‘The examining physician thought that the loss of brain matter was commensurate with a twelve-gauge shotgun. But they were certain that a small-calibre pistol accounted for the head wound at the time of your examination.’
Cory turned to an earlier report. Santiago, 1947: an unidentified male is found in a hotel room, killed by a self-inflicted shotgun blast through the roof of the mouth.
‘Dear Christ. Since 1947,’ he said, his voice weak with awe. He put a hand to his head. Even now, he found it difficult to accept that the skull cavity was, for the most part, filled with fluid. His conscious mind was a simulation running elsewhere. In his blood? In pieces, in his fucking blood? ‘It’s not fair,’ he continued. ‘The ichor should have rebuilt me. Me.’
Those fields around Atlanta. Those high times. That hope.
‘It did, in a way. I’m sorry.’
‘We were going–’ his breath shuddered—‘to call it Camelot.’
‘I really am.’
‘Saskia, I had a wife. Catherine.’
No, I didn’t.
My humanity exited my head in 1947 with the shotgun pellets. The man I was is no more than a gag reflex.
‘I’m a ghost after all. Dead these sixty years.’
‘Not dead. It’s not the right word.’
‘What do I do, Saskia? How do I checkmate the ichor? How do I step outside myself?’
‘Nobody does.’
‘I can,’ he said, and stepped towards her. ‘What are you waiting for?’
In a motion that matched his, Saskia stepped back.
Boo! he howled, his voice a wind across the steppe of her mind.
She pulled the trigger and the gun’s conducting filaments deployed. Their barbs pierced his neck and he coughed, tried to wrench them away, but the barbs were deep. The electrical charge burned him like venom. Flexing muscles ripped their sinews. His chin snapped to his chest and his arms swooped.
Red words only he could see blazed across the night:
I-Core had to shut down unexpectedly.
This, he screamed inside the copy of his mind, groping for the bounds of his consciousness with the ichor subtracted, this is what’s left of me, you fucks.
With that ember, he bullied himself over the rail. He saw Saskia’s face—blank as the moon—and fell, neck snared in the dead filaments, through the twelve long seconds down, finally alone, and calm. There was no smart matter to cup his body and unfurl great, pale wings in the facsimile of a carrion-eating bird, calling Ee-caw, ee-caw. He was alone. He remembered the grace of his wife in a waltz. He smashed his back on the observation sphere and pinwheeled away from the spire. The coming impact, he guessed, would knock his ghost from his bones and send his essence through the ground. He roared to keep his eyes wide and savoured even the last metres. Then darkness. Into the earth. Into Catherine. Into Camelot.
Saskia tracked his body until it shrank into Alexanderplatz. There would be a man called Eckhard driving onto the square, a local criminal, who would collect the remains in return for cash and no questions. She closed her eyes to dark crescents, rheumy and discoloured. Like Cory, she had passed the threshold of death more than once and collected macabre souvenirs, but she still called it unknown. Mission completed: and in the unconsidered calm after that storm, she felt the absence of direction and the insistence of despair.
She looked down again. Her unfocused eyes mirrored the glowing circuits of the cityscape. She remembered reaching around Jem’s waist to release the magazine from the gun that might have killed her—flicking the bullets into the sink thumb-stroke by thumb-stroke.
The taser seemed to appear and disappear in the winking navigation lamps. She put the barrel to her chest.
So. If she jumped, no true suicide could follow. Luck upon luck would conspire against her death because an event in 2023 must have an older Saskia as its cause. But the taser was still in her hand. Its charge would blow out the last dust of her mind, leaving her body to a woman whom Saskia knew only in reflections. Saskia’s memories would be erased and, with them, her being. The mountains of her life would flatten. Her love for Jem would zero out.
She squeezed the trigger.
‘You are not going to do this,’ said Jem, breathless in Saskia’s ear. The hands of the English woman passed around Saskia and gripped the gun. Saskia released the trigger and let her head rest against Jem’s cheek. The taser dropped over the gantry. It flashed like a tumbling coin, dinged the observation tower, and was gone. Saskia watched Jem’s hands slip away. She turned.
‘I told you not to come, Jem.’
The gantry was empty.
Jem was not here, or anywhere in Berlin. She was in England, of course, and had been since the day after the dinner.
Ego?
Nothing. It could not hear her this close to the pinnacle. There was too much interference.
Saskia stared at the gantry. Her hair blew across her face. She pushed it away and slipped her stump into her back pocket. Then she stepped through the tower door, alone with her visions.
Chapter Forty
Some days later
When Saskia and the clerk reached the basement, he passed her paperwork to a colleague. ‘Please remember, Frau Müller,’ he continued, ‘that the box requires two keys to unlock it. I have the master key and you have the box key. Yours has no duplicate.’ He pushed through a set of doors. ‘If you lose it, you will be charged for the services of a locksmith to replace the lock. Your rental agreement covers an initial ten-year period. Should you fail to pay rent after this period, the contents of the box will be given to the government. There can be no exceptions.’
The clerk waited for a uniformed guard to open the door of the outer vault. The clerk was clearly nervous. Perhaps something about Saskia disturbed him.
‘Frau Müller,’ he said, adopting a more friendly tone, ‘would you like me to get you a glass of water? You seem rather…’
She shook her head.
The clerk stared at her for a moment longer.
‘Finally, then, please remember that you are not permitted to store illegal or dangerous material in the box.’
He left her in a room with a low ceiling and a single table. On the table was a safe deposit box. Saskia lay her rucksack alongside it and withdrew a polypropylene biohazard container. She put this in the box. Then she took a cinerary urn and placed it next to the container. On the urn was a letter: ‘For J’.
She eased the daffodil from her buttonhole and laid it on top.
This city, late in the day, felt foreign for the first time. Above her, the clouds were feathers around the setting sun. The buildings made labyrinths. Airborne data were threads that she might have gathered on another idle evening, but not this one. The wind’s edge dried her lips. Snow fell, as ever. Her steps were certain. A hatted green man appeared. Saskia crossed the road. Headlights greyed the tails of her jacket. On a fleeting thought, she looked at a driver, ready to run, but he was nobody.
She arrived at Tempelhoff airport half an hour later.
Saskia did not wish to remove her lensless glasses or touch the stiff peak of her cap, though she was sweating, steaming, tickled by her itch for Jem. The arrivals board told her that Jem’s flight had been delayed. With a targeted thought, Saskia interrogated a server in Luton and waited for the answers to stack, byte by stolen byte, in a lattice before her mind’s eye. There had been a technical problem on board the flight. Take-off and landing slots had been reordered and the crew changed. She turned from the information and used the constant pain of her hunger to refocus on her physical self, to exorcise the empty virtual.