The Mandel Files (21 page)

Three hundred metres and ten minutes later Greg cleared the market and turned right into Church Street, parking outside a little bakery shop.

On the other side of the road was a head-high stone wall, rapidly disappearing under an avalanche of dark waxy-leafed ivy. There was a raised garden behind it, enclosed by buildings on two sides and a chapel on the third. He went through the open wooden gate and took the steps two at a time.

The garden and buildings used to be part of the Oakham School campus, but private education hadn’t lasted six months after the PSP came to power, swept away in the card carriers’ Equalization crusade. And after that the refugees had hit town demanding somewhere to live. The campus was requisitioned as fast as the shops, playing fields given over to allotments.

The school’s Round House was a plain circular building sitting on the south side of the raised garden, three storeys high, and built from pale Stamford brick, Its door was closed and locked. Greg stood in front of it, motionless, waiting. It was a game he and Gabriel played. After half a minute he admitted defeat once again and turned to the small touchpanel set into the brick. He started pecking out the six-digit code for room seventeen.

“Come on up,” Gabriel’s voice chimed out of the intercom before he’d finished. The lock buzzed like an enraged hornet.

Gabriel Thompson had been a major in the Mindstar Brigade, possessed of the most reliable precognition faculty ever recorded. She was thirty-nine; only two years older than Greg, but judging from physical appearance alone he would’ve said it was closer to twenty. Her fair hair had already faded to a maidenly pearl-white, flab was accumulating all over her body. She wore a fawn-coloured woollen cardigan and tweed skirt, making her broad and shapeless, a half-hearted attempt to disguise her physical deterioration.

It pained him to see her this way, a prematurely middle-aged spinster. Especially as his mind insisted on remembering her as that neat, efficient young officer in Turkey. A fine-looking woman in her day, idolized like an elder sister.

He was given a moody stare as he entered her room on the second floor; it was one of thirty in the Round House, originally intended to sleep two girl boarders. As a permanent bedsit it was terribly cramped.

“Typical,” she said. “Only ever visit when you want something.” Badly applied dabs of make-up made her face shine in the golden afternoon sunlight filtering through the net curtain.

“Not true. Oh, Eleanor says hello.”

“I doubt it.” Gabriel began pouring tea from a silver pot into two bone china cups, all neatly laid out ready.

Rock music from one of the other rooms thumped out a soft bass rhythm in the background, echoing down the stairwell.

“So what have you come for this time?” she asked.

“Philip Evans.”

“He’s dead,” She paused for a moment, then her eyes widened in surprise. “Christ!”

All she needed was a word, a phrase; extrapolating the future from there. Events closest to her came across strongest. There would be no point in him asking her what was going to happen to someone on the other side of the world, she wouldn’t be able to see them.

She’d described the probabilities to him once, explaining her limits after he’d asked her for some impossible piece of intelligence information when they were fighting the Jihad legion.

I’m standing at the mouth of a very large river, she’d said, at the moment when the future becomes the present; and I’m looking across the land where the water originated, seeing the first fork, and beyond that the tributaries branching away, and then the tributaries’ tributaries, splitting, multiplying, ad infinitum. The far horizon gives birth to a trillion rills, all converging to the mouth, each one the source of a possible destiny. They are the Tau lines, future history. On their way towards me they clash and merge, building in strength, in probability, eradicating the wilder fringes of feasibility as they approach confluence, until they reach the mouth: the point of irrevocable certainty.

She could send her mind floating back along those streams, questing, probing for what would come. The prospect terrified her, he knew. She’d hidden that from the Army, but of course he’d seen it at once. The knowledge cost him; as the one person whose empathy allowed him to see the true extent of that dread he felt protective towards her. He was her involuntary confessor, obligated.

Way ahead of her, at the furthest extremity of each of those streams, where the flow was little more than a trickle in the dust, her death waited for her. She refused to let her mind roam far into any of the possible futures; but even that self-imposed proscription meant she lived with the mortal fear of the streams drying up, one by one, the drought inching towards her; a reality so blatant she’d never be able to shield her eldritch sight against it.

