“Try opening it . . .”
Avatar did, and the heavy door swung open in a cascade of metal dandruff as its hinges creaked and popped fat flakes of rust. A twist of riveted steps fed down to the coldness below and then kept on going to the level below that, bypassing the turbine rooms.
Old-fashioned switches waited for Avatar at every landing but the bulkhead lights were empty of bulbs, so he felt his way through the darkness, until the fingers following the icy rail ceased to be his and vanished into a dull ache.
The deeper Avatar went, the colder it became until every inward breath froze in his throat or plated the inside of his nostrils and every outward breath condensed at his lips. The cold had a physicality that was new to him. And with the cold came a tiredness and the need for sleep.
Heat he’d lived with all his life. It arrived with late spring, sometimes earlier if a khamsin hit, with its fifty days of hot dry wind, and trickled away into the end of autumn. With it came catlike lassitude and pointless quarrels. But this was more than heat’s opposite. Every twist of stair Avatar descended took him further inside himself, folding him into lethargy.
“What’s the temperature?” Avatar demanded.
“Cold,” said the voice. “Cold enough to shut down your core.”
“And you live in this?”
“It makes no difference to me,” the voice said. “And Saeed Koenig wanted to discourage sightseers.”
His teeth chattered uncontrollably and his feet were a memory beyond feeling. The black T-shirt and combats he’d put on that morning now seemed less of a fashion statement and more of an absentmindedly written suicide note.
“Where now?” Avatar asked, knowing he’d been followed on camera every step of his descent.
“Straight ahead. Use the door . . .”
Still cursing the lack of a flashlight, Avatar inched through the darkness until his outstretched hand found a handle, low down and on the right. He gripped it tight with shaking fingers and everything started to go wrong. Disbelief giving way to panic as he tried to yank free his hand and heard skin rip. What panicked Avatar wasn’t pain but its complete absence.
He was frozen fast to a subzero metal door handle.
“Piss on it,” said the Colonel.
Avatar ignored the comment and tugged again.
“Piss on it,” Colonel Abad ordered crossly, his voice echoing from two places at once. “Go on. Do it now.”
The man meant it, Avatar realized. Using his good hand, Avatar fumbled at the nylon zip of his combats.
“Now piss on the other hand. Get some warmth into those bones.”
Avatar did as Colonel Abad ordered, fastened his fly and stepped through to the Colonel’s quarters, fingers still dripping. He didn’t imagine the Colonel would want to shake hands.
The room was in darkness.
“Lights,” said the Colonel, and a strip lit overhead. What it revealed was an empty space like all the others Avatar had passed through; just smaller, narrower and less high. The walls, which curved on both sides, were blasted back to bare steel and riveted plate. Obviously enough, there were no portholes. Also no furniture, apart from a low metal table, and no cooking equipment. No sign of human habitation and no Colonel.
As jokes went, it was a bad one.
“How are your fingers?” asked a voice behind him. “I’ve just checked my libraries and you may need a skin graft, when we get ashore . . . If we get ashore, ” the voice amended, as if suddenly concerned not to push the bounds of accuracy.
Avatar looked round until he spotted a speaker, attached to the ceiling over in the corner of the room. It was so out-of-date that its grille was cloth, set into a case that looked like it might actually be wood. Soviet-made, from the look of things. “Where are you?”
“I’m the housekeeping routine on the table.”
“You’re what?” Avatar looked across to see a small radio wired into a feed socket on the wall. At first glance the radio looked to be covered with grey suede, but that was just dust fallen from the ceiling or carried in through a ventilation duct on the Arctic wind. Beside it, by themselves, stood an ugly-looking pair of spectacles.
“Yeah,” said the Colonel, “that’s me.” A CCTV camera on the wall swung slowly between Avatar and the table. It looked like nothing so much as a duck shaking its head. “Not what you expected, huh?”
Avatar shook his head in turn. “No, it’s not.” All the same, he felt he needed to clarify the position. “You’re my dad’s boss? Colonel Abad?”
“‘But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. That is, destroyer. Angel of the abyss, he that brings God’s woes upon his enemies . . .’
“Revelation,” added the voice, when Avatar looked blank. “I’m either the true angel of God or his deadly enemy. Unfortunately, no one can decide which, though theologians once wasted a lot of time trying.” The Colonel’s tone made clear what he thought of that.
Revelation? That was the nasrani political endgame, at least Avatar thought it was. He wasn’t big on politics. “You believe this stuff . . .”
“What do you think?”
He thought not.
“Either it was a geek joke,” explained the Colonel, “or they needed to find a framework in a hurry . . . Lash-ups are always easier than starting from scratch, take a look at religion or computer games. My guess is the shapers fed in a couple of terabytes of world myth plus Jung. It didn’t worry them if the deep background was suboptimal. I was only there for the duration of the war. And that was only meant to last a few months.”
“I’m dying of cold,” said Avatar, “and you’re talking shit . . .”
CHAPTER 49
28th October
Mohammed Tewfik Pasha, Khedive of El Iskandryia, rolled over in his huge water bed and opened one eye at the sound of knocking. The bed in which he woke was larger than king-sized, obviously enough, since this was the Imperial Suite.
It was also empty apart from him, and that choice was his. He’d seen how he was watched by the daughters of other guests, their eyes tracking him as he walked down the ornate stairs into the dining room to take his place at the captain’s table. And he knew too that the Van der Bilt girl had dined alone in her cabin every night until he’d taken to eating his supper in public.
El Iskandryia was widely expected to lose its status as a free city. And the shallow end of the gene pool was preparing itself for the Khedive’s new role as romantic but tragic hero (with looks, money and title).
His face was on that week’s Time, but for all the wrong reasons. Cosmo Girl had even produced a poster showing him in shorts and T-shirt, standing barefoot on the deck of a yacht and staring moodily out to sea, or so he’d read. He’d never actually seen the poster and couldn’t remember having been allowed to go barefoot anywhere. Just getting permission from the General to appear out of uniform usually took a tantrum.
Any one of the young mothers who promenaded their children through the upper deck’s Palm Garden each morning would go to bed with him. He’d had sly smiles, batted eyelashes, even a handwritten note folded and slipped into his trouser pocket by a mother of twins. Then there was that Australian woman, her smile anything but innocent, asking him how many slaves he had in his harem . . . And would he like one more?
Yet the only girl he wanted, the one he’d actually invited, had sent her bastard half brother instead.