‘Although it might just be a story,’ Rosa said. ‘You know how it is in the trade. Someone tells you a story that a friend of a friend heard from someone they met in a pub…’
And now Chloe was saying goodbye to Gail Ann for the second time — the first had been when they’d parted at the Burger King after Sandra Hamilton had caught up with them — and trying to explain why she had to do what she was going to do without giving too much away. Not because she didn’t trust her friend, but because she didn’t know who might be listening in at Gail Ann’s end.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Gail Ann said. ‘One of Ada Morange’s lawyers emailed a phone number I can call if I get into trouble with the police.’
‘A freebie from my sponsor,’ Chloe said. ‘I’m told it doesn’t have an expiry date. If you don’t need it for this thing we fell into, you can use it later.’
‘Actually,’ Gail Ann said, ‘I’ve just had an off-the-record chat, so-called, with this very intense chief inspector who came to my flat this morning.’
‘Adam Nevers,’ Chloe said, with a feeling of falling.
‘He told me you were old acquaintances.’
‘I bet. Did he threaten you? If he did, call that number.’
Gail Ann said, ‘Oh, he wasn’t really interested in me. He told me that he knows where you are, and what you’re planning to do.’
‘Did he go into details? No, don’t tell me,’ Chloe said. ‘I don’t want to have to lie about it.’
‘He wouldn’t tell me. He did say that you were putting yourself and the Chauhans in direct danger. And that you were putting national security at risk. I guess he’s pissed off because he can’t reach out to you.’
‘He just did. I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess.’
‘Oh, a person could get a taste for this kind of front-line gonzo journalism. And Chief Inspector Nevers isn’t half as fearsome as some of the creatures I’ve run into during London Fashion Week. I suppose I should wish you bon voyage.’
‘We’re going to find something. Something wonderful.’
‘I hope so. I need a good capper for my story. Take care, sweetie.’
‘You too,’ Chloe said, and prised out the phone’s card and snapped it in two, dropped the fragments in the long grass, and walked up through the trees towards the farmhouse.
It was her last full day on Earth. She seemed to be saying goodbye to everything.
Over the past week, she and Fahad and Rana had been subjected to batteries of tests that attempted to quantify the influence of Ugly Chicken. EEG, MEG, a trip to the hospital in Caen, where they’d put on plastic helmets and been fed into the rumbling, beeping doughnut of a scanner that produced high-resolution atlases of the neurological highways in their brains. There’d also been visual-perception tests, a session with a psychologist who’d questioned Chloe about her childhood and showed her those inkblot patterns. An extrasensory perception test where she had to guess whether the symbols on a series of playing cards were circles, squares, crosses, wave lines or stars; a questionnaire in which she had to agree or disagree with a long series of statements.
I have to shut my mouth when I am in trouble.
Evil spirits possess me at times.
The tests showed that both Fahad and Rana exhibited anomalous patterns of brain activity, presumably due to the influence of Ugly Chicken. Odd spikes in the visual dorsal stream and between the temporal lobe and Broca’s area, the region responsible for language processing and control of speech; periodic slow waves across the entire cerebral cortex, too, the kind normally associated with deep sleep. Chloe was relieved to learn that she hadn’t been affected. At least, not in any way that the scientists could detect.
Fahad was scornful. He said that he didn’t need a bunch of machines to tell him that he and his sister had been chosen by the eidolon, said that it would communicate with them and no one else. He had endured the tests with thinly stretched patience. He wanted to prove himself but was wary of the scientists, seemed to think that they were trying to trick him, find an excuse that Ada Morange could use to row back on the deal they’d made.
Rana basked in the attention, ordering the scientists about, explaining what they were doing wrong, borrowing bits and pieces of equipment to do her own tests on Chloe and Fahad. She especially liked a little camera linked by a fibre-optic cable to a flatscreen. Liked to point it at her eye and study the close-up on the screen. Liked to point it at her brother’s eye, at Chloe’s. Chloe asked her if she was looking for Ugly Chicken; Rana laughed and said he didn’t live in people’s heads.
‘Is he here now?’
‘He’s always here,’ Rana said, folding her fingers around the bracelet on her wrist.
‘I mean is he awake or asleep?’
A crease dented Rana’s forehead while she gave that some serious thought. She said, ‘He was asleep a long, long time. Like Snow White. He’s happy to be awake.’
She was comically bossy and forthright. The scientists treated her with a respectful deference, and terminated the tests as soon as she showed signs of becoming tired or fractious. Not only because of her age; they didn’t want to inadvertently trigger Ugly Chicken’s defences.
The tests were carried out in an ancient barn that contained a laboratory with a black resin floor, gleaming workstations, and racks of equipment. The farm was Ada Morange’s country retreat, and it was also a research lab. The shuttle was very old, haunted by the imprints of a hundred Elder Cultures that manifested as visions, highly localised aberrant weather patterns, ‘transitory events’, and abnormal behaviour in people and animals in the countryside around the port. One of the ongoing projects was analysis of the behaviour of a supercolony of red ants that extended across several square kilometres and appeared to be developing a kind of symbolic language.
One of the scientists, Fatou Ndoye, told Chloe that analysis of the bead in Rana’s bracelet showed that it was a form of cat’s-eye apatite.
‘So it’s an alien crystal?’ Chloe said, thinking of cheesy old sci-fi programmes. ‘A sentient alien crystal?’
‘We don’t yet know if it’s truly self-aware or a sophisticated computer emulating a degree of self-awareness,’ Fatou Ndoye said. ‘But it is a marvellously strange artefact.’
She was about Chloe’s age, elegant and scary-smart. She had been seconded to the Ugly Chicken project from research into organic photon-plasmon emitters, something to do with quantum-information processing in the nervous systems of a clade of biochines. She explained that, like cat’s-eye apatites on Earth, Rana’s bead contained parallel fibres that produced a chatoyance, a luminous streak of reflected light like the pupil in a cat’s eye.
‘It is possible that information is stored in the quantum fields of those fibres,’ Fatou said. ‘Several of the Elder Cultures were able to pack vast amounts of data into small ordered matrices — quantum dust, minerals, even biological materials. There has been some interesting work on this in CERN and the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, but there is much we do not yet know.’
There were briefing sessions on the clandestine accommodation in which they would ride to Mangala, from the shuttle’s flight profile to the operation of the high-tech toilet. They couldn’t travel up and out on tickets bought on the free market because the British government had issued a stop notice to the UN Commission on Planetary Settlement, so they were being smuggled aboard. It wasn’t the first time Karyotech Pharma had done this, according to Henry. Back in the early days, before controls had been applied to the market in tickets sold to third parties by lottery winners, companies in the Elder Culture biz had resorted to all kinds of tactics to undercut or outwit their competitors.