Jennifer Morgue (6 page)

associate. Without to be eated."

"Eaten?" I ask. I must look a trifle tense because even Boris manages to pull an apologetic expression from somewhere.

"What is this job, exactly? I didn't volunteer for a field mission — "

"Know you do not. We are truly sorry to put this on you,"

says Boris, running a hand over his bald head in a gesture that gives the lie to the sentiment, "but not having time for histrionics." He glances at Brains and gives a tiny nod. "First am giving briefing to you, then must complete destinyentanglement protocol with entity next door. After that — "

he checks his watch " — are being up to you, but estimating are only seven days to save Western civilization."

"What?" I know what my ears just heard but I'm not sure I believe them.

He stares at me grimly, then nods. "If is up to me, are not be relying on you. But time running out and is short on alternatives."

"Oh Jesus." I sit down on the sole available chair. "I'm not going to like this, am I"

"Nyet. Pinky, the DVD please. It is being time to expand Robert's horizons ..."

The river of time may wait for no man, but sometimes extreme stress causes it to run shallow. Cast the fly back four weeks and see what you catch, reeling in the month-old memories ...

IT'S LATE ON A RAINY SATURDAY MORNING IN February, and Mo and I are drinking the remains of the breakfast coffee while talking about holidays. Or rather, she's talking about holidays while I'm nose-deep in a big, fat book, reacquainting myself with the classics. To tell the truth, each interruption breaks my concentration, so I'm barely paying attention. Besides, I'm not really keen on-the idea of forking out money for two weeks in self-catering accommodations somewhere hot. We're supposed to be saving up the deposit for a mortgage, after all.

"How about Crete?" she asks from the kitchen table, drawing a careful red circle around three column-inches of newsprint.

"Won't you burn?" (Mo's got classic redhead skin and freckles.) "We in the developed world have this advanced technology called sunblock. You may have heard of it." Mo glares at me.

"You're not paying attention, are you"

I sigh and put the book down. Damn it, why now? Just as I'm getting to Tanenbaum's masterful and witty takedown of the OSI protocol stack ... "Guilty as charged."

"Why not?" She leans forwards, arms crossed, staring at me intently.

"Good book," I admit.

"I'm sorry. I guess I'm just not that enthusiastic right now."

"Yes, well, I just paid my Christmas credit card bill, too, love. Face it, by May we're both going to be needing a vacation, and they'll be twice as expensive if you leave booking it too late."

I look Mo in the eyes and realize she's got me metaphorically surrounded. She's older than I am — at least, a couple of years older — and more responsible, and as for what she sees in me ... well. If there's one disadvantage to living with her it's that she's got a tendency to organize me. "But.

Crete"

"Crete, Island of. Home of the high Minoan civilization, probably collapsed due to rapid climactic change or the explosion of the volcano on Thera — Santorini — depending who you read. Loads of glorious frescos and palace ruins, wonderful beaches, and moussaka to die for. Grilled octopus, too: I know all about your thing for eating food with tentacles.

If we aim for late May we'll beat the sunbathing masses.

I was thinking we should book some side tours — I'm reading up on the archaeology — and a self-catering apartment, where we can chill for two weeks, soak up some sun before the temperature goes into the high thirties and everything bakes ...

How does that sound to you? I can practice the fiddle while you burn."

"It sounds — " I stop. "Hang on. What's the archaeology thing about"

"Judith's had me reading up on the history of the littoral civilizations lately," she says. "I thought it'd be nice to take a look." Judith is deputy head of aquatic affairs at work. She spends about half her time out at the Laundry training facility in Dunwich and the other half up at Loch Ness.

"Ah." I hunt around for a scrap of kitchen roll to use as a bookmark. "So this is work, really."

"No, it's not!" Mo closes the newspaper section then picks it up and begins to shake the pages into order. She won't stop until she's got them perfectly aligned and smooth enough to sell all over again: it's one of her nervous tics. "I'm just curious.

I've been reading so much about the Minoans and the precedent case law behind the human/Deep One treaties that it just caught my interest. Besides which, I last went on holiday to Greece about twenty years ago, on a school trip. It's about time to go back there, and I thought it'd be a nice place to relax. Sun, sex, and squid, with a side order of archaeology."

I know when I'm defeated, but I'm not completely stupid: it's time to change the subject. "What's Judith got you working on, anyway?" I ask. "I didn't think she had any call for your approach to, well ... whatever." (It's best not to mention specifics: the house we share is subsidized accommodation, provided by the Laundry for employees like us — otherwise there's no way we could honestly afford to live in Central London on two civil service salaries — and the flip-side of this arrangement is that if we start discussing state secrets the walls grow ears.) "Judith's got problems you aren't briefed on." She picks up her coffee mug, peers into it, and pulls a face. "I'm beginning to find out about them and I don't like them."

"I'm going down to Dunwich next week," she says suddenly. "I'll be there quite some time."

"You're what"

I must sound shocked because she puts the mug down, stands up, and holds out her arms: "Oh, Bob!"

I stand up, too. We hug. "What's going on?"

"Training course," she says tightly "Another bloody training course? What are they doing, putting you through a postgraduate degree in Cloak and Dagger Studies?" I ask. The only training course I did at Dunwich was in field operations technique. Dunwich is where the Laundry keeps a lot of its secrets, hidden behind diverted roads and forbidding hedges, in a village evacuated by the War Department back during the 1940s and never returned to its civilian owners. Unlike Rome, no roads lead to Dunwich: to get there you need a GPS receiver, four-wheel drive, and a security talisman.

