Descent (27 page)

It might be a good idea to establish a pattern of doing a lot of virtual viewing of other places and other people. There were, after all, many uses I could make of the app in my legitimate work. I just had to be careful, and not watch Gabrielle too often. No more than once a day, say, and only when she was on the street. Or in another public place. Or in a place where she could reasonably expect to be seen. Or in a situation where she had made no provision for privacy. Or …

You get the idea.

Outside my window, snow wasn’t so much falling on Leith as precipitating out of the air, in tiny particles of ice like frozen drizzle. Typical weather for the beginning of April, but enough to provoke a stirring of vague surprise and resentment, which people my age have probably picked up from their parents. It fitted my mood, which was rattled and out of sorts. I’d just come out of my by now daily self-torturing quarter-hour session of watching Gabrielle. I wasn’t just watching her on weekdays. For several Saturdays or Sundays now, I’d observed her and Calum doing banal, soppy, couple-ish things, like walking hand in hand in Kelvingrove Park or shopping in Sauchiehall Street or browsing the bookshops and sitting in the cafés of Byres Road or going out to or walking home from an Indian restaurant. The more happy and relaxed they looked together the worse I felt, both about the situation and about my own jealous obsession. Time and again I mentally said goodbye and good luck to them both, waved a wry blessing at their unheeding images, and switched off. Time and again, sometimes after as long as two days, I found myself watching Gabrielle once more.

So now. Oh well. I watched her go to her work, and turned with a certain reluctance to my own. I’d sat up until late the previous night refining my history of Gabrielle’s and Calum’s ancestral clans, and gone to sleep feeling I had it pretty much nailed down. Now I wanted to dig deeper into it, but that wouldn’t bring in any money. Paying rent on a two-person flat, I needed all the money I could get. So much for being out of sorts. What had rattled me, though, was an item that had come up in the overnight trawl.

A space access project, one of several taking shape around the old RAF airbase at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre, had announced the date for its first full-scale test as sometime in the first couple of weeks in May or thereabouts. (There was a reason for this imprecision as we’ll see.) The project was one of the many schemes, some on the face of it rather hare-brained, which the Scottish Government had – thanks to the crowd-sourced market-plan hybrid chimeric bastard offspring of the Scottish Futures Forum on the New Improvement – more or less backed itself into backing. We all remember the Sighthill Salmon Ladder scandal, of course, but it’s only sad bastards like me who can give you the details of the Spey River Turbine affair, the Moray Firth Delphinarium outrage, the Boat of Garten Wing-Mirror Farm receivership controversy, and so on.

This particular boondoggle involved launching a huge high-altitude balloon which, from high in the stratosphere, would drop a payload strapped to a cluster of ramjets. The ramjets would ignite, the craft would pull out of its powered dive and make a hairpin turn to ascent, and up it would go. The final thrust to orbit would be with a conventional rocket engine, kicking in when the air-breathing ramjets choked off for lack of air to breathe. This being Scotland, the project was called the Rammie, allegedly standing for Rapid-Airbreathing Multiple Motor Innovation Experiment, though I suspected the acronym had been an afterthought to the moniker.

One tiny little technical issue with the whole project was the inconvenient truth that the prevailing wind in Scotland is from the west, as is the jet stream, which likewise inconveniently has a tendency to wander over Scotland quite a lot. This meant that the balloon would tend to drift, not out over the Atlantic, but over the central belt of Scotland, the North Sea and on over Scandinavia and Russia, none of which were used or inhabited by folks likely to take kindly to experimental rockets making a vertical screaming nosedive in their general direction, regardless of how well-tested the ‘pulling out in a hairpin turn’ part of the plan was.

To this sort of knee-jerk, negative, nervous-nellie, nimby eyebrow twitching the project’s participants and backers had a well-rehearsed response, repeated wearily and oft, prominent in the site’s FAQ. It was … Ah, fuck it, let me just me pull up the quote:

Q: Won’t prevailing winds and the jet stream make the balloon drift to the east, over heavily populated territory?

