In extremis, the human mind, she is now discovering, works at an accelerated rate – and yet the body responds before consciousness can fathom the nature of the trauma. That is Ivon’s voice, is her first thought. But it can’t be. There was no alert to notify her of an incoming comm. And anyway she has blocked him. And that was not a comm. But it must have been. She is at home. To hear a voice outside her head would require the speaker to be present. It would mean another person in the same space at the same time. And she is at home. The paradox is confusing. The voice was certainly not in her head though, because it came from an external source – yes, it definitely did – off to the left, slightly behind her, from the direction of the door. It was certainly Ivon’s, too, for no one else speaks with that distinctive inflexion. The resolution to this paradox is hardening in her mind.
Ivon is in her home.
In the time it takes her to spin round in response to the shocking violation, her heart accelerates and a cold, tingling shockwave sweeps through her. She sees the arm. Then, in microseconds, her eye follows its line up to the face, which confirms Ivon as the invader, but the petty specifics of identity are lost amid the storm the crime has unleashed upon her. She loses control of her head first. It breaks into tiny oscillations round its pivot, side to side, side to side, a hint of up and down. Her mouth goes next, trembling, murmuring, muttering, ‘nononononono’. She stumbles backwards, away from the desecration, and collides with the wall. Against it, she can feel her entire body convulse. Her arms close round her, and her hands grasp again and again at whatever they can, the opposing shoulder, the upper arm, the torso, up and down her body they go, desperately trying to shield her, desperately trying to fold her up within herself, to withdraw again, now the sacred haven of withdrawal has been invaded.
She hears him speak of home, but not hers. He wants her to go with him to his. The violence the depravity the ABOMINATION. She must defend herself. What use the shutdown of her systems into shock? She must overcome. Turn the invader out. She must fight within her own home.
She screams and hurls herself in his direction. He braces, but she knocks him back against the door, then slams the heel of her hand against the underside of his jaw and jerks his head back. She tries to reach for the door’s release panel, when he fights back, seizing her arms and holding her away from him. His grip is strong, and they struggle against each other, when suddenly his grip relaxes. His whole body relaxes. She recognises the latest generation of immobiliser at work. Security must be here. But how so soon? She imagines her home flashing up on the Grid as desecrated. She wails at the shame of it. The very least she can do now is to expel him herself. She reaches for the release panel. The door opens, but he has re-gathered himself quickly and resists when she hits him again, shoving her back into the room. And yet he does not follow. He suffers a seizure, as if electrocuted, and yells in agony. The immobiliser has been intensified. She notices two security officers at her door now. They wait at the threshold, their gaze averted. Ivon about-turns, still shouting out his pain, and with two impulsive strides he is with them. The door closes.
Alanis sinks to the floor. This violation is a trauma too hideous and outlandish to understand. She will carry this with her. In time, she will consider, quite seriously, turning herself in for Assimilation, the agony a price that must be borne if she hopes to recover equilibrium.
For now, though, she trembles against the floor, her arms spread wide across it. She is homeless, quite lost.
Ivon breathes heavily. His hands are on his knees. The surface beneath his feet is sky blue. An ant crawls on it, just like the ones in Wales.
Alanis.
He notices a pair of feet on either side of him, shod in uppers of matt black.
‘Who are you?’ he says without looking up. ‘What was that in there?’
It takes several seconds for them to reply. ‘Come with us.’
He straightens. The men are dressed in black. He has seen such figures about town. It was men like these who took away the fighting girls from the club last week. Their faces do not invite conversation.
He doesn’t know what agony it was that seized him in there, but the sense that it emanated from these men is powerful. Neither of them moves, as Ivon comes to terms with what just visited him, and the fact that it has gone without, incredibly, leaving a twinge behind. A few seconds ago, he was shot through with it, a white-hot pain that seemed to live in every fibre of him, as if it had always lain there, as if it knew the entirety of him, mobilised for a moment, then quietly slipped back to lurk among his trusting molecules. It leaves him in peace now, but its threat remains vivid.
‘Where are we going?’
One of the men is looking away, towards the street. The other studies Ivon out of the corner of his eye. ‘Come.’
Ivon follows. He is disengaged, walking where others tell him. He has lost his girl; he now cedes control of himself, as they want him to on the field, as he did just then when some searing impulse made him march out of Alanis’s home to this bleak encounter with two sentinels in black.
Alanis. He doesn’t understand.
He is ushered into the back of one of their black and wheel-less cars. Through the streets of London they glide, past the colour-coded citizens, some on bikes, some on foot. Ivon catches a glimpse of a few of the faces. Disengaged, he and they.
Onwards into the green heart of the place they ghost, where the road rises above the parks and river below, into a lattice of converging routes that sits over the water like a spider. They take a road towards the east, skirting along the southern riverbank, until the people and buildings run out, replaced by a sudden forest, whose trees are arranged densely and precisely on either side of the road that knifes through it. After a few minutes the trees end as abruptly as they start, and Ivon notices a lonely building ahead of them, which stands tall and heartless against the reappearing river.
