With building dread, Cory unfurled his newspaper, Jennifer’s edition of one day hence, and scanned the first page. He let his automata process the text in parallel. His eyes widened.
Harkes, you beat me.
There was a short article that referred to Star Dust by name. The aircraft, he read, would be reported missing, presumed crashed. Her last transmission would be sent at 2:41 p.m. Buenos Aires time during final descent. Cory re-read the article. He was desperate to wring more information from it, but there was none. What was the transmission?
Fuck.
The aircraft banked and he looked onto busy dockland. He felt nauseous. Paul Simpson tapped his shoulder. Cory turned to see him take the cigarette from his mouth and wipe his forehead with theatrical relief.
A late lunch was served within minutes. Cory, a soldier, did not let events diminish his appetite. Indeed, anticipation heightened it considerably. He had the crème de volaille to start. It came on a simple, elegant plate with a spoon that, apart from being unusually heavy, was no different to what one could expect from a good restaurant. As Cory ate, he worked through the timings reported by the newspaper. He had less than three hours until the loss of radio contact and, without doubt, the aircraft itself. How? The newspaper claimed that a transmission had been received on schedule prior to landing in Santiago. Might the oxygen cylinders explode? But Cory had seen First Officer Cook check them in the moments before take-off. Ultimately, Cory thought, the disastrous failure could take any form: an electric short, bird strike, or the snapping of a vital control cable.
All he knew for certain was the time. In less than three hours, he had to leave the aircraft. How? The smart matter was at his side: a simple cane. Some agents were dextrous enough in their control of smart matter to cast rudimentary wings or angled shapes that could slow their descent when falling through air. Cory was not one of them—not yet. His control of the smart matter was conscious, not automatic, and rudimentary, not nuanced. Through dumb luck he might conjure a shape that could slow his descent, but he did not know if he would have the strength to hold onto it.
By the time his Tournedos chasseur arrived with new peas and mashed potatoes, Cory had convinced himself that one or more parachutes had to be somewhere on board this aircraft. Not enough for the passengers. Perhaps not even enough for the crew. The parachute would be part of the emergency provisions, as well as fire extinguishers, medical equipment, and so on. He looked behind him. The rest of the passengers were eating. Harald Pagh noticed him and waved a fork. Cory smiled. He looked deeper into the tail section and saw the bulkhead that marked the Elsan toilet. There was no room for emergency equipment back there. It had to be in the cockpit.
Unless there was none, and Cory was fooling himself.
‘I can recommend the Bourgogne rouge,’ said Miss Evans, offering Cory a tumbler. She smiled as Cory nodded his approval.
The newspaper suggested a solution to one mystery, at least. Given that Harkes had the advantage of full archive data for 1947, he could have identified ‘the Englishman’ from the same publication that Cory held. From there, it would be a short step to locate the murdered prostitute. Easy to let slip the details of his predicament, including Cory’s name, and easier still to let her find a ticket. But working backwards from the cause to its effect… Cory shook his head. He could not reach a mental state where this made sense. How can you decide to load a gun if you already know that it will fire, and where? In what sense is that a decision? Cory suffered under that thought—on the verge of insight but never grasped—as he finished his meal with apple pie, coffee, and cheese and biscuits.
‘Is everything acceptable, my friend?’ called Paul Simpson.
‘Wonderful.’
Paul Simpson was clean-shaven. Cory fought against the sudden recall of his own uncle’s dead visage, dolled-up in his casket, shaved of his beard by the mortician, and with a kicking
vertigo
nausea in his stomach he knew that Simpson was dead, as dead as Lisandro and Paloma and—he swallowed—soon every passenger and crew member on board this aircraft.
The sensation of entrapment made him want to burst. He fumbled for his seat belt but did not open the clasp. Instead, he gripped it. He pictured his fear as a horse that he could rein, but the mount changed into a snorting nightmare: he had succumbed to the dead, clockwork past. His struggles to remain outside the system had failed. He was a zombie like them.
No. I can still make it out of here.
Abruptly, Miss Evans put her hand on his shoulder. He looked at her red fingernails and could not suppress the image of her amputated hand. He bit his cuff and blocked his rising lunch.
Star Girl, he thought.
Paloma: a ghost under neon light.
No. I am the Ghost.
Cory choked and felt a new thickness in his throat. His eyes ached and ran wet.
I am the fucking Ghost.
Miss Evans: dead. Mr Simpson, King’s messenger: dead. And those behind him too. And Lisandro, harmless boy. Puppets, all of them, limbs strung by time—a puppet itself, an infinite regression of meaningless forces—and here was Cory, tangled.
Paloma: kicking.
I am the–
‘No’, came a voice. It sounded like Jennifer. ‘You are a necrophile. How does that feel, soldier?’
The boy from Georgia had never learned the word. His language-processing automata set to work on it.
Necrophile: A lover of death.
Paloma.
He thought of the bench in the courtyard. That moment still existed. It could be recovered. It was real in at least one sense. He watched his memory of Jennifer’s lips. They moved, but no sound issued. He no longer needed to hear.
‘Miss Evans, I’m very sorry.’
‘Not at all,’ she said, squeezing his shoulder again. ‘Can I get you anything? More coffee? Perhaps you’d like to challenge Mr Simpson to a game of chess?’
Cory laughed. Then he stopped, hoping this created the impression that something had just occurred to him.
‘I once heard of a man who became so claustrophobic on a flight between Paris and Berlin that he forced the captain to give him a parachute. In the event, they let him jump out somewhere in the vicinity of Amsterdam.’
He laughed again. Miss Evans crinkled her eyes and smiled. It was clear to Cory that she found his comment absurd, even worrying, but she was professional enough to come back with a throwaway remark.
‘Well, nobody has ever asked to use ours. After all,’ she said, moving towards the tail, ‘it is rather chilly on the cordillera.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Cory waited until they were well above the Andes and oxygen masks had been fastened. His stank of rubber. He thought about his plan and wondered whether the timing provided by the journalist in the newspaper article was accurate. There was a caesium-beam oscillator in his spine that helped coordinate nanoparticle activity, but he had asked Miss Evans to set his pocket watch by that of the navigator, which was a service BSAA advertised. He could be more confident that this clockwork timepiece, and its error, better reflected the chronometer of the Chilean ground controller who would report the loss of Star Dust. He wanted to bail out west of the mountains. The closer to Santiago the better. Buenos Aires would be too hot because of the crash of Star Dust and his implied role in it. His first problem was gaining access to the cockpit. He needed a pretext.