The Mandel Files (114 page)

We can’t find any reference to the flower, NN core one told her.

She focused slowly on the presentation box in her hands, her mind still lingering on the showy array of blooms in Royan’s room. He told her later he grew them for their scent; smell was one of the few natural senses he had left. He put a lot of weight on flowers.

Are you sure? she asked.

Absolutely, it’s not in Kew Gardens’ public reference memory cores. They are the most comprehensive in the world.

Access all the botanical institutes you can. It has to be listed somewhere.

She frowned at the delicate enigmatic mauve trumpet. Why, after eight months without a word, would he send an unidentifiable flower?

CHAPTER 4

For ten months of the year Hambleton village slumbered tranquilly under the scorching English sun, the rural idyll of a nineteenth century that existed only in wishful daydreams and apocryphal historical dramas. It was nestled at the western end of a long whale-back peninsula which jutted out into the vast Rutland Water reservoir, surrounded by a quilt of lush citrus groves which had sprung up in the aftermath of the Warming. Through those quiet ten months the groves were maintained by a handful of labourers who lived locally. But twice a year the trees fruited, and the peninsula played host to an invasion of travellers which quadrupled the population overnight. Such an influx could never be anything other than a rumbustious fiesta, awaited with a mixture of trepidation and delight by the residents.

This July the convoy of travellers hunting work at the groves stretched the entire length of the road which ran along the peninsula spine. There were genuine horse-drawn gypsy caravans, brightly painted in primary colours with elaborate trim; twentieth-century vans with long strips of bright chrome, bulky custom-built trailers towed by four-wheel-drive Rangers, converted buses, and sleek ultra-modern land cruisers. Kids screamed and ran among the stationary vehicles, playing their incomprehensible games. Dogs barked excitedly and tripped the children. Goats and donkeys added their querulous cries to the hullabaloo. Adults stood in groups round the cabs talking in quiet murmurs. Smells of cooking drifted through the stifling air.

From where Greg Mandel stood at the gate of the camp field it looked like a real carnival. He always enjoyed the first two weeks of July, blistering heat, fruit hanging ripe in the groves, the campfire meals, music and dancing under the stars. There were even the odd days when they got some picking done.

“Roll it through,” he yelled up at the driver in the trailer cab. The vehicle had been converted from a redundant Army AT Hauler chassis, eight metres long, with six wheel sets. It rumbled into the field, leaving deep ruts in the mud.

“How many is that?” he asked Christine, his eldest daughter.

“Nineteen. Room for lots more yet, no messing.” She grinned happily. The twice-yearly picking seasons were dizzy times for the four Mandel children. New faces, old friends, no school, late nights, extra money for helping with the crop.

“How many teams do you want this year?” Derek Peters asked. He was standing beside Greg, a grizzled old family chief, wearing dungarees and a porkpie hat. He was the first traveller to arrive looking for work when Greg and Eleanor moved into the rundown farm sixteen years ago. Since then he’d been back each time, in summer for the oranges and limes, and November for the smaller tangerine crop. He knew most of the travellers, advising Greg who to take on, who the trouble makers were.

“About thirty-five,” Greg said. “That ought to see us through. There was a lot of blossom in the east grove this year.”

“You’ll make it to kombinate level yet,” Derek said.

Greg shrugged, inwardly pleased by the compliment. The year he and Eleanor began converting the farm’s old meadows, he had struggled to plant two groves in time for his first crop; now he had nearly fifty hectares of the Hambleton peninsula covered with gene-tailored citrus trees. All of them on the prime southern slope where they received the most sunlight.

There were eleven other citrus plantations on the peninsula, taking advantage of the reservoir’s superabundance of water to irrigate the thirsty trees. But the Mandel plantation was easily the largest, which meant Greg was invariably elected chairman of the local Citrus Growers’ Association. His cosy lifestyle, his respectability, was something he looked upon with a strong sense of irony. Not that he would ever consider abandoning the groves, not now.