A: No. The balloon we’re going to use is made of a new metamaterial which takes in air from one side and expels it from the other, thus moving the balloon. The thrust is small, but steady, and more than enough to counter these air currents. The balloon will only drop its payload over the North Atlantic. Furthermore, there’s no intention to set up regular commercial launches from Machrihanish. The purpose of our project is to develop the technology and establish proof of concept. If successful and commercially adopted, any use of the system for scheduled launches is likely to be from the eastern coast of the Americas, or from China. The aim of our project is that Scotland will then have a head start in manufacturing equipment for this new and exciting system of cheap and reliable space access!

As a further safeguard, all our experimental ascents will be carefully timed to coincide with wind from the east, and with the jet stream flowing to the north or south of the flight path.

Not everyone, you may be surprised to learn, was reassured. Disquiet over the project had reached the Scottish Parliament, refracted through the cracked prism of political alignments. The Green Party was in the government coalition, with one junior minister, and its MSPs spoke in support of the project through gritted teeth and with one arm twisted behind them. Plenty of rank-and-file members and supporters of the party were hostile or dubious and backed a small but noisy campaign (predictably called Nae Rammie) against it.

The Renewal Party, as a small component of the official opposition bloc, presented a mirror-image contortion. Party policy and rhetoric derided the New Improvement. Some journalists, however, suspected that Renewal’s three MSPs had a sneaking regard for this particular project, it being the sort of wacky optimistic private-sector government-backed space-hype adventure that appealed to them as well as to the party’s younger voters, whose free-market principles could always be relied on to take a back seat to a chance to stick it to the Greens. In Parliament two had abided by bloc discipline and voted against it. The third, James Baxter, the opposition bloc’s Shadow Minister for Technology, had recused himself on the grounds of perceived possible conflict of interest: the manufacturer of the self-propelling balloon’s engine was none other than his former employer, British Avionic Systems.

It was the sort of story I’d normally avoid, because – besides Baxter – it involved the silver spheres. I was still reluctant to so much as think about the new aviation, despite seeing an increasing number of anomalously speedy balloons and blimps flit across the skies. I’d tinkered with the settings of my tech-news trawls, but now and again something on the subject didn’t slip through the deliberate holes in my net. What had snagged this one were two company names that I definitely did keep an eye on.

One was StrathSpace, which had offered to provide the launch with hyper-local weather information and real-time coverage, an offer gratefully received and duly publicised. The other was Fabrications, the company that had given Sophie her internship and her first proper job. Its range had expanded beyond fashion textiles – the division in which Sophie was still employed, and as far as I knew doing well – via outdoor wear to tent, canoe, and microlight-aircraft fabrics, and thence to the new aviation metamaterials. It was flashed up as a sponsor and listed in the background links as the supplier to BAS of the self-propelling balloon fabric, which BAS had developed (ha!) and patented, but which it found more efficient to license out for large-scale manufacture.

Now that was an angle, I thought. It was high time I got over my phobia about the new aviation. Coming at it by way of the new metamaterials might be a gentle route to desensitising myself on the topic. And anyway, I hadn’t spoken to Sophie for years.

The time was just after 9.30. I texted Sophie asking for a good time to call, and she replied that she’d ring me back in about an hour. This gave me time for more research, so I got on with that. When the phone rang I threw the call to the wall screen and let her see me too. Sophie sat at a desk, coffee mug to hand, sheets of paper and pads around her, and a wall with tacked-up sketches and swirling whiteboard arrows behind. She grinned at me. The grin faded as she looked at my room.

‘Hi, Ryan. Did you have a party last night, or what?’

‘What?’ I shook my head. ‘No. Why?’

‘Bit of a tip you’ve got there, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Oh!’ I waved as if swatting at midges. ‘Yeah, I need to tidy up, I guess.’

‘Do that,’ Sophie said. ‘And yes, I’ve heard.’

‘Heard about what?’

She gave me a look. ‘Gabrielle.’

‘Oh, yeah, well …’ I shrugged.

‘I understand why you’re gutted,’ Sophie said. ‘But don’t let it demoralise you, OK?’

‘Well, yeah, I suppose it does seem a bit …’

‘It does seem a bit,’ she said firmly. ‘It looks like it whiffs a bit, to be honest.’

