If Then (3 page)

She turned down a twitten, and here the shift in temperature from warm afternoon to bright cold evening was palpable; the surrounding hedges were overgrown, and the high branches of the trees entwined to form a dark green archway overhead. The twitten wall had crumbled back into a yard, forming a gap. The gap led into a small garden that had run to tall nettles, and contained a shed with a rusty corrugated iron roof. She felt a prickling in her stripe. There, padding slowly across the undulations of the roof, was a drone fox, sniffing left and right. Its brown pelt had not grown back where it had been striped, and its left eye was bloodshot, the eyelid swollen and half-curled in. Birdsong overhead, the distinctively arrhythmic jazzy birdsong of the Process; the sensation in her stripe changed from a pickling numbness to a fluid oozing, neither unpleasant nor unknown to her, the nodules giving up their temporary form to release their data. The drone fox shook its head as if to rid itself of an annoying fly or embarrassing memory, and then it stumbled, the legs on its left-hand side buckling under the weight of its body. Its flanks shivered, and the prickling in her stripe abated. Whatever sadness she felt had just been absorbed into the Process.

3

A
t the end
of the village, the track was thick with overgrown honeysuckle bushes and hawthorn trees, with blackberry and rose bushes stripped of their fruit and hip. Hector stumbled through the branches and fell forward onto his palms. He glanced up at James, right hand grasping the rope, their gaze locked.

James offered his open palm. “We need to push on. Not far now.”

The soldier pulled harder at the rope, a second experiment in volition. James took out his woodsman’s hatchet, and removed the glinting edge from its leather sheath.

“You must stop struggling.”

The soldier’s eyes ranged around, ignoring James and the head of the axe, attending only to the equation of war in the ether. James heard it too, like a voice from a burning bush or a greeting from a strange animal. The implant partitioned his mind so that some thoughts came from outside of himself, from nature or machines. In this instance, the thoughts seemed to come from between the sun-flicked branches of an oak tree, and they concerned the mathematics of conflict, calculating the correlation between the lust for vengeance and the number of casualties or the vigour to fight against the loss of territory.

The crimson beads threaded through the soldier smouldered and he leapt at James, grappling his waist, so that they fell together. James felt a rush of heat from the soldier’s skin; crimson beads melted to form blood, and the blood soaked through the bandages.

The two men struggled hand-to-hand. During the Seizure, James’ only relief from redundancy had been his civil defence shifts. He knew how to subdue another man without causing unnecessary hurt. The Process fought like a roach on its back, poorly and unfairly, and could accidentally take an eye or sever an artery. James had to be careful. He hoisted the soldier up with ease, turned his face from his chemical breath, and threw him through the thicket and onto the greensward.

James climbed over the dry stone wall and drove Hector across the field, and then down into a wood. With the rope trailing behind him, the soldier was caught up in the momentum of the steep decline; he stumbled, and then fell head over heels over head. The bailiff followed at an implacable lope. The signal of the Process was weaker in the valley. After each fall, the soldier struggled to get up again.

The Institute lay somewhere within the wood. The old landmarks were concealed beneath unchecked growth. The sheep trough was familiar: a circular concrete divot holding a shallow mirror of rain and a reflection of the morning cloud. The edge of the grounds was marked by a wall of crumbling brick sheathed with grey lichen; it had been broken, here and there, by roots and branches. James heaved the soldier over the fallen brick, then scrambled after him into the wood.

The tall larch and beech trees made a vaulted ceiling. The light scattered by the leaves reminded him of the coloured patterns thrown by a stained glass window. He found serenity among the cool indifference of trees. A muntjac deer, small, with haunches higher than its withers, glanced at them through coppiced trunks, then darted away at their approach. James stepped through a bone-white configuration of fallen branches. So much dead wood. The soldier’s blood solidified into crimson beads, and his expression grew heavy and docile. James hauled him through the bronze mulch. There was no fight in him anymore; the semblance of humanity caused by that outburst of will and determination was gone, and he had returned to his factory setting of diffident automaton.

The wood sloped downward. Smoke rose from a charcoal burner’s camp pitched beside a stream. The kiln gave off its tarry trail. James dropped the soldier under a tarpaulin strung over a cooking fire and called out a greeting. Two grubby children in the brushwood watched but did not answer.