When he and Eleanor set up their new home on the peninsula he hadn’t been at all sure of the idea. Up until then his life had been given over almost exclusively to combat or conflicts of one kind or another. A professional soldier, he had joined the Army at eighteen, serving in a paratroop regiment until the joint services’ psi-assessment test found him to be esp positive; whereupon he wound up with a hurried transfer to the newly formed Mindstar Brigade. After the Army came the Trinities, and a hot brutal decade slugging it out against the People’s Constables on Peterborough’s streets. But unlike the majority of the Trinities he made an attempt to cut free once the PSP fell; living in an old timeshare estate chalet on the shore of the reservoir, trying to make ends meet as a private detective. A role his espersense made him ideal for.

Two years spent grubbing away on desultory poorly paid cases and enduring lonely bachelor nights. Two years trying to build a reputation for professionalism and competence.

And ultimately it paid off. He was hired by Event Horizon to track down the source of a security violation in their orbiial factory. The case grew in size and complexity until he was finally confronting some PSP relics who had squirted a virus into Philip Evans’s NN core. At the same time Eleanor came into his life. The two events combining to change his mundane world out of all recognition.

An extremely grateful Julia paid him a ridiculously lavish fee for resolving the case. They could have lived quite comfortably off the interest alone, which made the prospect of carrying on as a detective seem stupid. But they had to do something, aristocratic lotus-eating, endless parties, and global tourism didn’t appeal to either of them. So they bought the farm: Greg had been a picker before often enough, a good supply of ready cash during the PSP years; and Eleanor grew up on an agricultural kibbutz.

By and large, it had been a good choice. Apart from one relapse, when Julia had used something approaching moral blackmail to coerce him into helping the police with a murder investigation which threatened to tarnish Event Horizon’s esteem, his previous life drifted away from him. He was happy to let it. The old memories of violence and sorrow grew progressively more inaccessible, veiled by a cold. discouraging fog.

The next vehicle trundled up to the camp field’s gate. Greg reckoned this year’s convoy was the largest yet. With the New Conservatives giving road repair a high priority, traffic in general was on the increase. Another ten years would have people worrying about gridlock again—he had to explain the word to Christine, a relic of his own youth. To someone who had grown up with roads that were little more than moss-clogged tracks it was an unbelievable concept. But three years ago the big Transport Department remoulder vehicle had laid a thermo-hardened cellulose strip over Hambleton peninsula’s crumbling tarmac road, and she had fallen into thoughtful silence. That was one part of the post-Warming boom he could do without. But with each of Hambleton’s plantations taking on pickers the convoy families should all find work this summer. He ought to bring that up at the next Association meeting; if they ever had to start turning away large numbers it could lead to resentment. Maybe he could sound Derek out about it first. He scrawled a quick note on his cybofax wafer.

“Hey wow,” Christine growled.

Greg looked up at the new arrivals. Two boys driving an old blue-sprayed ambulance, he could just make out the words Northampton Health Authority down the side.

“Alan and Simon,” Derek said. “Cousins.”

Everybody was a cousin or an in-law, if they weren’t they didn’t get past the gate. Greg never could work out what qualified them as family, it certainly wasn’t anything as simple as genetics.

“First year by themselves,” Derek added.

Greg could see that for himself, they were both about twenty, fresh-faced and apprehensive. The ambulance’s tyres were bald. “You ever done any picking before?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. “Ever since I could climb a ladder, maybe before, too.”

“And you are?”

“Simon, sir.”

“Can you do anything else?” Christine asked. There was a purring challenge in her voice.

Simon broke into a sudden ingratiating smile. From his position in the passenger seat, Alan was craning over Simon’s shoulder, staring.

Greg sent out a silent prayer. Christine was fifteen years old, and developing a figure as grand as her mother’s. The lime-green cap-sleeve T-shirt she was wearing proved that; and now he thought about it, her cut-off jeans were high and tight. None of her clothes were exactly little-girlish any more. He supposed that one day he really ought to talk to her about boys and sex, except that he had always sort of assumed Eleanor would do that. Coward, he told himself silently.

Simon’s mouth had opened to answer her, but then he took in Greg’s impassive expression and Derek’s scowl, and decided not to chance it. We can help with the cooking. And I have an HGV licence,” he offered.

