Bitter Seeds mt-1

by Ian Tregillis

  “Because they're smarter than you,” said Hargreaves. “They know that by eliminating us, they lose their access to the rest. But that is no good. They want us all gone. Every soul on Earth.”

  Lorimer fell silent. He looked pale.

  Stephenson crushed out his cigarette. Smoke eddied about his fingers. “So they demand blood,” he concluded. “The more you spill, the more people they see.”

  “As far as they understand. To them, it makes sense: shedding a person's blood should give the Eidolons the map of that person's existence. But of course, it doesn't work that way because we—” he gestured at himself, Hargreaves, and Webber “—position ourselves as a buffer.” Will shrugged again. “It must be rather frustrating for them. Or it would, if they had feelings.” His eyes clouded over, as though he were gazing upon a dark storm. Quietly, he added, “And so their prices increase. Every day.”

  Marsh shifted again, but the ache in his back wouldn't subside. He stood, stretched. Outside, sunset painted orange the barrage balloons over Pall Mall. Lengthening shadows inched across London's inconstant skyline. The Blitz kept the city in a state of flux.

  “You want blood prices?” he asked. “Thank the Luftwaffe for doing your job for you. They're spilling our blood every miserable day.”

  “Yes, Pip. Blood is spilled every day. But it has no bearing on our work.” Will shook his head. “They don't know what blood is; only that they access it through us.” He gestured at the warlocks again. “For that matter, we should be glad they don't understand our civilization any more than you understand the inner life of a bacterium. If they ever do understand us well enough to comprehend hospitals and blood transfusions ... Well, that will be a very bad day.”

  “I still haven't heard a compelling reason why you refuse to end this war overnight,” said Marsh. He pointed at the window. “If we die, it won't matter if it's at the hand of Jerry or the goddamned Eidolons.”

  “We're doing what we can. But we mustn't let the Eidolons start extracting prices on their own. We'd lose control over what information they obtain. Given enough information, they'll be able to fill in the gaps. They'd see all of us. And that would raise merry hob with, frankly, everything. It would all fall apart.

  “So I hope you understand, Pip.”

  “I understand that Agnes died for naught, and you lot are content to leave it that way.” Marsh slammed the door when he left.

  The ache in Marsh's hip turned into a tingling pins-and-needles sensation along his leg. The cot frame creaked as he shifted his weight. He folded the thin pillow in half and propped it under his head. He'd roll again after the ache moved from his hip to his neck. He put his hands under the pillow to prop up his head. The stretched canvas felt rough against the backs of his hands.

  A bead of water trickled down one corner of the storeroom. It was raining outside. Marsh crossed his arms across his chest to ward off the damp. Rainwater distilled the odor of mildew as it percolated through the stones.

  The prisoner, Gretel, had slept here during her brief incarceration. Marsh had found reminders of her presence when he'd first started sleeping here. Long, black hairs draped across the pillow; the smell of a woman not his wife. Unlike Marsh, she'd had no trouble sleeping on the cot. But also unlike him, she'd been drugged.

  Congratulations. It's a girl.

  Why Williton? The question had become a lodestone aligning the iron filings of his thoughts. It made no sense. The only special thing about Williton, thought Marsh, was Agnes. And it was no coincidence.

  But now he knew what to do. He didn't know how long the idea had been gestating at the back of his mind. It had crystallized during the long, restless hours he'd spent vainly trying to sleep after the maddening conference with Stephenson and the warlocks. It was strange, the way something so obvious had to simmer for so long.

  The steady drip of water resolved into footsteps in the corridor. Marsh yawned and rubbed his eyes.

  “I don't understand,” Will said from the doorway, “why you won't accept my offer and stay at the Kensington flat.” He looked around the storeroom as he entered. He nodded at the mildew. “I admit it lacks the same ambience. But I'd wager the sleeping arrangements are at least equal to what you're enjoying now.”

  Marsh sat up on the edge of the cot. “Hi, Will.”

  Will's suit had changed. Now it was a royal blue herringbone pattern, as opposed to the charcoal gray he'd worn at the meeting. Neither combination included a tie, Marsh noted. Will had stopped wearing ties altogether.