I looked at the condition of the front room and saw what she meant. It wasn’t obvious squalor: there were no pizza boxes or take-away cartons, because I cooked for myself; no unwashed plates, because I always ate out of pans and left them in the sink; no beer cans, because I didn’t drink beer at home; and no whisky bottles, because I doggedly took these to the recycling bins every week. It was just lots of things out of place, an entropic increase in disorder.

‘Anyway,’ she said brightly, ‘I take it this isn’t what you wanted to talk about.’

I outlined what I did want to talk about.

‘I’m not sure I can help,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s not my area.’ She indicated the colourful, slow-twirling sketches behind her. ‘I’m still in fashion fabrics.’

‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘I know. I just wondered if you could point me to someone who knows a bit more—’

‘There’s a link here’ – she limned it in the air with the tip of her forefinger – ‘to aviation fabrics enquiries—’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried that. Just got the standard stuff, anyone can look at and listen to. I’d like just one sentence from an actual human voice with a name I can quote.’

‘Hmm. All right. I shouldn’t really do this, but try Jasmine.’

She pushed out the name and I grabbed it, slapping it on my phone before Sophie could change her mind.

‘Thanks.’ I felt awkward all of a sudden, like having caught myself in a faux pas. Oh yes, I’d been a bit too instrumental and brusque. ‘Uh, how are things with you?’

‘Fine, thanks for asking,’ she said. She sipped from the mug, enjoying my discomfort, knowing I knew she knew about it. ‘There’s hope for you yet, Ryan. But I have to crack on at the moment.’

‘Oh, that’s OK, thanks, I understand. Those lampshades don’t light themselves, or something.’

‘Ha-ha! Not bad, not bad.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘And do remember to take care of yourself, Ryan, yes?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You too.’

She snapped her fingers and her face dwindled and vanished, leaving an after-image in my mind if not on my retinae of a fleeting impression of irritation from just before the connection broke.

I called Jasmine, who turned out to be a technical specialist in the aviation fabrics plant. She was wary at first, but relaxed when I mentioned Sophie and, I think, when she realised that like her I was from Greenock. A virtual tour of the plant and running commentary took about fifteen minutes, at the end of which I had plenty of soundbites, quotes, stats, technical details and so forth to cobble together.

‘I got to get on wi things, mind,’ she said, sounding actually regretful.

‘Oh, it’s been great, many thanks.’

I wove what Jasmine had told me into other material I pulled in during the course of the morning, fired off the piece, and got a couple of acceptances before I’d finished my lunch. All very well, but picking over my necessarily unused scraps of research I sniffed the potential of something bigger: an analytical article that would get picked up by the serious sci-tech sites, and (if I pushed the right political buttons) even the main news and comment channels, especially in the US where ‘The New Improvement: Threat or Menace?’ was a perennial talking-head topic of displaced and disproportionate, not to say fair and balanced, debate.

The prospect was tempting. I had the track record, the background knowledge, a good list of contacts and sources, and I was now fully up to speed on developments. The opportunity was mine to seize. Only one thing made me hesitate. There was one politician I could not avoid quoting, and could not pass up the chance of an interview with or off-the-record briefing from.

I sat staring at Baxter’s name on the screen for a long time, trying to think of a way I could avoid talking to him. There seemed to be none. Even a news bot wouldn’t generate a story about the Rammie debate without some mention of him, and the only way I could get my story past any decent editing software would be for it to be better than anything a news bot could compile. (It’s an open secret of journalism that editors fire up news bots and run comparisons on incoming copy.) I leaned back, looking away from the screen, and my gaze fell on a scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled Baxter’s name.

For a moment I berated my earlier self for leaving my later self such an unhelpful reminder. Why had I written his name down? Oh yes, I’d been seeking some connection that had eluded me. Some connection – other than the coincidental one raised by my worries about surveillance – between Baxter and the problem of Calum and Gabrielle. And of course other than the obvious one with our encounter all that time ago with a light from the sky that might well have been a smaller and earlier version of the very same kind of balloon as the Rammie project would use. I still didn’t get whatever my subconscious had flagged up. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Baxter since Calum and I had met him by chance outside the Parliament, just before our far more fateful convergence of paths with Gabrielle. I’d glimpsed him on screen now and again, usually spitting soundbites like he had that time Gabrielle and I had watched him on my phone while he’d ranted on a panel at the Forum.