Greg thought of himself sitting in a plane as it began its long fall out of the sky; standing paralysed by fear in the middle of the road as some huge lorry bore down, brakes squealing, unable to stop in time. She had to live with the prospect of seeing that eventuality raising its head every minute of every day. Knowing that it was inevitably going to happen.

So he forgave her for going to seed. His espersense was a heavy cross. He would never have the strength to carry hers.

“Exactly,” he said. “Philip Evans made it back from the grave. Can you see who’s behind the blitz on his NN core?”

“Hmm.” Her mind betrayed how intrigued she was. “I’ll have a look.” She cut a slice of almond cake and began munching, staring up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused.

He sipped his tea, trying to identify the herbs. Rosemary, possibly. The market stalls weren’t particularly choosy what they ground up.

“Not a thing,” Gabriel said.

He didn’t show any disappointment. (Was there some alternative-universe Greg Mandel currently raging at her failure?) The answer did exist. Down one of those Tau lines was a future where he and Gabriel teamed up and successfully tracked down whoever had attacked Philip Evans. But for the moment the distance was too great. She wouldn’t stretch herself that far, not even for friendship’s sake.

“Will you help?” he asked.

She looked dreadfully unhappy.

“No big visions,” he reassured her. “Just cross out probabilities for me, eliminate suspects and dead ends. That kind of thing. I’ve got to interview Event Horizon’s giga-conductor team tomorrow, that’s over two hundred people. Then I’ll probably wind up having to go through the security division’s headquarters staff for the mole. My espersense can’t last out that long. Twenty’s my limit. And that hurts bad enough.”

“All right,” she whispered.

He held up the card Morgan Walshaw had given him. Gabriel stared at it, mesmerized. He could sense the trepidation mounting in her mind. She wanted to soar into the future and find out what it meant. The larger, ever-present dread held her back.

“Afterwards,” he said, “succeed or fail, I’m going to pay for your operation. That’s your fee, Gabriel, that gland is coming out.”

She looked at him incredulously, her mind spilling out hope. Her eyes watered. “I can’t,” she moaned.

“Bullshit,” he said softly. “I’m the one who can’t, I can keep my demons at bay. You can’t. You think I’m blind to what the gland has done to you? You’re getting out, Gabriel, no more living under the pendulum.”

Tears began to roll down her cheeks, smearing the makeup. She twisted round to avoid his eyes, looking out of the window.

He put his hands on the nape of her neck, feeling the solid knots of muscle, massaging gently. “I hate seeing you like this. You don’t live; you crawl from day to day. It’s a miserable existence. Too timid to walk under the open sky in case a lightning bolt hits you. It’s got to stop, Gabriel. No messing.”

“You bastard, Mandel. I’d be nothing without the gland, nothing.”

Outside, the sun shone down on the school’s old chapel on the other side of the garden, its pale stone gleaming like burnished yellow topaz.

“You’d be human.”

“Bastard. Prize bastard.”

“Truthful bastard.”

He turned her to face him. She was suddenly busy with a lace handkerchief, wiping away tears, making an even worse hash of the make-up.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll start with the Event Horizon Astronautics Institute, OK?”

She looked confused for a moment, then gathered her thoughts, entering into that familiar trance for a few seconds. “Yes, that’s a good start.”

“Right, then. I’ll pick you up at nine o’clock.”

“Fine.” She sniffed hard, then blew into the handkerchief.

Greg leant forward and kissed her brow.

CHAPTER 17

A pair of dolphins spiralled around Eleanor, silver bubbles streaming out from their flashing tails, wrapping her at the centre of an ephemeral DNA helix. Playful scamps. She’d come to love the freedom of the water over the last few weeks. Down here, surrounded by quiet pastel light, tranquillity reigned; life’s ordinary worries simply didn’t exist below the surface. Sometimes she spent hours swimming along the bottom of Rutland Water; one small part of her mind checking the long rows of water-fruit rooted in the silt, while her memories and imagination roamed free. Daydreaming really, but this gentle universe understood and forgave.

The marine-adepts had warned her about the state. “Blue lost’, they called it. But she couldn’t believe it was that dangerous. Besides, the reservoir was finite, not like the oceans they talked of, where some of their kind never returned. Swimming away to the edge of the world.

