For perhaps an hour she lay there, feeling stiff, needing to pee. No clues came her way until she heard a door open close by. Then a man's voice, brisk with authority and in no doubt she was awake, said, “Time to get up. We've got a few questions we'd like to ask.”
She stalled another second but there was no point pretending. She figured she must be in police custody or something like that. Fooling around with them in the past, in younger days, had only got her a black eye and two broken ribs.
She moved slowly to a sitting position and looked around.
It was a cell, as she'd thought. The tanned white man in front of her was no police officer, however. He was dressed in khakis and built like Magpie had once been when he was a marine, before going Fed and losing muscle. In fact, he was bigger than that. But his face didn't hold the bland callousness she associated with authority. It was looking at her shrewdly, watching her every move.
The shift of shirt cloth on her arms made the burns flare wildly.
“Can I have some water? And my pills?” she asked, not really holding out any hope.
“They're in the interview room,” her jailer said. “All you have to do is walk through there.”
White Horse got up, easing her stiff knee that hadn't been right since she jumped out her window, and shuffled out in the direction he indicated. A short corridor of brown walls led to another room with chairs, a table, and several other men she'd never seen before. Two of them wore army uniform. Another was in plain clothes. On the table the contents of her bag and the bag itself were laid out.
They gave her the water and allowed her to swallow a dose they counted out from her tablets. Then they asked her to sit down. They didn't say who they were and she didn't expect them to. They asked her who she was and she told them the truth because no doubt they already knew it.
“White Horse Jordan. Deer Ridge. Montana.”
The plainclothes man sat down opposite her whilst the others stood back. His grey suit made her think of robots and civil servants. His voice was amiable.
“Where did you obtain this device?” He indicated the black casing.
She wondered if she had any rights that were worth asking for. There wasn't even a recorder going. She didn't try it.
“I took it from an unlocked car, a Chrysler, in Deer Ridge.”
“You stole it?”
She gave her interrogator a flat gaze, carefully neutral, and said nothing. What did he think?
He was writing with a stylus on some very new and fancy-looking kind of Pad.
“Why did you take it?”
“It was evidence,” she said. “I needed it to press charges. I couldn't have waited for the cops to come.”
She sensed the attention of the three uniforms sharpen. The questioner noted her answers with no visible reaction.
“What charges and against whom?”
“Assault with a deadly weapon, against the federal government.”
Now his mouth did flicker in a kind of smile at her naivety. Anger made her stomach growl suddenly and its unhappy sound filled the silence. She took another drink of the water. Only now did she wonder if there might be more in it than water. Too late, though.
“So, this was the deadly weapon?” He indicated the machine with his stylus, not touching it. “And where were you going to file? Did you have a legal representative working with you?”
“No. Nobody. I didn't trust anyone close to home. They're all in the back pocket of the state police. I wanted to come to Washington.”
“But you didn't find a lawyer there.” It was a statement. They all looked at her.
There? So she wasn't in DC any more. It was a kind of knowledge, but so weak it didn't make her feel better. “Not yet.”
“What were you waiting for?”
“I wanted to be sure that I had enough evidence.”
“You went to your half brother's apartment. What is his job?”
“He's a Fed.”
“Mmn. But not any Fed.”
She was going to have to say it. There was no way out she could think of. She wondered who they were. If this were official surely there would be more stuff about legal protection—theirs not hers.
“He's SS. Perfection Technology Investigator. I thought he could tell me if I had a case.”
“That seems reasonable.”
She looked properly at the man's face opposite for the first time. He was about forty, only a little lined, white with perhaps a flash of Hispanic. His five o'clock shadow was light. She didn't trust him.
“Where were you going this afternoon?”
“Away from you,” she said and reflected his own stare back at him.
The others behind her laughed and she heard them moving about.
“Do you know who we are?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? You might be the same people who did Martha Johnson. You might be against them.”
“We are against them,” the questioner said calmly. “Does that surprise you?”
“Doesn't mean you're with me, does it?” She finished the water. The pills were just starting to take the edge off her pain. She tried to sit very still so nothing made it worse.
“Not necessarily,” he admitted. His face became sympathetic. “We need more of a case, as you put it, than we have so far. I believe that it's in your interests, and ours, that we pursue the same lines of investigation. That way, there's more chance of success.”
White Horse reached out to take hold of the black machine and all three of the uniforms leaped forward to stop her. She pulled back her hand and smiled at them as they withdrew, stalking back a few paces,
“I see. Well, we've done treaties with your type before.”
“Miz Jordan, this is not that kind of deal.”
His focus on her was acute and its pressure forced her to pay attention in return, against her will. She knew there was no point in attempting to cross him. Whoever he was, he gave the impression that he had power. Far more than she did. He put his Pad aside. “I will tell you the terms. We will release you, together with this—scanner—to continue making enquiries as you were doing. We will see where the feathers start rattling and falling. In return, when we complete our own investigations, your work will be included as part of a much larger general prosecution against the present government.” He paused to see if she was going to protest. When she waited he said the bit she was really listening for.
