Michaelmas turned his head stiffly towards her. Clementine’s mouth was pursed in dismay. Her eyes developed a sheen of grief. “Oh, quel dommage! Laurent, you must have known him, not so?”
His throat working convulsively, Michaelmas asked Domino for data on her.
“What you’d expect.” The answer was a little slow. “Pulse up, respiration up. It’s a little difficult to be precise. You’re rather isolated up there right now and I’m having to do a lot of switching to follow your terminal. I’m also getting some echo from all the rock around you; it’s metallic.”
Michaelmas glanced out the window. They were on the highway, skimming closely by a drill-marked and blasted mountain shoulder on one side and an increasingly disquieting drop-off on the other. Veils of snow powder, whisked from the roadside, bannered behind them in the wind of their passage. The city lay below, popping in and out of view as the car followed the serpentine road. Somewhere down there was the better part of Domino’s actual present location, generally except for whatever might be flitting overhead in some chance satellite.
The spoken bulletin came to an end. It had not been very long. Clementine sat forward, her expression anxious. “Laurent?”
“I knew him,” Michaelmas said gently. “I regret you never met him. I have lost a friend.” And I am alone now, among the Campions. “I have lost a friend,” he said again, to apologize to Horse for having patronized him.
She touched his knee. “I am sorry you are so hurt.”
He found himself unable to resist putting his hand over hers for a moment. It was a gesture unused for many years between them, he began to think, and then caught himself. “Thank you, Madame Gervaise,” he said, and each of them withdrew a little, sitting silently in the back of the car.
As they approached the sanatorium gate, they drove past many cars parked beside the highway, tight against the rock. There were people with news equipment walking in the road, and the car had to pull around them. Some shouted; others ignored them. At the gate, there was the usual knot of gesticulants who had failed to produce convincing press credentials.
There was a coterie of warders—a gloved private gatekeeper in a blue uniform with the sanatorium crest, plus a sturdy middle-aged plainclothesman in a sensible vested suit and a greatcoat and a velour hat, and a bright young fellow in a sportcoat and topper whom Michaelmas recognized as a minor UNAC press staff man. The UNAC man looked inside the car, recognized Michaelmas, and flashed an okay sign with his thumb and forefinger. The Swiss policeman nodded to the gatekeeper, who pushed the electric button which made the wrought iron gates fold back briefly behind their brick posts. Leaving outcries behind, the Citroën jumped forward and drove through.
Michaelmas said to Domino: “I wonder if time-travelling cultures are playing with us. I wonder if they process our history for entertainment values. It wouldn’t take much: an assassination in place of exile, revolution instead of election—that sort of augmentation would yield packageable drama. Chances are, it wouldn’t crucially alter the timeline. Or perhaps it might, a little. One might awaken beside a lean young stud instead of the pudgy father of one’s whining child. There’d be a huge titillated audience. And the sets and actors are free. A producer’s dream. No union contracts.”
“Michaelmas, someone in your position oughtn’t divert himself with paranoias.”
“But oughtn’t a fish study water?”
A little way up, there was a jammed asphalt parking lot beside a gently sloping windblown meadow in which helicopters were standing and in which excess vehicles had broken the cold grass in the sod. The Citroën found a place among the other cars and the broadcast trucks. Up the slope was the sanatorium, very much constructed of bright metal and of polarizable windows, the whole of the design taking a sharply pitched snow-shedding silhouette. Sunlight stormed back from its glitter as if it were a wedge pried into Heaven.
They got out and Clementine Gervaise looked around. “It can be very peaceful here,” she remarked before waving towards their crew truck. People in white coveralls and smocks with her organization’s pocket patch came hurrying. She merged with them, pointing, gesturing, tilting her head to listen, shaking her head, nodding, tapping her forefinger on a proffered clipboard sheet. In another moment, some of them were eddying back towards the equipment freighter and others were trotting up the sanatorium steps, passing and encountering other crews in similar but different jumpsuits. From somewhere up there, a cry of rage and deprivation was followed by a fifty-five-millimetre lens bouncing slowly down the steps.
“Ten-twenty local,” Domino said.
“Thank you,” Michaelmas replied, watching Clementine. “How are your links now?”
“Excellent. What would you expect, with all this gear up here and with elevated horizon-lines?”
“Yes, of course,” Michaelmas said absently. “Have you checked the maintenance records on Horse’s machine?”
“Yes.”
“Have you compared them to all maintenance records on all other machines of the same model?”
“Yes.”
“Have you cross-referenced all critical malfunction data for the type?”
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. If you’re asking was it an accident, my answer is it shouldn’t have happened. But that doesn’t exclude freak possibilities such as one-of-a-kind failure in a pump diaphragm, or even some kind of anomalous resistance across a circuit. I’m currently running back through all parts suppliers and sub-assembly manufacturers, looking for things like unannounced re-designs, high reject rates at final inspection stages, and so forth. It’ll be a while. And other stones are waiting to be turned.” Clementine Gervaise had entered the awareness of the comm terminal’s sensors. “Here comes one.”
“Let’s concentrate on this Norwood thing for now,” Michaelmas said.
“Of course, Laurent,” Clementine said softly. “The crew is briefed and the equipment is manned.”
Michaelmas’s mouth twitched. “Yes… yes, of course they are. I was watching you.”
“You like my style? Come—let us go in.” She put her arm through his and they went up the steps.
There was another credential verification just beyond the smoked-glass front doors. Another junior UNAC aide was checking names against a list. It was a scene of polite crowding as bodies filed in behind Michaelmas and Clementine.
Douglas Campion was just ahead of them, talking to the aide. Michaelmas prepared to speak to him, but Campion was preoccupied. Michaelmas studied him raptly. The press aide was saying:
“Mr Campion, your crew is in place on the photo balcony. We have you listed for a back-up seat towards the rear of the main auditorium. Now, in view of the unfortunate—”
“Right,” Campion said. “You going to give me Watson’s seat and microphone time?”
“Yes, sir. And please let me express—”
“Thanks. What’s the sea location?”
There was nothing actually nasty about him, Michaelmas decided sadly. One could assume there was regret, grief, or almost anything else you cared to attribute to him, kept somewhere within him under the heat shield.
He watched Campion move away across the foyer towards the auditorium’s rear doors, and then he and Clementine were stepping forward.
The aide smiled as if he’d been born ten seconds ago. “Nice to see you, Mr Michaelmas, Miz Gervaise,” he said.