Hung from an iron hook stuck into the earth, a dixie pot boiled on the campfire, a stew of muntjac bones, nettles and cobnuts. James waited for the charcoal burner to emerge from his cat hole, and soon enough the man came out of the woods, adjusting his braces and wiping his hands clean upon a wet leaf. He greeted them with mannered courtesy. James inquired about the condition of the Institute. The charcoal burner shook his head.

“We don’t go there anymore.” He took a pocket knife and stirred the stew, poking at the venison. “They used to take two dozen sacks from me a month,” he gestured toward the charcoal kiln and its lid of earth sections, strewn with bluebells and fern fronds. “Then about a year ago, they stopped coming out to meet me. I went to speak to the woman who runs it, Ms Drown, do you know her?”

James nodded. Alex Drown. The woman who had overseen his implant and made him into the bailiff.

“She told me they wouldn’t be needing any more charcoal. Said they had made other arrangements. Bullshit. But I have learnt to mind my own business. Do you have any tobacco?”

The man mimed a pinch, his lean face streaked with charcoal, his collarless shirt ragged from being washed on river stones and dried on a branch. James shook his head.

“Does he have any snout?” The charcoal burner gestured at the soldier, who sat upon a log with his head bowed. The soldier did not respond.

“Your friend is very quiet,” said the charcoal burner.

“Have you seen other soldiers in the woods?”

He shook his head. “It’s not often I get to talk to a gentleman like yourself. When I go into town they aren’t so friendly since the crash.”

“The Seizure,” corrected the bailiff.

“Is that what it’s called now? The Seizure?” He speared a piece of venison and chewed over that thought. “The people in the Institute – I mean, the people who are left there – they’re not really people anymore.”

“In what way?”

“Ms Drown warned me not to return. That the staff and the inmates had been experimenting on one another. They were carrying them out on stretchers.”

“Experimenting?”

“Poking around in
here
,” the burner pointed to his own narrow skull. “I saw a figure through the windows of the great house, naked, about seven foot tall, and something wrong with his head. They do operations there.”

“I know,” said James, running his fingers through his hair. “Have you seen anything recently?”

“My sons went out there. You know what children are like. Wouldn’t listen. They listen now. They came back shivering and white. I would move to a different wood except my kiln is here and the stream is good. A man gets lazy.”

The charcoal burner tended to his kiln, dousing the conical pile with water so that it did not burn too hot; steam rushed forth and then slowed, drifting upward among the tall larch trees. The stew boiled away on the dixie.

“How are things in town?”

The charcoal burner was keen for gossip, for some connection with society. James thought of Lewes as he had left it that morning; quiet and self-contained, wood fires and malt steam from the brewery mingling with a curious mist. Lewes had been established over a thousand years earlier to take advantage of its situation: from the top of the Norman castle, a sentry could see seven miles south to the sea, west to Firle Beacon, and north, along the river to the chalk pit and the approach along the disused railway line. The town had two hearts, one high up by the castle, and the other lower down, in the lee of a chalk cliff face sharking free of the undulations of the Downs. It had been easy to erect barriers at each of the points of ingress, securing Lewes against any incursion of the evicted.

“The town has everything it needs,” said the bailiff.

The charcoal burner gestured around at the woods.

“Except freedom.”

“It has freedom.”

The charcoal burner tapped the top of his head, meaning
the stripe
. “Matter of opinion.”

James asked for directions to the Institute.

“Follow the wood down, and then turn west at the weir. That will bring you to the old house from the direction of the gardens. You’ll have more visibility that way. If you follow the walls then you will end up in the bunkers around the back. That’s the way my sons went. I would avoid that. You’re welcome to stay for some stew. My wife will be back soon, and she’ll be sorry she missed you.”

“Perhaps upon my return.”

The burner and his boys watched James go, pulling the soldier along behind him, Hector’s face fixed in a thousand yard stare.

James followed the directions down to the river. At the shallow bridleway, the glide of the river appeared to reverse against the consecutive drags of stepping stones. In the lee of each stepping stone, the water bubbled and cohered into memory pools hemmed in by the swirl of the current, memories that were inseparable from the current yet appeared – if only briefly – to belong to an individual rock.

He had spent time at the Institute, first undergoing the implant, and then recovering from it. It had seemed the only way to get through the Seizure with any quality of life. He and Ruth had done very badly out of the collapse, and prior to that, the crisis. And then events accelerated.

No, James corrected himself, acceleration implies forward movement. Events lateralized. Events networked.