She helped tend their crops three or four days each week; with inflation the way it was, the water-fruit money came in useful. And she could spend the time thinking about life, the world, and Greg, weaving the strands in fanciful convolutions; so that when she left the water behind her mind was spring fresh and eager for the sights, sounds, and sensations of land again. Mental batteries recharged. The world outside that ever-damned kibbutz was too big to endure in one unbroken passage.

She felt a dolphin snout poking her legs, upsetting her balance. It was Rusty, the big old male. She knew him pretty well by now, though some of the others were hard to distinguish. Rusty had a regular ridge of scar tissue running from just behind his eyes down to his dorsal fin. The marine-adepts never talked about it, so she never asked. But something had been grafted on to him at one time. She didn’t like to think what.

They’d brought eight dolphins with them to the reservoir to help harvest their water-fruit. The dolphins’ long, powerful snouts could snip clean through a water-fruit’s ropy root. All of them were ex-Navy fish, their biochemistry subtly adjusted, enabling them to live comfortably in fresh water as well as salt. Greg said that was so they could be sent on missions up rivers. But whatever Rusty had been made to do back then hadn’t affected his personality; he could be a mischievous devil when he wanted to be.

Like now.

She suddenly found herself flipped upside-down, whirl currents from his thrashing tail tumbling her further. The remains of Middle Hambleton spun past her eyes. Shady rectangular outlines of razed buildings rising from the dark grey-green alluvial muck. One day she was determined she’d explore those sad ruins properly.

She stretched her arms out, slowing herself, then bent her legs, altering her centre of gravity, righting herself. A shadow passed over her, Rusty streaking away, beyond retribution. She let herself float upwards.

At the back of her mind she was marvelling at her own enjoyment. She, a girl who couldn’t even swim six weeks ago, even though the kibbutz at Egleton was right beside the reservoir. The marine-adepts had thought that hilarious.

For the first few weeks after she’d moved into Greg’s chalet she’d had a sense of being divorced from selected sections of his life. Apart from the Edith Weston villagers everyone he knew was ex-military; the marine-adepts, Gabriel, that mysterious bunch of people in Peterborough he’d referred to obliquely a couple of times, even the dolphins. They were a hard-shelled clique, one that’d formed out of shared combat experiences. She could never possibly be admitted to that. And the marine-adepts were naturally reticent around other people; it wasn’t quite a racial thing, but they did look unusual until you were used to them. The only time they left the reservoir was to drive their water-fruit crop to Oakham’s railway station.

Breaking through their mistrust had been hard going. The turning point had come when Nicole had finally taken over her swimming lessons, more out of exasperation than kindness, she’d thought at the time. But a bond had formed once she realized how keen Eleanor was, and the rest of the floating village’s residents had gradually come to accept her. A triumph she considered equal to walking out on the kibbutz in the first place.

She could never hope to match the marine-adepts in the water. They had webbed feet which enabled them to move through the water with a grace rivalling the dolphins, and their boosted haemoglobin allowed them to stay submerged for up to a quarter of an hour at a time. But with flippers and a bioware mirror-lung recycling her breath she was quite capable of helping them in the laborious nurturing of the water-fruit. Planting the kernels deep in the silt, watching out for fungal decay in the young shoots, clearing away tendrils of the reservoir’s ubiquitous fibrous weed which could choke the mushy pumpkin-like globes. The marine-adepts had staked out eight separate fields in the reservoir, and earned quite a decent living from them.

Her only real failure among Greg’s friends had been Gabriel Thompson. The woman was so stuck-up and short-tempered Eleanor had wound up simply ignoring her. She suspected Gabriel had a jealousy problem. Always mothering Greg.

She broke surface five hundred metres off shore, about a kilometre away from the Berrybut time-share estate. The sun was low in the sky, and she could see flames rising from the estate’s bonfire.

Rusty’s chitter tore the air ten metres behind her. She slapped the water three times and he vanished again. Some Navy dolphins had been fitted with bioware processor nodes to make them totally obedient to human orders. But Nicole said the Navy had left Rusty’s brain alone. The marine-adepts used a hand-signal language to talk with the reservoir dolphins. Eleanor had mastered most of it, and Rusty nearly always did as she asked. That little edge of irrepressible uncertainty in his behaviour was what made him such fun.