“If you betray us, or fail to cooperate in any way, then both you and your brother will be eliminated from the enquiry. The Deer Ridge reservation will also lose its current courtroom fight against the state, and the land will be turned over to the government for mineral and oil exploitation.”
White Horse was cold. Before this, she'd thought they were some small group. If they could influence the court, they were much bigger. And still she didn't know if they were lying. It could all be an elaborate plot. But if so or if not—what could she do?
She nodded. “And if you—we—win?”
“Then you needn't worry about your land rights. Here.” He pushed his Pad over and she read something about a granting in perpetuity; blah, blah, it meant nothing.
“You might not keep your word,” she said.
“That's true.” He drew back his Pad and switched it off. “But then, I'm afraid that's the way it is. What do you say?”
She swallowed, carefully clearing her throat. She wanted to spit in his face. “I guess that saying no leads to a much shorter ending to our conversation?”
“That's a possibility. You would remain here, in custody, indefinitely.” He grinned. “Did you think we would kill you now? But then, maybe later you could change your mind. Then we would have wasted a good opportunity. Perhaps we could ask your brother to persuade you, when he comes knocking to find out where you are? Miz Jordan, I assure you this effort of ours is in everyone's best interests. Even the lore and language of your People would endorse it, were I able to explain it to you in full. Alas, I cannot.
”
“Enough talking, Abe,” the big man with the keys said then. “Our window is getting short.”
“Miz Jordan?”
She looked around at their faces, trying desperately to judge from what she saw, to see some good intents, some competence, something that could persuade her she had a chance. She saw only faces, men with worries, men who were already outside their own law.
“Okay,” she said.
They put her things back together, gave her another shot, placed a dark bag over her head and carried her away. Throughout it all she didn't resist, not a single muscle fibre moved. She saved her strength and prayed, until darkness took her, for cunning.
Dan knew that he'd forgotten something important. He vaguely remembered a call about Natalie, from Shelagh Carter. At least all that was out of his hands now. The Ministry and their twerpy security guys, macho and strutting, were actually better at looking after Nat than he was. But he didn't feel exactly good as he sat at home. He felt as though he'd been very Bad Dan indeed.
To get over it he fixed himself a big gin and tonic. A big gin, rather. The tonic was just speculative.
At least the day had gone well. Bobby was staying overnight and would be released tomorrow, and for a while there would be fuss, but then Clinic life would subside to its usual starchy ebb and he would have some time to get himself together.
He called the local Chinese for a delivery and flicked through the Radio Times. Natalie had already been home and gone back again, leaving him strict instructions to stop fucking around and do something useful. She hadn't even been baitable about the American guy, and Dan's cautious and sensitive attempt to suggest he might not be whiter than white had gone down like a bucket of cold sick. Maybe she shouldn't have slept with him. After all, if he meant a lot to her, now it was only going to be worse. You definitely shouldn't do that with people you cared about. Far too complicated.
He shook his head wisely and prepared to spend the evening doing a very safe, very certain, nothing at all.
It was about two in the morning when the shrill of a repeating alarm stripped him of sleep. He woke, shuddering with horror, barely realizing what it meant. It wasn't smoke. It wasn't the house. What was it?
Dan floundered up off the sofa and hit his head on the corner of the table. The pain momentarily made him intelligent enough to slap the house controller and get the noise to stop. On the TV screen there was a message:
“Emergency Staff Call. Dan Connor. This is a Grade Five Emergency. Respond by return call to confirm your attendance before you leave home.”
He went through the motions in a blur of confusion. Grade Five; that was an accident, a breakout, a contamination alert or something like that. No, not quite like that or they wouldn't be calling him in, would they?
Since he hadn't got undressed he didn't need to do much before he was ready. Bleary-eyed and half sick, with chow mein trying to regurgitate every minute or so, he stumbled down the stairs, wrestled with the door, got it to shut, and fell into the taxi that was already waiting for him at the curbside. He hoped nobody was going to breathalyse him when he got there.
Natalie was in her office, poring sleepily over the results on her own code at about one fifteen in the morning, having been unable to sleep for thinking about Jude and Mikhail Guskov, when one of the night-shift nurses burst in, out of breath.
“You've gotta come!” she said between gasps. “He's saying something!”
Since there was only one important patient on the wards it wasn't hard to guess who she meant, but Natalie was still figuring out why his saying something was so desperate by the time she reached his room.
Bobby was sitting, talking.
“… Because the spaces and the forms are part of one thing. Like a jigsaw. There is no division between space and form, the void and the illusion of dense matter. Matter itself is an energy vibration. Resonance derives shape, property, and gravity. Matter is information.
“As the shadow is seen in the light so the emptiness of energy alone is animated by information, and all life is a supercollation of informative points, a brilliant invasion on the empty world; its voice and song …”
Natalie stood similarly dumbfounded as this spiel rolled out in a light, airy tone that was both animated and curiously monotonous, as though Bobby were the mouthpiece of a machine, or speaking in tongues.