He had argued with Ruth about the meaning of the Seizure. She insisted that it was plain theft and exploitation. They argued about the onset of their obsolescence, what had been lost, what would never be. They argued about the state of the world before the crisis, or the collapse or the Seizure. James believed that they had been deluded as to the true nature of their society, whereas Ruth believed that the future they found themselves within was a lie, and that the past, and the way they had once been together, was the truth.

Throughout their arguments, events continued to slide sideways, in the same way that if he stood on the bank staring at the river’s flow, it seemed as if the bank was moving backward while the river remained motionless.

Humans are astonishingly adaptable. A few years living within the Process and already it seemed as natural to him as the river’s progress to the sea.

The soldier went splashing through the cold water of the bridleway; his features had the potential to be cunning, even demonic, if intelligence returned to them.

He hauled the soldier along a muddy path and through the trees he glimpsed the gothic castellations of the Institute: the roof with its eighty or so chimneys, the east wing covered with autumnal ivy, the west wing a turret and great Round Room. Between him and the house, there were three hundred yards or so of meadow ending in a haw-haw, and then a low courtyard wall. It was as if the Institute was below sea level, in a muggy stilted zone, with mosquitos in the air that made the scar on his scalp itch.

The foundations had been laid in the ninth century for a priory. The house had undergone a major renovation at the end of each of the previous three centuries so that it was a patchwork of architectural fashions covered in crimson lichen and vines. Time was fermenting here, becoming an intoxicant. The moon was high and so was the sun. He took the soldier by the hand and they walked together across the meadow. Atop the turret of the Round Room, taut silver sails rigged at oblique angles monitored the ether. Behind the windows, strange shadows passed to and fro.

He stood at the door and shouted Alex’s name, then tested the handle. The door opened onto a hallway, a muddy black and white tiled floor interspersed with buckets and chamber pots to collect drips from the leaking roof. Murmurs and whispers came from a bright side room, and through a crack in the doorway he saw the painful movements of a tall and half-naked figure.

But it was Alex Drown who met him at the entrance of the Round Room. Her right eye was entirely bloodshot.

“James. You’ve come back.”

“I’ve brought you something.” He helped Hector into a seated position on the tiled floor. “I found him trapped in some barbed wire on the Downs. The wire was new.”

She inspected the soldier, opened the pockets of his outfit, rooted around in his backpack, and looked inside his mouth and his ears.

“I’d say this one was made from archive photographs, reverse engineering from descendants, and something weirder.”

She registered the name on the identity disc. “Has Hector been livelier than this?”

“He took a swing at me outside Glynde. The villagers said they had found other soldiers and brought them to you.”

“We have half a dozen now. But Hector seems different, as if made from a more detailed pattern.”

“Pattern from where?”

“Something weirder, as I said.” She grinned at him. Her dark hair was short and ragged, cut by herself in the reflection of a grimy mirror. Her trouser suit had blood stains upon the collar. He noted the vinegary odour of stale female perspiration. Two villagers dressed in boiler suits and frayed grey lab coats arrived to take the soldier away.

“It’s good to see you again, James.”

“Your eye,” he said.

“I know. Upgrades. We should never have augmented the hardware.”

He didn’t understand.

“The implants,” she explained, reaching over to him, feeling through his hair for the scarred intake on the back on his skull. “We should have confined ourselves to hacking the software and not dabbled with the wiring. You live and learn. Every time Omega John upgrades me, my eyes bleed, my fingernails fall out and I lose my sense of balance. Will you join me in the Round Room?”

The Round Room was in a state of benign neglect. The dome of the rotunda was covered by a mural depicting characters from the history of the Institute. The other walls were slick with damp and the paint sloughed off them in silvered waves. Alex perched upon the edge of a heavy dark wooden desk and huddled into her suit jacket against the draught from the sash window frames.

“Do you mind if I ask Omega John to come in on this meeting?” Remnants of corporate dialect remained in Alex’s speech. Before the Seizure, she had worked for a technology company called Monad.

An awkward half-naked figure, the same one that James had glimpsed on the way in, walked into the Round Room. He wore a bedsheet like a sash. Skin and bone iterated in a massy cauliflower-like clump at the base of his bald head. Perspiration welled on his sunken spotted chest. The arms were as pallid as wishbones, the shoulders like knuckles. He ran a dry tongue over chapped white lips before speaking.