Joe Goonwardeene had become enthusiastic about the possibilities of tachyon detection, and was busy hustling various departments of SynBioTech for money and resources for a project to develop synthetic mutated rhodopsin. His pitch was that even the smallest hint about the future could be of immense value to the company, giving it an edge on its competitors in anticipating promising new ideas. Geena, meanwhile, was already informally observing and recording Joe’s efforts with fascinated delight. She’d just about finished her thesis, and was casting about for funding for postdoctoral work on how Joe was going about getting his project funded. And, of course, she was keeping a careful record of her own activities, for possible future use.
‘It’ll take reflexivity to a whole new level!’ she’d said. ‘The political economy of the promise of the political economy of the promise of promise!’
Hugh had bought glasses with his first week’s wages, and sometimes he shared a virtual space with Hope and Maya and Geena. Sometimes he talked one-to-one with Joe or with Geena, long conversations in the evening – some, like last night, with Geena, continuing long after Hope had gone to bed. Hope wasn’t more than slightly jealous. Hugh and Geena, and Joe, shared an experience she was glad she didn’t, and talking about it, or indeed about anything, with someone else who’d been through it seemed to help Hugh get to sleep and not wake up shuddering and shouting in the night.
Hope didn’t regret her decision to take the fix. There were two reasons why she had taken it. One was that, just after her arrest, she had said she would. She hadn’t made any conditions, but it had felt like a bargain: if I get off, if we all get out of this, then I’ll take the fix. It had not felt like a bargain with the state, whose forces were at that moment holding her down and telling her her rights. She would have had no compunction about breaking a promise to them. No. It had felt like a bargain with God. Hope didn’t believe in God, not even in the distant, impersonal, mathematical, indifferent God that Nigel spoke of, but she wouldn’t have felt right going back on a bargain with him just because he didn’t exist. It would have felt like cheating.
There was another reason why, when she’d seen Hugh walking in, and seen Nick leaping into his arms and proving him real, she’d kept her side of the bargain without a moment of hesitation. It was because it hadn’t felt, at that moment, that she’d been finally worn down and defeated. It had felt like a victory. More than that, it had felt like revenge. A revenge on all those who had worn her down and arrested her and tortured her husband and threatened to take her children away.
It had felt like that because she knew the gene was real, and that the bright land was real too; because, in the culvert, she had seen what Hugh and Nick were telling her they saw. She’d seen it faintly, a ghost image, like a double exposure, beyond the water and the wall that she saw too. Maybe that faint refraction was all of the bright land that those without the gene could see. Perhaps those with the gene could do more than see it, in some places or circumstances: they could actually go there. They could even go there and come back, at some cost in lost time as the old tales told, and as Nigel (Hope secretly thought) had done. If any of this was true, she knew that the world contained things stranger even than tachyons. She didn’t care. She knew, or at least believed with more surety, that the gene was real and that the fix would neutralise it, and not only did she not care, she was glad. Let it go, let them take it, let them edit it out of the genome.
These people didn’t deserve to know the future.
At that moment, Hugh, too, was having a tea break. He was a long way off, on a new site up at the north of the island, on the headland of Ness. From where he sat, in the lee of a half-dismantled tower, he could see the lighthouse at the very tip of the island, and on either side the sea, grey and white under the darkening sky. Soon the lighthouse would again be the tallest structure on Lewis, though far older and more obsolete than the wind-farm towers.
He sipped hot black tea from a mug and munched the first of the day’s sandwiches, idly scanned the news scrolling on his pad, and without thinking much about it exchanged remarks with the men who sat beside him. He was slightly distracted from all that by the scene straight in front of him, where a gang working for a different contractor was taking no break at all and wasting no time in winding cable out of the conduits in the ground, in lifting reels of the stuff from the winch as one after another the reels filled up, and rolling them to a long low-loading lorry and sticking them along the scaffolding poles that held them in place like spindles, gradually building up to great long cylinders of high-tension cable. The chug of the generator that powered the winch came and went with the freshening breeze. The gang were all of Asian appearance, good old local Stornoway Pakistanis, their accents indistinguishable from his own, and often enough their Gaelic better. He felt a trace of discomfort just from sitting here, watching their unstinting toil. There was something privileged, almost colonial, about the contrast of their work and his rest, while he sat sipping tea from the same subcontinent as their ancestors had come from, and (no doubt) whose current owners the cargo they were loading was ultimately destined to enrich.
There was more than that to his unease. Ever since that moment the first day after their arrival, on the hill above the old school overlooking the bay, he’d felt the same disquiet whenever he’d chanced upon a similar scene. The coiled cable, the generator. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. It had troubled Nick too, Hugh recalled. ‘Don’t like it. Dark.’ The boy had said the same, with more obvious justification, a moment before they’d gone into the culvert.
Hugh pushed that memory away. He didn’t want to think about it. A few days after his release, a gang of men had gone up the hill behind the house, carrying crowbars and lugging heavy packs. An hour or two later, a series of dull thuds had echoed among the hills, and shortly afterwards the men came down. His father had had a word with them, and he’d told Hugh that they had done a job he’d phoned in to urge the company to do: to dynamite and block up the entrance to the old, unfinished culvert, with its deep and dangerous pool at the far end.
‘Should have done it years ago,’ Nigel had said. ‘That time you and the boys went in it.’
‘I’m not sorry you didn’t,’ Hugh had said. ‘And I’m not sure you are, either.’
Nigel had looked at him, grinned, almost winked, and then walked away. It was the closest either of them had come to mentioning anything that had happened the night after Hugh’s arrest. The deeper lines that Hugh had noticed in Nigel’s face, that morning in the police station, hadn’t gone away. Hugh had his suspicions about how the air pistol had got into Nigel’s safe, but Nigel had volunteered nothing, and Hugh hadn’t asked. It wasn’t something you talked about.
But that was manners, or reticence. It wasn’t like some other things you didn’t mention. Last night, when he’d been speaking to Geena, their conversation had raised and dropped the topic that each of them did and didn’t want to talk about, and had ranged off on different matters but always circled back. It was like picking a scab, they agreed; but they also agreed that underneath it all, the scar was healing. In the course of one of these conversational cometary orbits, going far out and then coming back, Geena had touched on the Naxals, and Hugh had said – because it was one of those things that everyone seemed to know and never talk about – ‘The Naxals? What the fuck are they about, anyway?’