He steps from the car and follows as his escorts guide him towards the silvery smooth curve of the southern wall. A door opens from nowhere, and Ivon is admitted into a circular atrium, whose mirrored walls rise the full height of the tower’s interior into an apex of glass. There is a desk, manned by an operative, and a smattering of men dressed in the black of his escorts. No one reacts to their arrival. Ivon is led straight to an elevator. It climbs to the eleventh floor, where the doors opposite those he stepped in through open into a wide window-lined room, which gives views across the river and trees to the proud glass of the city beyond.
‘Ivon.’
The voice that hails him is neutral.
Ivon turns to its source, on his right. ‘It’s you,’ he says. His voice is neutral too, even though he should be pleased to see the old man who entertained him so well in Canterbury. He had that funny name. And the nose. Cirius, or something.
The old man is sitting on a jade couch. He invites Ivon to join him on another. The view from here is comprehensive – not only of the expanse outside but the length of the bare room, a desk at the far end and Ivon’s inscrutable escorts, who stand on either side of the elevator doors.
‘Welcome to 1, Greenwich, where we senior Exempts live and conduct our business, away from the eyes of the population.’
‘Like an old folks’ home.’
He does not respond.
‘Are we going to start drinking now?’
The old man sighs and leans forward, resting his elbow on his knees. ‘What have you done, Ivon?’
Ivon pauses to consider. For the first time since it happened the swirling traces of what just passed between him and Alanis begin to gather into something coherent in his mind. His numbness flecks and spits into a reaction against the suddenness of it, the brutality and hostility. She was his anchor, his haven, his home from home in this sinister, soul-free land.
‘She flipped. That wasn’t her. I just wanted to talk.’
The old man shakes his head. ‘I want to help you, Ivon. I want this to work. But you’re not making it easy for me.’
‘It was like she went mad.’
‘You entered her home!’
‘I just wanted to talk to her.’
‘That’s not how it works here. You should have learned that by now.’ He looks briefly in the direction of the men in black. ‘You’re an Assimilation waiting to happen, Ivon. If my officers hadn’t been shadowing you just then, you would have been taken in as a matter of course. And you would not have found the machinery of state security as careful to preserve your identity as I am. I have managed to persuade them to let my people in Improvement deal with this incident. The injury crisis at fly-half has made your release for tomorrow’s match a matter of urgency. But if you keep transgressing you will be corrected.’
‘This is the brainwashing, is it?’
‘Assimilation, Ivon. They will change who you are. Your conversion to Perpetual citizenship will be complete and irreversible. You will no longer be the Welshman. Just another fly-half. The experiment will be over.’
‘What are you talking about? Is that all I am to you? An experiment? Was I an experiment when you welcomed me to Canterbury like some kind of messiah?’
The old man smiles and rises from his seat. ‘We shall have to place a restraining prompt on you. That is the very least that would be expected.’
‘What do you mean? What is that?’
‘It’s nothing to worry about. It merely prevents you from approaching to within 100 metres of the girl.’
‘Fuck that! I’m patching things up with her. I can’t enter her home. I get that. But I am going to make it work.’
‘It won’t be as simple as that. I believe you have just experienced the shock of an immobiliser to your system. With this restraint, your chip will be programmed to deliver such a charge if ever you breach the 100-metre radius.’
Ivon rises to his feet. ‘This fucking chip!’ he cries, slapping the back of his neck. ‘No one said it was for controlling me!’
‘New applications for it are continually coming to light. You should think of this as cutting-edge technology.’
Ivon shakes his head. A fury is rising in him. ‘No. No. That’s enough. I’ve had enough. I want to go home.’
The old man looks out over the river. ‘It’s too late for that.’
The rage in Ivon takes a surer hold. How could he have left his homeland for this? A rage and a panic. He turns to the nearest stretch of glass and, roaring, he hammers his fists against it.
His consciousness is switched off like a light.
XIV
‘What do you mean, he’s travelling separately?’
Dusty tries to calm himself. The head coach of London Rugby is a man of presence, but his focus is elsewhere, his eyes tuned in to a retinal projection, probably perusing the blueprints for this afternoon’s match-plan against Yorkshire. Dusty has cycled from Hampstead to Richmond, setting off as soon as the sleeping hours were over, to intercept London Rugby’s elite squad as they gather to depart for the north. It is his most overtly irregular act so far. He cycled past Ivon’s home again, but didn’t stop this time, nor was he intercepted. There was no sign of life inside or of security guards among the shadows outside.
Now Dusty mingles unobtrusively with the London Rugby squad, clad in the green of elite. The head coach has barely acknowledged him, except to tell him that Ivon is not travelling with them to Yorkshire.
‘Has something happened to him?’ Dusty says, pressing him as gently and urgently as he can.
‘There was some incident last night. He’s travelling up in a sealed aero. Precautionary.’
‘Incident?’
‘Entered another’s home.’
‘They’ve not assimilated him…’
‘No. We need him today. Situation to be reviewed post-match.’
Dusty backs away, looking around him, as if in hope of catching a glimpse of the boy. What has he done? If security around him has been tightened…
He decides to try him once more. This time, to Dusty’s surprise, Ivon answers.