But it was what he was saying that rooted Natalie to the spot. Despite many recent distractions her head was still full of the minute workings of Selfware, and her own hopes of it, and in hearing Bobby's voice she was slowly becoming sure that this was its doing.
A chill crept over her from the bones outward as she listened to the bizarre litany. Selfware was not supposed to be active in him. Hell, it wasn't even complete in the system they'd used on Bobby. He'd never been exposed to the full program. Besides which, Bobby had been normal when they had purged all systems in his head more than six hours ago. Everything had shut off.
It didn't sound like him, except for his local accent. They weren't words he would have chosen or things she would have thought him capable of talking about. This was no sweet-talk from the influence of a drug, or even from an overflow of neurotransmitters triggered by the activity of the NervePath.
Was she responsible for this?
“What do you think it is?” she heard the nurse behind her murmur uneasily over Bobby's continuing paean to life, space, and time.
Natalie didn't answer. She studied Bobby minutely.
He was sitting up, his legs crossed under the sheet and his arms raised, like a swami at prayer. His face was radiant with the joy of his beatific insights and his gaze was dreamy and distant, looking far from the little room, its mundane beige decor and stupefied, equally mundane staff. “Marvellous,” his word for what they had done to him, echoed through Natalie's mind, because that was what he was seeing now, whatever it was.
“Let's get him sedated for the time being. Bring the portable scan unit in here.”
She had to buy herself some time to figure out what was going on. She would have to call her father.
“… the sign and the symbol are more than the signified,” Bobby was now relaying.
“Through symbolization a single meaning becomes hyperplastic within the mind. The limits of comprehension are broken. The reality they strive to reveal, concealed within the illusion of words, is set loose.”
Natalie took a sedative shot from the nurse and administered it herself, slowly, because she wanted to hear what he was saying. It sounded horribly like the kind of things she'd heard from speculating physicists and language theorists. It was the kind of thing she would have half-expected to hear from a person who was capable of witnessing and understanding the world beyond their five senses. Or, of course, some peacenik student out of their head on pot.
“The mind flows in constant dialectic between the inner universe of the single self and the outer, material universe, in twin streams of pure information, each shaping the other to greater specificity. And the hidden dimension of gravity and the dimension of spatial expansion and collapse that is Time …”
Bobby's lips stopped moving and his muscles relaxed. Natalie caught him as he fell back to his pillows and straightened his legs out for him, smoothing his blankets, tucking him in.
Serene, he slept. Natalie wondered if maybe he'd had a secret hobby—quantum mechanics and consciousness theory, perhaps. No reason he couldn't. For all they knew this might have been a dream state and he was babbling something he'd read in a magazine.
Contrary to what her father thought she believed, Natalie did not have faith in any theory of quantum consciousness, where all minds were united as one in a unified field that interacted weakly with the physical world. Some people even thought that consciousness itself had determined the entire feature set of the physical world. She thought that was too quirky, too coincidental, and altogether such an ill-thought-out wish-fulfilment version of the quantum world that she wouldn't have touched it
with a ten-foot pole. Such ideas oozed a tacky mental ichor that contaminated everything it touched with a blight of dreamy false premises. On the other hand, if someone maintained that a person's awareness of the world defined the way in which they understood it and themselves, she was all for that.
All the same, Natalie hadn't entirely given up on quantum theory and a possible link with consciousness, despite the fact that a brain was too warm a place to allow the kinds of changes that such things demanded. It was possible that there was a quantum element that was crucial to conscious states, aside from the very obvious observation that since everything was made up of quanta then of course there would be quanta involved in consciousness. At any university there were hordes of philosophers prepared to argue the toss—if consciousness is not physical the metaphysical leaps gladly in—but Natalie wasn't sold on beliefs about insubstantial and nonphysical souls, minds, or spirits of any kind. She considered herself a scientist and she couldn't go that far. But sometimes she would have liked to. In the case of Jude's file, for instance, it was a tempting idea and so far her only one.
She left Bobby content in his bed and went to make contact with her father. His pet Ministry official, McAlister, a man of political ambition, had already been alerted and was waiting for her. As she arrived he was sitting in her father's seat, studying the large-screen wall monitor, where pictures of exactly what was going on in Bobby's head were displayed. He looked faintly amused and bemused, like a two-year-old watching television.
The sight made her stop in midstride.
Bobby X's brain was ablaze, and not with ordinary shifts of activity. It looked more like the Christmas, Eid and Diwali illuminations than a real-time scan of a mind at work. Surges raced from frontal lobes and around the dopamine pathways, drove through the hippocampus like juggernauts, sparkled in the language centres, flickered like fireflies inside the blindsight area, and shone with the force of minor novae in the key zones that gave Bobby his sense of self, his awareness of his own body, his sense of joy, and, last but not least, his awareness of living things.
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