  Marsh added, “Good morning, I suppose.” His own clothes hadn't changed since yesterday. Or was it the day before? Down here, day and night melted together into one sleepless blur.

  “I didn't wake you, I trust.”

  “No.”

  Will used a toe to drag a stool from the corner of the room. It was far too short for him. He had to fold himself like a carpenter's rule in order to sit. His knees rested higher than his waist.

  “Do think about the flat,” he said. He placed his bowler on one knee. “Better still, go home to your wife.”

  Marsh frowned.

  “How is she?”

  “I couldn't say,” said Marsh in what he hoped was a tone that implied the subject was closed. He didn't feel up to another argument.

  He rested his back against the wall, letting his legs drape over the edge of the cot. Rough stone pressed painfully against the ripples of his spine. The cold and the discomfort helped to wake him.

  “You look terrible,” said Will. “Nip?” He opened his suit coat to reveal the tip of a silver flask tucked in the breast pocket.

  “I thought it was morning. A bit early, isn't it?”

  Will shrugged. “Thought it might get you back on your feet.” He let his suit coat fall closed again. “I came to see if what we told you yesterday made sense. Hargreaves would go off his nut if he knew I was doing this, but I wanted to make certain you understood our objections. I'm willing to discuss things further, if it will help.” He sighed. “I'm sorry about the meeting.”

  “Me, too, Will. I was wrong.”

  “Don't concern yourself, Pip. We're all of us under tremendous pressure right now,” said Will, playing with the brim of his hat. “Short tempers are the order of the day. No hard feelings.”

  “Wrong about Agnes.”

  “Oh?”

  “She doesn't have to die for nothing. She doesn't have to die at all.”

  Will stopped. Slowly, with great deliberation, he set the bowler back on his knee. He adjusted it twice. Then he sat up straighter. His ches swelled with a deep breath. He held it for several moments before responding. “I don't know what you're suggesting, Pip.”

  Marsh looked straight into the deep, dark things Will's eyes had become. “Bring her back.”

  The lines around Will's eyes disappeared. He stared at Marsh, wide-eyed but silent. His head drooped. He looked at the floor. He ran a hand through his ginger hair, massaged the nape of his neck. Still looking down, he said, “I'm sure I didn't hear you properly.”

  “Bring my daughter back,” said Marsh. “Make the Eidolons give her back to us.”

  Will ran his hands over his face. He sighed. “Pip.”

  “I'll help you. Anything you need.”

  “I ... I don't know where to begin—”

  “The price doesn't matter. I'll pay it.”

  “What if the price is your own life? Yours for hers?”

  “I'd agree to that in a heartbeat, Will. I don't care what it costs.”

  Will said, “I can't believe we're having this conversation. This is monstrous.”

  “More monstrous than having the power to save her life and not using it?”

  “First of all, Pip, nobody—nobody—has the power to save her life,” said Will. He shook his head. “I'm sorry, truly sorry, my friend, but she's forever gone. If I could, I'd undo it all for you and Liv. But I can't.”

  “I knew you'd say that. But this isn't simply about me and Liv. It'
s our chance to thwart them, to stick it to von Westarp's brood.”

  “Now I know I'm not following you.”

  “Ask yourself, Will. Why Williton? What was so important about one insignificant little village in Somerset that Jerry had to bomb it into powder?”

  “I haven't a clue. But I'm sure you'll tell me.”

  “It was Agnes. They wanted her dead, Will. I'm sure of it. They wanted my little girl dead.”

  “Oh, my God,” Will muttered. More loudly: “Are you even listening to yourself? You sound like you've gone completely and utterly round the bend.”

  “It's the only explanation that makes sense. We know they'd been watching us, Liv and me.”

  “Do you realize what you're saying? Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me you believe the Luftwaffe conducted a raid specifically for the purpose of killing one infant? And that now you want us to reverse her death?”

  “I don't care how it sounds.” Marsh grabbed Will's arm. “Bring Agnes back.”

