‘You’re too good,’ he pretended, insides knotting ‘Really, my work is not of such importance.’
Pamela was horrified. ‘Mr Schroeder! How can you say that? Only yesterday Mr Mortmain and myself were present when one of our dearest friends was handed over to a contemporary of yours, a Mr Gruman. The experience was truly moving. He was a stoutly built gentleman like yourself. Do you know him?’
‘Gruman.’ Harry elected to lie. ‘Yes - not personally, you understand; more by reputation.’
‘Then he is reliable?’ questioned Pamela, mollified.
Harry drew a blank.
She glanced at her husband.
Harry felt something...
‘I think,’ said Martin. ‘That is, I know this is delicate, but Pamela is keen to learn of her late companion. How she is faring. When we might see her return.’
Something profound, the dredger decided. ‘The world is in a time of crisis,’ he said, sounding, he hoped, sufficiently grave. ‘As you have pointed out, madam, there are secrets. It would ill-serve the lady about whom you inquire were I to reveal them.’
The Mortmains quelled their obvious disappointment, while the parrot eyed him critically.
‘Martin,’ said Pamela. ‘The tables.’
Her husband dropped to his feet and scuttled behind a decorative partition, returning moments later with several long scrolls of paper.
‘I’ve done my homework,’ she informed Harry as she tugged loose a purple ribbon. ‘These tables belonged to my mother, and her mother before, going back generations. Here are marked the criss-crossing paths of subterranean forces. The footsteps of gods, no less, from a time of perturbations, when I believe a contest was fought between the strongest immortals for dominion over those of us of flesh. But you’re familiar with the histories, I’m sure. I don’t mean to sound omnipotent, because I’m not, but my understanding of these events greatly surpasses any of my dead or living contemporaries.’
Harry, bored with niceties, wondering if they were merely delaying him here, returned his cup and saucer to the tray and took the roll from Pamela. His brow wrinkled. His stomach tightened further. He grabbed another scroll, sliding the ribbon off and peering intently at the displayed information, a linear series of graphs and measurements, contoural overviews and digitally precise columns of figures. He searched through the tables until he found the last in a sequence, its mass of diagrammatic evidence a violent zig-zag flourish that even to Harry’s untrained eye represented the energy and magnitude of a significant tectonic disturbance.
‘Where did you get these?’ he asked brusquely, still absorbing the jagged readings, digesting their meaning more readily, it seemed, than his breakfast.
Silence.
Fear?
Pamela was breathless, Martin thrown into a stiff confusion.
Who were these people?
‘This is a computer printout,’ he stated flatly, uncharacteristically vicious, ‘the hardcopy of a recording. I need to know where you got it.’
Nothing...
A tear slid from Pamela’s right eye.
Martin jerked awkwardly and lunged at him across the table, a palpable hatred in his suddenly whitened features as he clawed mostly at air, upsetting crockery.
Hammering at the door echoed his crashing.
Pamela coughed nauseously.
The hammering again, reverberating through two doors into the apartment, accompanied by muffled shouting.
She vomited, sobbing as pain jolted desiccated limbs.
Harry, standing now, yelled loud enough to drown her guttural noises. Stamping on Mr Mortmain, who twitched at his feet like an injured kitten, he brought his fist round and smashed it into Mrs Mortmain’s accusing visage, mending its twisted ugliness, knocking her and her wheelchair over backward. Layers of petticoats fell to cover her face. Bodies slammed against woodwork.
He folded the last roll of print, stuffed it in his shirt and headed for a window. Cold air piled in as he heaved open the multi-paned sash and climbed out onto a narrow ledge running in both directions, perhaps eight centimetres wide. Beneath stretched a sheer wall of glass mouldings, lesser dwellings, balcony gardens...vegetation and concrete.
A doily floated past. Harry shuffled nervously toward a fixed ladder and scrambled to the roof, where he found himself among topiary disturbed by a squatting contraption; half flyer, half company wing, with its decals painted out.
fourteen - final breath
Mud and Swiss were dead, killed by Luther Canning. Luther was tried and convicted, protesting his innocence, and now he’d escaped. Harry and Ivan were to bring him back. Alive if possible, as the law did not countenance his disposal. He’d held a gun to someone’s head, stolen their vehicle and fled out to sea, where Harry and Ivan gave chase, churning the slick gook of the wind-sculpted ocean the Ologists called dessert, a bottomless, turgid puree Harry found loathsome.
