Fergal grinned. “It just sits in the centre of a new communications web, that’s all. A useful thing to have.”
“Bloody dangerous, you mean!” I said.
“Don’t worry,” said Fergal, realising he’d gone too far. “It’s not going to interfere with the satellite. It’ll just… gather information. For the future.”
“Oh God!” Menial exclaimed. “You’re out of your fucking mind! That thing is a deil! It’ll have the world in a new Possession before you know it!”
“It’ll be our Possession,” Fergal said.
Tours, you mean!”
Fergal stretched out his legs.
“And what would be wrong with that?”
He looked at our appalled faces and burst out laughing.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “There’s no way it can do anything without having people to work with, and there are no such people yet.” He placed a thumb on Menial’s chin for a moment. “As you fine well know.”
She smacked his hand away, none too gently.
“That was not funny,” she said. She got up with unsteady dignity. “I’m going for a piss.”
Fergal watched me watching her thread her way through the throng. If he detected the tumult in my thoughts he gave no sign.
“No chance of persuading you, Clovis?”
“Not a chance in hell,” I said, still distracted. His casual banter fooled me for not a second; this was a man who wanted power, Possession indeed, and his current scheme with the AI would not be his last. He was a man I would have to watch, and might one day have to kill.
“Oh, well,” he said. “Our day will come, and you’ll see it.”
I was about to contest this when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Oh, hello, Catherine.”
My former landlady smiled down at me; like everyone here, she was already a bit drunk. She nodded at Fergal and looked back at me.
“Hi, Clovis. I hope you like your new accommodation.”
“Oh, aye.”
She reached into a pouch on her hip. “I’ve got something for you,” she said. “A letter that arrived a few days ago, I didn’t get round to—”
“That’s all right,” I said, taking the bulky envelope. “Thanks.”
Fergal, perhaps subdued by his rebuff, was moodily studying his drink, or tactfully respecting my privacy, as I opened the package. From the handwriting of the address, I knew it was from Gantry. It contained a letter and a thick booklet. The letter was neatly typed. I glanced down the predictable hand-wringing about my expulsion from the University (the trial had been a farce, not that I cared any more) and about my choice of tinkering as a career; then turned over to the next sheet.
However, Clovis, and just as a little reminder of the joys of historical research—you may remember I looked a little puzzled when you introduced your girlfriend, Merrial? The reason was that I thought I recognised her from somewhere. Actually, of course, I hadn’t—but I’d come across a picture of what may be an ancestor of hers by the same name, in one of the Institute’s old yearbooks—2058, in fact. You may even have glanced through this once yourself. Have a look at page 35—the resemblance is quite striking.
(Needless to say, I expect you to return…
I almost dropped the papers as I fumbled open the booklet and turned to the page. It showed—in much sharper detail and better colour than in modern photographs—some kind of social occasion. People were sitting, smartly dressed, at long tables, clapping their hands as others in their company danced. In the immediate foreground was a girl, caught in mid-twirl, her thick black hair swaying around behind her head, one hand swinging her long, layered skirt out to the side, her bare feet lightly, precisely placed. A fine dancer. Merrial.
She was even named, in the small print of the caption.
It could be an ancestor, I tried to tell myself, as Gantry thought. But I knew it was not so. If anyone could be identified from a photograph, Merrial could. She looked, in the picture, no different from how she looked this day.
I had, from the first moment I’d seen her, thought her younger, fierier, fresher than myself, and attributed her occasional ironies and unreasonably intelligent remarks to her native wit, which I was quite unenviously happy to regard as greater than my own. It was a shock to realise that they were the wisdom of age. Dear God, how old was she? She had lived since the Deliverer’s time! The thought was enough to make me feel dizzy.
Gantry was right about one thing—1 had seen this picture before, on an idle trawl through the Institute’s public-relations archive. And, as I had anticipated, the memory of seeing it did come back. It had only been a few seconds’ pause as I’d turned the pages, a couple of years earlier, my attention momentarily caught by this pretty image from the past.
Fergal’s voice broke into my appalled reflections.
“Bad news from home?”
I shook my head, folding the letter around the booklet again, inserting the sheets in the envelope and slipping it into my pocket.
“No, no,” I said, forcing a smile. “Nothing like that. It’s just—1 feel faint, I think I’ve had too much to drink, on an empty stomach, you know?”
I clapped my hand to my mouth.
“Oh God.” I swallowed. The tinker’s sardonic, sceptical eyes regarded me. I realised that I had still to decide what to do about another shock, delivered only minutes earlier: that he—apparently with Mer-rial’s expectation—had put the AI on the ship. All it would take to expose him, and blast whatever schemes either or both of them had hatched, would be a word to Druin…
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just need some fresh air. I’m going out. Could you tell Menial to come out too?”
“Sure,” he said, already scanning the crowd for other company. “Where’ll you be?”
“In the square,” I said. “At the statue.”
14
Final Analysis
To Almaty then, and apple-blossom on the streets, smoke in the air, and the Tian-Shan mountains beyond; so high, so close they were improbable to the eye, like the moon on the horizon. Myra almost skipped with relief to be back in Kazakhstan.
President Chingiz Suleimanyov’s office was a lot grander than Myra’s. She felt a tremor of trepidation as she walked past the soldier who held the door open for her. A ten-metre strip of red carpet over polished parquet, at the end of which was a small chair in front of a large desk. The chair was plastic. The desk was mahogany, its green leather top bare except for a gold Mont Blanc pen and a pristine, red-leather-edged blotter. Glass-paned bookcases on either side of the room converged to a wide window with a mountain view. The room’s central chandelier, unlit at the moment, looked like a landing-craft from an ancient and impressive alien civilisation making its presence known.
The President stood up as she came in, and walked around his intimidating desk. They met with a handshake. Suleimanyov was a short, well-built Kazakh with a face which he’d carefully kept at an avuncular-looking fiftyish. He was actually in his fifty-eighth year, a child of the century as he occasionally mentioned, which meant that he’d grown up after the Glorious Counter-Revolution of 1991 had passed into history. The reunification of Kazakhstan in the Fall Revolution had been his finest hour, and he always called himself a Kazakhstani, not a Kazakh: the national identification, not the ethnic. He didn’t have any of Myra’s twentieth-century leftist hang-ups. He had never had the slightest pretension to being any kind of socialist. However, he followed Soviet tradition by wearing the neatest and most conventional business-suit that dollars could buy.
“Good afternoon, Citizen Davidova,” he said, in Russian. She responded similarly, and then he waved her to her seat and resumed his own. The soldier closed the door.