  “You should care, because you sound like a raving nutter. And as for Agnes, even if we went so far as to resurrect her body, I promise you, the thing inside it wouldn't be her. The thing that was Agnes has gone somewhere else.” Will shook his head. “Ask the others if you don't believe me. They'll tell you the same, but they won't frame it so compassionately.”

  He continued, “I wish I had the power to undo things. I wish I had the power to breathe just one person back to life. To make up for ...”

  Click. It felt like a cog slipping into place. Separate parts of Marsh's mind came together and engaged.

  Part of him still grappled with Will's objections. Marsh put that aside in a special place where he could go back to it later; he wasn't ready to consider that Will might be right. This was different, something new.

  Cogs turned. And turned. And turned.

  “Are you listening to me?” Will asked.

  “I'm sorry, Will. What did you say?”

  “Nothing at all. I was merely unburdening myself to you. It won't happen again.”

  “No, earlier. Before that. About Agnes.”

  “She's somewhere else now.” Will sighed again. “You need to accept that.”

  “That was it. You said she's gone somewhere else.”

  “A figure of speech. What of it?”

  Marsh cracked his knuckles against his jaw. “You've just given me an idea.”

  “Oh, bother.” Will crossed his arms over his chest. “I'm listening.”

  “You said yesterday that the Eidolons are omnipresent.”

  “They are, insofar as nothing can be everywhere, I suppose. They don't relate to things like we do. If you imagine points in space and time as bricks in a wall, the Eidolons would exist in the mortar between the bricks.”

  “In that case, let me ask you,” said Marsh. “What prevents us from using them for transportation?”

  Silence stretched between them long enough for another drip to become audible. Finally, Will said, “Are you suggesting we should regard the Eidolons as our own private Tube system?”

  “Like a Tube system with no distance between stops.”

  Will said, “This is the third mad thing you've said this morning. You need to start sleeping, Pip.” He stood. “I don't like what happens to you when you don't.”

  Marsh stood as well, feeling animated for the first time in days. “Are you willing to tell me that nobody has ever thought of this before?”

  Will's mouth opened and closed soundlessly for a few seconds. “It—well—that is, there are legends ...”

  “So let's do something legendary.”

  3 December 1940

  Milkweed Headquarters, London, England

  The window behind Stephenson's desk afforded Will a grand view of St. James' Park and the preparations under way there. Sleet pattered against the mullioned windowpanes, sounding like the impatient tapping of fingernails. It trickled down, slowly collecting along the sash like diseased hoarfrost.

  The sleet had started out as a bone-cold drizzle within the fog that rolled off the Thames the day before. It was an unusual fog, but still a natural manifestation, rather than something wrought through prices and negotiations. Nobody complained. It kept the Luftwaffe at bay.

  Down in the park, swaths of camouflage netting fluttered violently in a gust of wind. Moments later the same gust splattered a new layer of sleet against the glass. Will stepped away from the drafty window.

  For the moment, he had the old man's office to himself. It smelled of winter rain, stale cigarette smoke, and Stephenson's brandy. Will helped himself to more of the last thing. He concentrated on pouring, but the liquid slopped over the side of his tumbler and trickled down the side of the desk.

  “Oops,” he said to nobody in particular. “Opps.” He giggled. “Secret ops.”

  He sipped again. The brandy burned on the way down, but the fire died when it reached the ice in Will's stomach. Nothing could melt that.

  Outside, across Horse Guards' Road, a ten-foot privacy fence had been erected around two acres of royal parkland. Inside the rings of fences and sentries, under the camo, stood a jumble of tents. At least a dozen, but probably more by now. Will couldn't see well enough through the thickening weather to count them. But they'd been popping up like toadstools since the fog rolled in. There were one or two Nissen huts down there as well.

  The encampment put Will in mind of a violent carnival. (“Carnival.” He giggled again. “Farewell to the flesh.”) Several tents had been erected to protect the machines that Lorimer and the science boffins had designed. One tent would soon contain a stone plucked from the lake in the center of the park.

  All part of Marsh's ill-conceived plan to attack the Reichsbehorde. Marsh and his crusade.