‘Dusty, what the fuck’s going on?’
He is vocalising again. The panic and fear resonate in Dusty’s head.
‘Stay calm, Ivon. Where are you?’
‘I’m in a… I don’t know… It’s a…they’ve put me in a van. I’m in a box.’
‘They’re taking you to the Headingley Dome for the Yorkshire match.’
‘They won’t let me see Alanis. They won’t let me go home.’
Thoughts rush through Dusty’s head. Ivon must be brought home. To London and then, somehow, to Wales.
So it was Alanis, was it?
‘Dusty?’
Their conversation is probably being monitored.
‘Just get through the match, Ivon. Don’t do anything irregular. Follow your prompts. Do not go off-plan. Just get through the match.’
Dusty breaks off the comm.
He doesn’t have the stone with him. He has never prepared for a match without the stone, nor travelled to a match alone in a windowless box. He has never played in one without the prospect of love or a return home.
Coach White had released him earlier from the cell they’d held him in deep within the stadium – another first – waiting for the rest of the team to arrive. He was cool and practical as he and a pair of security guards escorted Ivon to his cubicle.
‘You are required for this match,’ he explained, ‘but your temperament is under investigation. Transfer in solitary is a standard precaution. You will link up with your comrades now.’
His kit was waiting for him in the cubicle. He sits in it now, staring at the empty space between his hands. No stone. No spirit. No desire. The thunder from the stadium above has built to a climax, just as it does in London. The air is saturated with it. They will not be admitted to the arena until game time. Their warm-ups and team runs have taken place in a hangar adjacent to the cubicles.
Ivon is numb again. As he was in the car from Alanis’s to the old man’s apartment. As he wishes he’d been in the box to Yorkshire. There may be nerves in him, there may be rebellion, anger or conformity – he does not know. The whiteness has him. The white noise from above, the white walls in his cubicle, the white canvas across his soul.
He steps out of his cubicle before time. He needs clearance above his head, in front of his face. No more small rooms. The communal area between the closed doors of the cubicles is empty, except for Mike Bulstrode, who strides across it from the direction of the toilets and sneers when he sees Ivon. He passes close to him, then pauses, looks around and turns. He places the outside of his forearm across Ivon’s chest and drives him back against the wall. Ivon does not resist.
‘So you entered another’s home?’ he says. Then shakes his head slowly. A white scar cuts diagonally across the stubble on his chin, from the corner of his mouth to somewhere under his leaden jaw. There is moisture on his brow and in the roots of his hair. His pupils are wide and pulsing. ‘They say you’ll be assimilated when we get back to London.’
Ivon manages a smile. ‘Olympus Dan getting to you, is he, tough guy?’
Bulstrode leans up and into his forearm. Ivon can feel the wiry hairs on it catch against his own stubble, even as the vice is tightened across his windpipe.
‘You savages disgust me,’ he says, spitting the words into Ivon’s face. ‘If I had my way I’d assimilate you myself.’
Ivon’s eyes bulge as Bulstrode presses his forearm deeper into his throat. The pressure is released. Bulstrode opens his mouth like a lion and expels a hiss of air. He walks away, flexing his neck right and left. The siren sounds to summon the others from their cubicles.
Dusty’s joules for the week are burned, but still he has to run. He has ditched his bike. He’s always liked running. It is, along with coitus, the purest of the major exercise types. Humans have always run. They must have. Just as there must have been a time before bicycles, swimming pools and cross-trainers. Coitus and running – it was ever thus.
He has no appointments
at ReSure this afternoon, but an afternoon’s quiet recovery is an intolerable prospect. He must run. Through these streets he knows so well because they are so easy to know and he has run them so thoroughly. He remembers now a time when the roads weren’t sky blue and uniform. He remembers dusty orange. And isn’t there even a recollection of grey streets deep down under his memories, trying to raise itself from beneath all the others?
Is there any way he can watch the match, watch Ivon?
No. For a viewing screen he would need to be in Parliament or the Institute of Improvement. It would be impossible to secure an appointment in either at such late notice and on suspicious grounds like the non-scientific watching of a match. And, anyway, no, no, intolerable. The match is taking place now and Dusty has to keep running. To stop and expose himself to it… No.
Just get through the match, Ivon. It may already be too late, but if he can survive this latest incident with personality intact he may yet see Wales again – and so might Dusty. They would need to remove the identity chips from their hands. There’s a device at ReSure that removes them neatly from premature departures. Why wouldn’t it work on animate citizens? That would take their central chips off the Grid, free them up to be Welsh with impunity. They could commandeer a boat from one of the aquacentres across the water from Wales. He has seen a map at ReSure. The Fence stops at Woolacombe. Any one of the aquacentres round the corner, along the far coast of the South West, might offer up a boat within reach of the coast of Wales. Dusty’s memorised the names. Bude, Bideford, Padstow, Newquay. Or there’s the northern end of the Fence, which stops at Preston, so the aquacentre at Blackpool, maybe, St Annes, Fleetwood… To want to flee from England to Wales, to do it willingly – the idea is unheard of. Who would expect it? They’d be away and gone before anyone realised.
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