“Look,” said Kearney, “let’s go to the Lymph Club and have a drink.”
But Tate wouldn’t let himself be won over that easily. He hated the Lymph Club, he said. Anyway he had work to do. “I suppose you could come back with me,” he suggested.
Kearney, permitting himself a smile, agreed that this would be the best thing.
The suite smelled of cats, stale food, Giraffe beer. “Most nights I’m sleeping on the floor,” Tate apologised. “I don’t get time to go home.” The cats were burrowing about in a litter of burger cartons at the base of his desk. Their heads went up when Kearney walked in. The male hurried up to him and fawned about at his feet, but the female only sat where she was, the light making a transparent corona out of her white fur, and waited for him to come to her. Kearney passed his hand over her sharp little head and laughed.
“What a house of prima donnas,” he told her.
Tate looked puzzled. “They’ve missed you,” he said. “But look here.”
He had prolonged the typical useful life of a q-bit by factors of eight and ten. They cleared the rubbish from around the credenza at the back of the room and sat down in front of one of the big flatscreen displays. The female cat prowled about with her tail in the air, or sat on Kearney’s shoulder purring into his ear. Test results evolved one after the other like puffs of synaptic activity in decoherence-free space. “It’s not a quantum computer,” Tate said, after Kearney had congratulated him, “but I think we’re ahead of Kielpinski’s team, as of now. Do you see why I need you here? I don’t want Gordon selling us down the river just when we can ask anybody for anything.” He reached out to tap the keyboard. Kearney stopped him.
“What about the other thing?”
“What other thing?”
“The glitch in the model, whatever it was.”
“Ah,” said Tate, “that. Well, I did what I could with it.” He tapped a couple of keys. A new programme launched. There was a flash of arctic-blue light; the female oriental stiffened on Kearney’s shoulder; then the earlier test result bloomed in front of them as the Beowulf system began faking space. This time the illusion was much slower and clearer. Something gathered itself up behind the code somewhere and shot out across the screen. A million coloured lights, boiling and sweeping about like a shoal of startled fish. The white cat was off Kearney’s shoulder in a second, hurling herself at the display so hard it rocked. For fully half a minute the fractals poured and jerked across the screen. Then everything stopped. The cat, her coat reflecting ice-blue in the wash of the display, danced about for half a minute more, then lost interest and began to wash herself affectedly.
“What do you make of it?” said Tate. “Kearney?”
Kearney sat full of a kind of remote horror, stroking the cat. Just before the burst of fractals, just as the model collapsed, he had seen something else. How was he going to save himself? How was he going to put all this together? Eventually he managed to say:
“It’s probably an artefact, then.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Tate. “There’s no point going any further with it.” He laughed. “Except maybe to amuse the cat.” When Kearney didn’t rise to this, he went off and started setting up another test. After about five minutes he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation:
“Oh, and some maniac was here to see you. He came more than once. His name was Strake.”
“Sprake,” said Kearney.
“That’s what I said.”
Kearney felt as if he had woken in the night, out of luck. He put the white cat down carefully and stared around the suite, wondering how Sprake had found his way here.
“Did he take anything?” He indicated the monitor. “He didn’t see this?”
Tate laughed.
“You’re joking. I wouldn’t let him in. He walked up and down in the area, swinging his arms and haranguing me in a language I didn’t recognise.”
“His bark’s worse than his bite,” Kearney said.
“After the second time, I changed the door code.”
“So I noticed.”
“It was just in case,” said Tate defensively.
Kearney had met Sprake perhaps five years after he stole the dice. The meeting occurred on a crowded commuter train passing through Kilburn on its way to Euston. The walls of the Kilburn cutting were covered with graffiti, explosions of red and purple and green done with deliberation and exuberance, shapes like fireworks going off, shapes bulging like damp tropical fruit, effects of glistening surfaces. Eddie, Daggo, Mince—less names than pictures of names. After you had seen them everything else became oppressive and dull.
The platform at Kilburn was empty but the train stopped there for a long time, as if it was waiting for someone, and eventually a man pushed his way on. He had red hair, pale hard eyes, and an old yellow bruise across the whole of his left cheek. He wore a belted military surplus coat with no jacket or shirt underneath it. Though the doors closed, the train remained still. As soon as he got in, he rolled a cigarette and began smoking it with relish, smiling and nodding around at the other passengers. The men stared at their polished shoes. The women studied the mass of sandy hairs between his pectoral muscles; they exchanged angry glances. Though the doors had closed, the train remained where it was. After a minute or two, he pulled back his cuff to consult his watch, a gesture which revealed the word FUGA tattooed inside his grimy wrist. He grinned, and indicated the graffiti outside.
“They call it ‘ bombing,’ ” he said to one of the women. “We ought to live our lives like that.” Instantly she became involved with her Daily Telegraph.
Sprake nodded, as if she had said something. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and examined the flattened, porous, spittle-stained end of it. “You lot, now,” he said. “Well, you look like a lot of self-satisfied bullies.” They were corporate IT workers and estate agents in their mid twenties, passing themselves off with a designer tie or a padded shoulder as dangerous accountants from the City. “Is that what you want?” He laughed. “We should bomb our names onto the prison walls,” he shouted. They edged away from him, until only Kearney was left.
“As for you,” he said, staring interestedly up at Kearney with his head at an odd, bird-like angle on his neck, and dropping his voice to a barely audible murmur:
“You just have to keep killing, don’t you? Because that’s the way to keep it at arm’s length. Am I right?”
The encounter already had the same edge of unease—the aura, the heightened epileptic foreboding—many events had taken on in the wake of the Shrander, as if that entity cast some special kind of illumination of its own. But at the time Kearney still considered himself as a kind of apprentice or seeker. He still hoped to gain something positive. He was still trying to see his retreat from the Shrander as accompanied by a counter-trajectory—a movement towards it—from which something like a transformational encounter might yet proceed. But the truth was that, by the time he met Sprake, he had been throwing the dice, and making random journeys, and getting nowhere, for what seemed like a lifetime. He felt a flicker of vertigo (or perhaps it was only the train starting up again, to drift, slowly at first then faster and faster, towards Hampstead South) and, thinking he was going to fall, reached a hand out to Sprake’s shoulder to steady himself.
“How do you know?” he said. His own voice sounded hoarse and threatening to him. It sounded disused.
Sprake eyed him for a second, then chuckled round at the occupants of the carriage.