  The door opened, sending warm yellow light across the darkened office. Will's reflection appeared in the window. He looked like a haggard ghost hovering outside the Admiralty building, a revenant spirit condemned to wander endlessly through a landscape of winter fog.

  “Beauclerk? What are you doing in my office?”

  Will turned. Stephenson tromped in. Droplets of ice water sparkled in his graying hair. He shrugged off a sodden black mackintosh, flipped it off his shoulder with his good arm, and hung it on the coatrack in the corner in one practiced motion.

  “Watching the festivities,” Will answered. He jerked his chin toward the window. It made the room spin. He shuffled sideways.

  “Don't you and the others have more pressing issues to occupy you right now?” said Stephenson. The empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder flapped up and down as he kicked off his galoshes.

  “I came to talk to you about that very thing.”

  Stephenson turned on the light and joined him at the window. He looked pointedly at the bottle on the desk and the tumbler in Will's hand. “Dozens of men down in St. James', working their arses off in this weather, and you're up here having a little party.”

  “I'd offer to share, but ...” Will took the bottle by its neck and waggled it upside down above the floor. Nothing dripped out. He set the bottle back in Stephenson's drawer, where he'd found it.

  Stephenson looked around the room, assessing his office for further indignities. Will knew he'd left several strewn across the old man's desk. A finger's worth of spirits seeping across the blotter. A bent letter-opener. Scrapes and gouges in the finish along the edges of the drawer.

  It had surprised Will to discover that the old man had taken to locking his desk drawer. Apparently he'd noticed the bottle slowly going empty.

  “You're pissed. On my brandy.”

  “Me? Heavens no. Empty stomach. Low blood sugar.” Will giggled again. “Blood. Yes. That's the problem.”

  “Beauclerk.” Stephenson shivered as he said it. Perhaps owing to the draft; perhaps not. “I am wet, I am cold, and I am hungry. I wanted to come inside, dry off a bit, down a bracer to warm me, then go home and eat dinner with Corrie. You will note that nowhere on this list of desires did
I include chatting with a soused toff.”

  The room wobbled. Will plopped down in the wide leather chair behind the desk.

  “And get out of my chair,” said Stephenson. He gave the chair a swift tug. It spun, and so did Will. Will lurched to his feet. Stephenson took the seat he vacated. “What the hell is wrong with you to night?”

  “We need to talk. One Englishman to another.”

  “Would knowing I'm Canadian born make you go away any sooner?”

  Will waved away the objection. “We're none of us perfect. Take me, for instance. Completely pissed.” He gulped from the tumbler. “Runs in the family, you know.”

  Stephenson sighed. “How long have you been waiting?”

  “I really couldn't say.” Will pointed at the empty bottle. “How full was that when I found it?”

  “Do I need to call a ride for you?”

  “He's quite mad, you know.”

  “Who's mad?”

  “Your boy.” Will waved his arm at the window, slopping the remaining brandy with a gesture that encompassed the park and, by extension, all Marsh's works, and therefore Marsh himself. “Marsh.”

  “He's not my boy.”

  “Oh, but he is. He is, he is. Perhaps not by blood, but—Ha. There it is again.” Beads of liquid splashed across the desk when he set the empty tumbler down. “Can't get away from it, can I.”

  “I wasn't jesting about wanting you out of here. Is this about Marsh?”

  “It's about this whole bloody project.” Will pointed outside again. “It's a terrible idea. Sir.”

  Stephenson said, “It's a brilliant idea.”

  “What ever it is that you and Marsh hope to achieve with this ploy, I tell you true, it will end badly.”

  “We can hobble the Reichsbehorde in one stroke. We stand to obtain the research as well. Britain needs us to do this.” Stephenson looked outside, down at the park. The fingernail rattle of sleet against the window had tapered off; a handful of cottony snowflakes blazed in the office light as they eddied past the window.

  “It's a brilliant idea,” he repeated. “It's Milkweed's chance to balance the scales. And we have to take it now. At present they can't have more than seven or eight, perhaps a dozen at most, of von Westarp's creatures running around. But how long will it be until they number seven hundred? Seven thousand?”