‘Why’d that bastard have to come out here?’ he moaned.
The giant wheels that gave the vehicle its name, each the height of a man, whipped the ocean’s superficies to a glassy foam.
‘I mean, look at this stuff!’
Ivan smiled and drove. Their destination was an oasis of brittle rock labelled Island 9, eighteen hundred kilometres southeast of Central. The scene of the crime, it seemed likely Luther would return here, like a dog to its vomit. The trace on the stolen wheels confirmed the hunch - the hunch having been Ivan’s, which explained his satisfied expression, as Ivan professed to understanding “the criminal mind”.
‘Can’t you sit still?’ he asked Harry.
The screen read forty kilometres to go.
Harry folded his thick arms and scowled.
In places the ocean formed a thick crust, bulging like green ice. It was even possible to walk on it. In others it was weakly fluid, shooting impressive geysers, pressure-driven plumes that from a distance resembled giant orchids, sprays of hanging flowers whose heads were blurred. The Ologists dubbed these regions inactive and active. They were headed into an area of inactive dessert now.
The sound of the wheels altered to a bass rumble.
‘Nearly there,’ chirped Ivan.
Island 9 was barren and yellow, sulphurous. It smelled to Harry of lighted matches. There were presently fourteen such islands, transient atolls that rose from the sea floor. Or so it was inferred. They stretched in a loose archipelago between the continents. Here Mud and Swiss had been killed. And here Luther hid, maybe armed, maybe dangerous, his abandoned wheels hunched on the crumbling beach like some bloated insect with gout.
‘Where do we start?’ questioned Harry, inquiring of his partner’s famous brain. The island was two thirds of a kilometre across at its narrowest, and rugged.
Ivan tapped a forefinger off his brow. ‘Where it’s highest, I guess.’
Somehow the idea of climbing the one modest peak didn’t appeal to Harry. He scratched his paunch and rooted for cigarettes, but finally relented.
The stolen vehicle disabled and their own secured, they set off. Rock, soft and moistureless, groaned like packed sand under their feet. 9 was dead; dead and sinking. The atoll filled Harry with a sense of foreboding, what Ologist’s liked to call away-sickness. Behind them loomed the ocean, dark and possessive, the colour of shaded grass.
‘Wait a minute. Rest,’ Harry argued. ‘Why the rush?’
‘You rest,’ Ivan said. ‘It’s not far to the summit.’ He climbed on, leaving Harry to sweat, the taller, younger man’s strides carrying him away in languid, flowing moments.
Harry swore and uncapped his flask. A few drops leaked from his mouth and fell to the ground, where they fizzed. Spittle on a hotplate, he thought, laughing quietly to himself, sensing movement to his rear as he fitted a cigarette to his lips. He was about to turn when something struck him in the back of the neck. Water gushed from the dropped flask, a bubbling rivulet that steamed and hissed toward the shore, releasing a wealth of garden compost odours
.
i
Luther Canning was no murderer. Mud and Swiss had been his friends, all three engineers seconded to the survey, their boozing and long circuitous hikes just their way of relieving the boredom.
Dropped off one grizzled morning and told to expect the survey team within the hour, they’d waited four days. Why the delay? Who was in charge of this expedition that they could allow a group of engineers to be landed with only basic rations, a two hundred litre container of beer, and no radio?
ii
Crouched meditatively at the island’s highest point, the opalescent sky gridded with snow, Ivan caught a shape to his left in the corner of his eye. A figment perhaps, a spectre of sun, shadow and dust, or Luther Canning.
Unnerved, he slid quickly down the incline, rolled and came up on one knee, weapon raised to meet any possible threat. He held the position a moment, wrapped in silence as the wan shades of mock clouds snapped on and off like the shutters of a thousand magic lanterns, casting dizzy forms all round him, regaling him with ghosts.
Standing, his head came level with the corroded platform from which he had jumped.
Nothing there. Ivan clambered back up, grateful Harry was not about to witness his foolishness, his nervy response. But there was a further consideration...
He holstered his gun and dusted himself off. The peak rose approximately thirty metres above sea-level, the horizon a blur of green smudges, trees shrouded in fog. There were no footprints save his own, and those would be shortly abraded by a
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