“Will you be aboard the VSTOL?”
“No.I need to stay here and brief Rafiq on what Carne told you.”
She went to say something else, then cut the connection. Anwar stared for a while at the empty projected rectangle on the wall. His mask, now he was alone, collapsed.
Arden Bierce replayed Anwar’s report and started making notes. Like Anwar, she worked quietly and reflectively, and worked best on her own.
She hadn’t looked at Anwar’s earlier files, when he was Rashad Khan, for some time. She did now. Most of them she already knew well, but she found something she’d almost forgotten, tucked away in a subfile: The Story of Arnold the Wart. It was Anwar’s (then Rashad’s) entry for a short story competition at his school, written at the age of twelve.
Hubert had a large wart on his head. It was growing larger every day. Hubert grew attached to it, in every sense of the word, and after living with it for a while he decided to give it a name. He called it Arnold.
Hubert and Arnold went through life comfortably together, but Arnold grew bigger and bigger. Eventually he got so big that Hubert became a wart on Arnold, and Arnold’s friends kept saying to him “Arnold, why don’t you cut off that ugly wart?” So he did.
Rashad’s teachers told him that the Arnold story was cold and careless and brutal. It needed more work, particularly on Arnold’s and Hubert’s relationship to each other and their social interaction with their peer groups. Rashad went away and thought about it, then came back with a new ending.
...Arnold’s friends kept saying to him “Arnold, why don’t you cut off that ugly wart?” So he did, and they both died.
Not only did the story not win the competition, but it led—after a series of worried meetings with educational psychologists—to the school principal asking for a conference with Rashad’s parents. The outcome was inconclusive.
The principal referred to Rashad’s well-known skill with immersion holgrams. Indeed, Rashad had many impressive qualities, but (his parents sensed the “but” coming) the holograms often showed a kind of quiet disrespect for authority figures. They also showed a compulsive curiosity about how things worked and what was hidden inside them—the tension between containers and contents, surface and substance. None of these were in themselves bad things, but they gave him a quality of apartness. A quality further emphasised by the Arnold story. There wasn’t just a quietly cruel humour hiding in there, there was a private dread of relationships and commitment: the idea that getting close to another person could kill you.
She pondered Anwar’s exact, word-for-word report on his interrogation of Richard Carne, and remembered Annihilate. I used that word myself, in the villa. Asika was annihilated, and so was Levin. Both of them, long gone.
And she remembered what she’d been about to ask him before she’d cut the connection: would he really have done those things to Carne? She knew what he’d told Olivia when she asked the same thing—he’d included a verbatim report on that conversation, too—and knew that if she, Arden, was to ask him, he’d simply have referred her to that answer. She’d have to settle for that. But she remembered his outburst just now, and thought, What is this mission doing to him?
Dissolution. Corrosion. Collapse.
Anwar snapped his wristcom shut. The empty projected rectangle faded from the wall. Something was going to happen, here, live and in public, in two weeks. Whatever they would send,it wouldn’t be some Meat slab. It wouldn’t be just another out matched opponent. It would be whatever killed Levin and Asika. Only about thirty people in the world knew what he was, and eighteen of them were others like him. Sixteen now. How can they make things that kill Consultants? Who are they? How can Rafiq not know about them? Am I out of my league? Is Rafiq out of his?
For the first time he actually feared for his own life, never mind hers. No, he did mind hers. Olivia was offensive, but this was his mission. Very offensive, but this was still his mission. Monumentally offensive, so that he could almost imagine killing her himself, but he wouldn’t let them kill her, whoever they were. Because of what she stood for. Bigots multiplied everywhere and made the world ugly. Only a few people stood for things which made it less ugly: Rafiq, certainly, and maybe her, at least publicly, no matter how offensive she was privately.
So this was still his mission. The one he was made for. But his lifelong comfort zone was gradually, detail by detail, collapsing.
A VSTOL landed on the pad at the end of the Pier. For the first time, Anwar thought, a VSTOL comes without Arden. Another detail, changed. It contained people from UN Intelligence. Also some doctors, in case any one was watching. Carne’s body was stretchered aboard, an IV bag attached to his arm, busily and uselessly pumping fluid into a dead man.
Anwar watched the VSTOL lift off silently and flicker into the dusk, then he returned to his suite. He walked out onto the balcony, and for the second time saw the sun setting over the Cathedral complex. September was about to become October, with the summit only two weeks away. He cried out for Asika, and for his friend Levin.
A floor above, Olivia heard him. She too was crying, but silently, and for a reason of her own. It was a quite specific reason, almost a detail, but if she told Anwar now it would change everything. She would tell him after the summit, if they were both alive then.
SIX: SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2060
1
On the last day of September, the weather over southern England was pleasant. It was a warm autumn evening in Brighton when Anwar cried out over the deaths of Asika and Levin; and also in Rochester, as an Evensong service began in the Cathedral.
For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter.
He shall defend thee under his wings,
And thou shalt be safe…
The congregation was small, and mostly elderly. The service took place in the Nave, the part of the Cathedral where the West Door opened out onto College Yard.
The Nave was divided from the rest of the Cathedral by the organ, and to either side of it by the Pilgrim Steps and the stairs to the Crypt. A small altar stood in front of the organ. This divison was known as the Crossing.
Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night…
For he shall give his angels charge over thee,
To keep thee in all thy ways.
There was traffic noise outside. Rochester had become down at heel now that the southeast coast and Thames Estuary areas had seen massive new developments. The main road from the new bridges over the River Medway ran parallel to the old High Street, taking traffic past Rochester on the way to and from the new retail centres and business parks, some of them financed by the New Anglicans. They were places as alien to, and as different from, an old conventional town like Rochester as the New Anglicans were to the Old Anglicans. Rochester was dwarfed by them, and left in their wake.
There were only seven people in the choir, and less than fifty in the congregation. The Nave had enough space for many more, but they were almost huddled together in a few pews close to the front. The service was conducted by Michael Taber, Dean of the Cathedral. The Bishop of Rochester was not present.