“Any mechanical problems, and I’m your man,” Alan added. “City and Guilds diploma in transport power systems.”

Greg made a note on his cybofax.

“Mr Mandel lets you in, then you work from dawn to dusk,” Derek said. “I told him you was good boys; you fuck up, you make me a liar, you disgrace your family.”

From anyone else it would have been absurdly over the top. But Simon and Alan suddenly looked panicky.

“We want to work,” Simon insisted. We didn’t drive two hundred klicks for fun.”

Greg ordered a low-level secretion from his gland. In his imagination it was a slippery lens of black muscle, pumping away enthusiastically, oozing milky liquids. It was an illusion he had somehow never quite managed to shake off. Reality was far more banal. The gland was an artificial endocrine node which the Army had implanted in his skull, absorbing blood, and refining a devilish cocktail of psi-enhancing neurohormones to exude into his synapses.

The Army saw psychics forming a super-intelligence-gathering task force, pinpointing enemy locations, divining their generals’ strategies, opening up a whole chapter of information that would ensure victory. The Mindstar Brigade never quite lived up to those initial hopes, although it retained a fearsome reputation. Psi wasn’t an exact science, human brains were stubbornly recalcitrant, and not everybody could take the psychological pressure.

After his encouraging test results, the project staff had expected Greg to develop a formidable sixth sense, seeing through brick walls, seeking out tactical data over twenty kilometres. Instead, he wound up with the ability to perceive people’s emotions, their fears and hopes, knowing instantly when someone was lying. It was useful for counter-intelligence work, but hardly justified the expense.

His gland also cultivated a strong intuitive sense, although official opinion was divided on that. Greg knew it was real. One time in Turkey during the Jihad Legion conflict, he had tried to convince his company commander it was too risky crossing a valley floor. The major hadn’t listened, putting it down to the usual squaddie superstition about open ground.

Eight of the company had been lost when the Apache attack helicopters swam out of the cloudless sky, another fifteen were stretcher cases.

Greg felt his perception altering as the neurohormones bubbled through his brain, the world receding slightly, becoming grey and shadowy. The tightly wound thought currents of the two boys in the ambulance shone out at him. It was like watching fluid neon streamers swirling in surreal patterns, a cryptic semaphore message he alone could read.

He always checked over newcomers, just to make sure he wasn’t letting any vipers into Hambleton’s rustic peace. But neither of the boys were harbouring anything sinister, no malice or secret disdain, there was just a flutter of nerves as they waited for his answer, a genuine urge to work. And in Alan’s case, a high-voltage sparkle of admiration for Christine.

The one thing Greg never used his espersense for was checking up on his own children. He’d always promised himself that. Paranoid parents were the last thing a growing kid needed. So he stopped short of seeing how interested Christine really was with the two boys, preferring trust instead.

Besides, she already had three serious boyfriends that he knew of.

Christine brushed some of her long titian hair aside, tucking it behind her ear. “Two hundred kilometres; where have you come from?” she asked the boys.

“York,” Alan said.

“Oh, I think that’s such a wonderful city. I always love visiting it.”

“We’ll give it a shot,” Greg said hurriedly, trying to regain control.

“Thank you, sir,” Simon said, grinning broadly. “We’ll show you haven’t made a mistake.”

“Right. Park down beside the torreya tree. Make sure to put some wood underneath your wheels, the ground’s wet. OK? And don’t cut down any trees in the copse.” He pointed at the block of Chinese pine saplings beyond the groves. “We provide logs.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ambulance’s hub motors engaged with a light whine.

“And don’t you piss in the reservoir,” Derek yelled after them. Simon’s hand waved from the open window.

“You’ve never been to York,” Greg said to Christine.

She started giggling. “Oh, Dad, what’s that got to do with anything?”

Greg gave up. “Right, that’s twenty. Who’s next?”

A pair of hands were placed over his eyes. “I thought you always told me it was impossible to creep up on a psychic,” a woman’s voice said in his ear.

Christine squealed. “Aunty Julia!”

Greg turned round to see Christine hugging Julia Evans. He gave her a lame grin. “Listen, you, it’s more than possible when a psychic is having a day like this one.”