In the margin an unknown hand had written on the photocopy:
L-
Maybe you’re right.
M
I don’t know how long I stood there reading that. I felt like an island of stone with time flowing around me. Speak to me, I said to my mind.
No answer.
20
‘We have brought you,’ they said, ‘a map of the country;
Here is the line that runs to the vats,
This patch of green on the left is the wood,
We’ve pencilled an arrow to point out the bay.
No thank you, no tea; why look at the clock.
Keep it? Of course, it goes with our love.’
I left Katya a note, put a fresh filter in my breather, a switchblade and the stunner in my pocket (I didn’t wire myself for bio because it was more likely to get stolen than used), took the lift up to the roof, and waited quite a long time until an eastbound wirecar clattered in. The only other passengers were a young Euroforces corporal quietly being sick in a corner and three heavyset women with headscarves and Corporation Sanitation badges reading Russian newsfaxes. The wirecar shook and rattled through the dark; the night sky crouched over London like an animal over its prey: my kind of time.
At King’s Cross I took the lift down to the Class A walkway but when I got to the Maze exit it was for red passes only so I had to go down to street level where the smells of frying and vomit mingled with that other smell, feral and melancholy, of the small hours in places where whores and tattoo artists ply their trades and the neon lights always spell out the same things in different letters.
As I made my careful way past an interesting variety of threats and offers I found myself wondering why I’d been so ready to believe Lowell Sixe. I told myself it was the authentic-looking handwriting of the notebook entries that convinced me; I’d seen that writing reproduced in articles and books about my mother, and why would he show me photocopies of real notebook pages and then lie about the rest of it? On the other hand I was often prone to stupid decisions and this expedition might well be another of them.
Full of fear and doubt I arrived at 37 The Maze which was next door to a shop called First Strike, whose window displayed flick-knives, daggers, death stars, handcuffs, knuckledusters, coshes, flails, ball-maces, chemical sprays, and a magazine called DO IT TO THEM. Piccadilly Relief was the top name on the doorway intercom, over Renée, Hildegarde, and Eros Productions. When I pushed the button a raspy male voice said, ‘What?’
‘Charles Harris gave me your card.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘You might know him by another name.’
‘And I might not.’
‘My name is Fremder Gorn.’
‘How do you do.’
‘Can I come up?’
‘Why?’
‘Does the name Marie Demska mean anything to you?’
‘Should it?’
‘I don’t know. Charles Harris whose real name is something else is dead. He was trying to tell me something when they zapped him. He stuck this card in my hand as he died.’
The buzzer sounded and I opened the door and went up a carpeted stairway that seemed impregnated with vomit dating from the Roman occupation. As I neared the top I could smell disinfectant, incense, slammo, toadsy, and the composite sickly-sweet odour of commercial consolation.
When I knocked on the door it was opened by a bearded man about seven feet tall and proportionately broad and thick. He was wearing a red-and-black striped bustier, black silk knickers, a black suspender belt, black fishnet stockings, and a pair of worn and dirty Hermès trainers. On his left upper arm a green-and-red dragon was tattooed: under it the word MOTHER. Behind him was a deserted bar with blue neon lights and the usual glittering array of mirrored bottles; elsewhere in the shadowy room were dim lamps with beaded shades, a lot of red wallpaper with pink flocking, three sagging couches with greasy-glistening cushions, a jukebox that stood like an illuminated shrine to silence, slow time, and despair, some balding wine-coloured velvet drapes with tarnished gold fringes, and at the back a beaded curtain featuring a bird on a flowering branch. No one else was in the room.
‘Convince me that you’re Fremder Gorn,’ said the bearded man.
I showed him my ID.
‘Looks real.’ He frisked me carefully, then he picked me up and turned me upside down so that the switchblade, the stunner, and everything else fell out of my pockets. He put me down, opened Sixe’s wallet, and looked at his ID. ‘This Charles Harris, did he tell you who he was?’
‘Lowell Sixe.’
‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.’ He went through the beaded curtain and the door behind it. He returned in less than a minute. ‘Ever know anybody named Achilles?’
‘Achilles was the tortoise who lived in the ecodome garden at The Cauldron when I was there.’
‘OK,’ said the bearded charmer, ‘until proved otherwise you’re Fremder Gorn.’ He gave back the contents of my pockets.
‘Hello, Fremder,’ said the woman who now came through the beaded curtain. She was tall and elegant, somewhere between fifty and sixty, one of those beauties who don’t change their hairstyle when they stop being young; she wore it long and straight with a fringe. She was in a black kimono and she moved with a kind of grace that made me ready to believe whatever she might be going to say. ‘I’m Marie Demska,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t remember me — the last time you saw me I was wearing a surgical mask. I did your implant when you qualified for flicker drive in 2044.’ Her voice was husky and her English had the shapely vowels and alien rs of the East European. To the bearded one she said, ‘Zizi, could we have some coffee?’
We sat on one of the sagging couches and she took my hand. ‘Poor Lowell Sixe!’ She shook her head sadly.
The way she was holding my hand made me a little nervous. ‘Hang on — ’ I said, ‘so far all you are to me is a name on a card. For all I know you’re Thinksec or Top Exec or some other kind of big trouble. What are you? And from where? What am I to you and what are you to me?’
‘I’m a neurosurgeon at Athena Parthenogen and I used to know Ulrike Brandt who was a friend of your mother’s. At the time of Helen Gorn’s breakdown I was with Corporation Neurotech. I was the one who downloaded Lowell Sixe and helped him escape.’
‘Why’d they kill him after all these years?’
‘He was still on the termination list and Top Exec doesn’t like loose ends.’
‘Why did he give me your name, I wonder?’
‘Everybody has a part in many overlapping stories and it isn’t always clear which one is particularly your story — probably you’ve thought of that sometimes, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think Lowell must have come to a time when he felt that you should have his part and my part of your story — or your part of our stories, depending on how you like to look at it. On the other hand, perhaps you don’t want to look at it at all; not everyone does.’
‘I do.’
‘I’ll tell you something you may find interesting: the standard oscillator implant is a B18 which is what they were using when you had yours done in 2044. They’d send them down to theatre from the lab and we’d bung them into the brains of all the names on our list. On the day you had yours fitted everything was as usual except that your name was highlighted with a yellow marker and a note next to it said: “Ring Dr Stiggs.” He was the Lab Supervisor.’