Aetius sighed. “Now, Regina—”
“You promised me.”
His mouth opened and closed. “Well, that’s jolly unfair. I promised no such thing.”
“Liar. Liar. ”
Carta tried to subdue her. “Oh, Regina—”
“She doesn’t want me. She’s sent me away.”
“It’s not like that,” Aetius said. “She loves you — she will always love you. Look — she asked me to give you this.” From a fold of his tunic he produced the precious silver dragon brooch.
She dashed it from his hand; it fell to the coarse grass, where it gleamed. She turned on Cartumandua. “And don’t you dare pick it up, Carta! I never want to see it again.”
Cartumandua flinched from the command in her voice.
And that was when the tears came, in a sudden flood, sudden as a rainstorm. Aetius folded her in his arms, and she felt Carta’s small hand on her shoulder. She wept for her mother and herself, as the carriage clattered its way the last few paces toward the Wall.
Chapter 6
I took Vivian’s advice and set off in search of my sister.
I booked some overdue leave. I had no trouble getting it through my line manager, or even through the Nazi killer robots who ran Human Resources. But I saw the way their gazes slid away from me as I handed over the forms and explained my vague plans. My days at Hyf were numbered. To hell with it.
I drove north, listening to news radio all the way. Along with the sports and the useless traffic bulletins, the main topic of the day was undoubtedly the Kuiper Anomaly. Absorbed with my own affairs, I just hadn’t noticed the way this thing had continued to mushroom in the public consciousness.
Reaching Manchester at around ten that evening, I drove to the city center, to the hotel I’d stayed in before. I actually parked the car. But I didn’t get out. I remembered what Vivian had said: reconnect. I shouldn’t be here.
I turned the car around and drove out to the suburbs. I canceled my hotel reservation with my cell phone.
There was a real estate agent’s sign outside my father’s house. I hesitated to disturb Peter, but when I knocked on his door he was awake — I heard the hum of PC cooling fans; perhaps he was working — and he was happy enough to give me a key. I let myself into Dad’s house. Inside it was warm and clean, but of course it was stripped of furniture; somehow I hadn’t been able to imagine it this way. There were pale patches on the wallpaper where furniture had stood for years. Empty or not it still managed to smell musty.
To my chagrin I finished up knocking on Peter’s door again. I borrowed a sleeping bag, pillow, and flask of tea. I spent the night on the thick carpet of my old bedroom. Lulled by the sound of distant trains passing in the night, immersed in a familiar ambience, I slept as well as I had in years.
In the morning, around eight, Peter showed up. It was a bright, fresh morning, the sky a deep blue. He brought soap, towels, a glass of orange juice, and an invitation to come over for breakfast. I accepted, but I promised myself I’d get to the shops and stock up as soon as I’d eaten.
Set on the other side of the road, Peter’s house was a mirror image of my father’s, the staircase and rooms eerily transposed from left to right. I went in there with some trepidation: this was the domain of Peter the solitary weirdo, after all. Well, it was plainly decorated, so far as I could see, with bland pastel paint hiding old wallpaper. The furniture looked a little old, and certainly wasn’t modish, but it wasn’t shabby. There were bookcases everywhere, even in the hall. The books seemed neatly ordered, but not obsessively so.
Peter wore a gray sweat suit of soft fabric, and thick mountaineer’s socks — no shoes or slippers.
We consumed Alpen and coffee in the kitchen. I told him I’d seen him on TV, and we talked about the media frenzy over Kuiper. Peter said it was all to do with positive feedback.
“It’s like that Mars story a few years back. You know, where they found fossil bacteria in a meteorite—”
“Thought they found.”
“And Clinton zipped himself up long enough to pronounce that NASA had discovered life on Mars. Suddenly it was everywhere. The story itself became the story.” It was the nature of the world’s modern media, he told me. “The days when news was controlled by a few outlets, the big networks, are long gone. Now you have CNN, Sky, Internet news sites: thousands of sources of news at local, national, and international level. And they all watch each other. A story sparks into life somewhere. The other outlets watch the story and the reaction to it, and pick up on it …” He was overfamiliar with this stuff, and tended to talk too rapidly, using specialist jargon, words like mediasphere. He showed me an editorial he’d clipped from the Guardian decrying the bubble of hysteria over Kuiper. “There’s even news about news, which itself becomes part of the story. It usually finishes with a spasm of self-loathing. ‘What This Hysteria Says About Our Society.’ Pathological, really. But it shows the kind of world we live in now. We’re all densely interconnected, like it or not, and this kind of feedback loop happens all the time.”
Densely interconnected. For some reason that phrase appealed to me. “But the fuss about Kuiper has been good for you,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s been good for me.”
Cradling our second mugs of coffee, Peter led me into his living room. Beyond a big double-glazed picture window, a garden glowed green in the soft light of the autumn morning. The room obviously served as an office. In addition to a music stack and wide-screen TV with various recorders and set-top boxes, there was a large table given over to computer technology: a big powerful-looking desktop, a laptop, various handhelds, a scanner, a joystick, and other bits of gear I couldn’t recognize. The desktop was booted up. There were books and stacks of printouts on the desk and on the floor.
All this looked like the environment of a freelancer working at home. But there was no sense of style, and a certain lack of ornamentation and decoration — no photographs, for instance — a lack of personality.
The only exception was in the little alcove over the fireplace. In my home my parents used to keep silly souvenirs in there — tiny wooden clogs from Amsterdam, a little Eiffel Tower, other family knickknacks. Peter had set up a little row of die-cast model toys. Intrigued, I asked, “May I?” Peter shrugged. I reached up and brought down a fat green aircraft. It was a Thunderbird Two, heavy and metallic-cold. I turned it upside, trying to see a manufacturer’s date. Something rattled in its pod. On the edges of the wings and along the base the paintwork was chipped and worn away.
“It’s a Dinky original. Nineteen sixty-seven,” Peter said.
I cradled it in my hands like a baby bird. “I never had one of these. My parents got me a plastic snap- together substitute.”
“Without a detachable pod? I sympathize.”
“They didn’t understand. This must be worth something.”
He took it back and restored it to its place. “No. Not without the original box, and it’s hardly in mint condition.”
“Much loved, though.”
“Oh, yes.”
I stepped toward the big gear-laden table. I could smell Johnson’s Pledge, I realized, and it struck me that the Thunderbird toy had been free of dust. Up on the desktop screen was what looked like a prototype Web page. It was complex, crowded, and partly animated; it showed stanzas of music that cycled rapidly, along with a kind of binary code I didn’t recognize. Peter stood awkwardly beside the table, big hands wrapped around his coffee cup.