"Something like that. Angleton's asked me to take on some additional duties, but I don't think I can talk about them just yet. Let's say, it's at least as interesting as the more obscure branches of music theory I've been working on." She tenses against me, then hugs me tighter. "Listen, nobody can complain about me telling you I'm going, so ... ask Judith, okay? If you really think you need to know. It's just a compartmentalization thing. I'll have my mobile and my violin, we can talk evenings. I'll try to make it back home for weekends."

"Weekends plural? Just how long is this course supposed to take?" I'm curious, as well as a bit annoyed. "When did they tell you about it"

"They told me about this particular one yesterday. And I don't know how long it runs for — Judith says it comes up irregularly, they're at the mercy of certain specialist staff. At least four weeks, possibly more."

"Specialist staff. Would this specialist staff happen to have, say, pallid skin? And gill slits"

"Yes, that's it. That's it exactly." She relaxes and takes a step back. "You've met them."

"Sort of." I shiver.

"I'm not happy about this," she says. "I told them I needed more notice. I mean, before they spring things like this special training regime on me."

I figure it's time to change the subject. "Crete. You figure you'll be out of the course by then"

"Yes, for sure." She nods. "That's why I'll need to get away from it all, with you."

"So that's what this Crete thing is all about. Judith wants to drop you headfirst into Dunwich for three months and you need somewhere to go to decompress afterwards."

"That's about the size of it."

"Ah, shit." I pick up my book again, then my coffee cup.

"Hey, this coffee's cold."

"I'll fix a fresh jug." Mo carries the cafetiere over to the sink and starts rinsing the grounds out. "Sometimes I hate this job," she adds in a singsong, "and sometimes this job hates m e ..."

Or occult physics. And she wouldn't be in this job if she hadn't met me (although, on second thoughts, if she hadn't met me she'd be dead, so I think we'll call it even on that score and move swiftly on).

Look, if I come right out and say, "Magic exists," you'll probably dismiss me as a whack job. But in fact you'd be — well, I say you'd be — mistaken. And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted.[2 Not to mention outgunned.] We've tried to cover it up as best we can. Our predecessors did their best to edit it out of the history books and public consciousness — the Mass Observation projects of the 1930s were rather more than the simple social science exercises they were presented as to the public — and since then we've devoted ourselves to the task of capping the bubbling cauldron of the occult beneath a hermetic lid of state secrecy. So if you think I'm a whack job it's partly my fault, isn't it?

Mine, and the organization I work for — known to its inmates as the Laundry — and our opposite numbers in other — countries.

The trouble is, the type of magic we deal with has nothing to do with rabbits and top hats, fairies at the bottom of the garden, and wishes that come true. The truth is, we live in a multiverse — a sheath of loosely interconnected universes, so loosely interconnected that they're actually leaky at the level of the quantum foam substrate of space-time. There's only one common realm among the universes, and that's the platonic realm of mathematics. We can solve theorems and cast hand-puppet shadows on the walls of our cave. What most folks (including most mathematicians and computer scientists — which amounts to the same thing) don't know is that in overlapping parallel versions of the cave other beings — for utterly unhuman values of "beings" — can also sometimes see the shadows, and cast shadows right back at us.

Back before about 1942, communication with other realms was pretty hit and miss. Unfortunately, Alan Turing partially systematized it — which later led to his unfortunate "suicide" and a subsequent policy reversal to the effect that it was better to have eminent logicians inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside pissing in. The Laundry is that subdivision of the Second World War-era Special Operations Executive that exists to protect the United Kingdom from the scum of the multiverse. And, trust me on this, there are beings out there who even Jerry Springer wouldn't invite on his show.

The Laundry collects computer scientists who accidentally discover the elements of computational demonology, in much the same way Stalin used to collect jokes about himself.[3 He had two Gulags full.] About six years ago I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton, not to mention most of Birmingham and the Midlands, while experimenting with a really neat, new rendering algorithm that just might have accidentally summoned up the entity known to the clueful as "fuck, it's Nyarlathotep! Run!" (and to everyone else as "Fuck, run!").[4 Except the Black Chamber, who would say, "You're late — we're going to dock your pay."] In Mo's case ... she's a philosopher by training.

Philosophers in the know are even more dangerous than computer scientists: they tend to become existential magnets for weird shit. Mo came to the Laundry's attention when she attracted some even-weirder-than-normal attention from a monster that thought our planet looked good and would be crunchy with ketchup. How we ended up living together is another story, albeit not an unhappy one. But the fact is, like me, she works for the Laundry now. In fact, she once told me the way she manages to feel safe these days is by being as dangerous as possible. And though I may bitch and moan about it when the Human Resources fairy decides to split us up for months on end, when you get down to it, if you work for a secret government agency, they can do that. And they've usually got good reasons for doing it, too. Which is one of the things I hate about my life ...

PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon behind the computer has something significant to say. It's the tool of choice for pointy-headed idiots with expensive suits and skinny laptops who desperately want to look as if they're in command of the job, with all the facts at their fiddling fingertips, even if Rome is burning in the background. Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface ...

I'm sorry. Maybe you think I'm being unjustifiably harsh — a presentation graphics program is just a piece of standard office software, after all — but my experience with PowerPoint is, shall we say, nonstandard. Besides, you've probably never had a guy with a shoulder holster and a field ops team backing him up drag you into a stakeout and whip out a laptop, to show you a presentation that begins with a slide stating: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. It's usually a sign that things have gone wronger than a very wrong thing indeed, and you are expected to make them go right again, or something doubleplus ungood is going to happen.