Three men in dark suits looked at her. She tried not to think of the many jokes beginning There was a Pole, a German and a Russian…Gently, she took a mouse from one of the cages and placed it in the entry to the maze. It sniffed around the little space, squeaking.
‘We have here a subject: the s, as we call it. In a moment I’ll open the entry door and it’ll attempt to find a way through this maze of transparent tubing. All the subjects – the experimentals and the controls – have already learned a path through the maze. The experimentals have received mild doses of the various preparations in their water, taken ad libitum. This particular subject is one of a group which has received a locally obtained psylocibe derivative. The mean time hitherto has been around seventy seconds—’
‘For both the experimentals and the controls?’ the Pole asked.
Janis released the entry lever and the mouse sauntered down the pipe. ‘Yes. I don’t wish to obscure the fact that, so far, the null hypothesis—’
ping
The s had pressed the switch at the end of the maze and was nibbling its reinforcer, a square centimetre of marmalade toast. The timer, wired to the exit lever and the reward switch, stood at 32 seconds.
Silently, Janis removed the mouse and tried again with a control.
She ran through a dozen variations: mice doped with betel-juice, opiates, coca, caffeine…
It wasn’t a fluke, the psylocibe-heads were consistently twice as fast, way outside even experimenter effect.
She stared at the men, puzzled.
‘I must set up some double-blind protocols,’ she said. ‘Up to now, frankly, it hasn’t been worth it. At least, I assume you were interested in major effects.’
‘We certainly are,’ said the German. ‘And this isn’t a new preparation?’
‘Cumulative?’ said the Russian when Janis shook her head.
‘It’s possible. Obviously, more…’
‘Research is necessary, huh?’
They all laughed.
She worried that they’d think it was a set-up, lowering their expectations like that and then producing something so interesting; but no, they were sold on it. Her contract was renewed for six months; she was to take on a technician, check out all the possibilities.
As she escorted them down the corridor the Russian sniffed. He nudged her.
‘Is maybe not patriotic,’ he said, ‘but the Lebanese is better, no?’
She smiled back at him blankly, then quickened her pace to hide her blush.
Oh shit.
Fonthill Road, centre of the garment district. Great automatic factories spun and wove, cut and stitched in towers of glass and steel. The car-free street thronged with people who all, especially the women, seemed to Jordan to take up far too much space: jammed with bustles, he thought dourly as he skirted crinolines, ducked under parasols, manoeuvred around trains. Modesty’s own window displays – with their fractal chintzes, Mandelbrot paisleys and swathes of computer-generated lace applied as if with a spray-gun to every conceivable garment surface and trim – looked tasteful and restrained against the styles of the Bible-belts of Florida, Liberia and everywhere else that everybody’s daughter wanted to look like a televangelist’s wife.
Four minutes after noon. Five people ahead of him in the queue for the Bundesbank cashpoint at the corner of Seven Sisters Road. Jordan shuffled and fumed, stared over their heads at the Fuller domes of the old Development Area. He keyed in the number at 12.13. The machine laboured and muttered to itself for forty finger-drumming seconds, then coughed and spat out a thick wad of crumpled currency. And another, and again.
Jordan snatched them up and almost ran off while the screen was still offering a succession of financial services in what seemed increasingly desperate pleas to get the money back.
Back at the office building he headed straight for the toilet and locked himself away in a lavatory stall. He knew he was safe there – say what you like about the Elders, they were genuine about certain kinds of privacy. It was understood that God was watching. Jordan suddenly discovered that he really needed to shit. He sat down and counted the money. Four thousand Britische marks. He felt the blood leave his head, his bowels turn to water.
The B-mark was the hardest of hard currencies – only Norlonto used it internally, and even there four thousand would last a couple of months. In the community economies you could get laughable sums of funny money for it, even after bribing the guards. For a hundred B-marks your average checkpoint charlie would sell you his Kalashnikov and probably his sister’s address.
Jordan stared at the white paint of the stall door, losing himself like he sometimes did at the screen. Nothing seemed real. He remembered a word of wisdom that he had once, delightedly, checked out in a lucid dream: If you can fly, you’re dreaming. He thought about it for a minute, and no, he didn’t float upwards…
Just as well, because his trousers were around his ankles.
When he stepped through the door of the office he found everybody yelling at everybody else.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
That got all those in earshot yelling at him. Mrs Lawson pushed her way through. He was relieved to see she looked relieved to see him. She grabbed his elbow and tugged him towards his own screen. He stared at it. Bands of colour warped and writhed, almost hypnotically complex patterns appearing momentarily and then changing before he could appreciate them.
‘This has got to be a terminal malfunction,’ he said. ‘Either that or the world economy has gone to h – Hades!’ He recalled the window displays. ‘It’s not, uh, some designer’s palette that’s got its wires crossed with our system?’
‘Nice try,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Just don’t suggest it to the designers – they’re practically hysterical already.’
She glared around and several people slunk back abashed.
‘The engineers have been in all lunchtime and assure us there’s nothing wrong with the hardware. And, yes, we have checked and it isn’t – hee hee – the terminal crisis of capitalism, either.’
A lowercase thought slid along the bottom of Jordan’s mind.
our sleeper viruses have survived twenty years
The room swayed slightly. Get a grip.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, loud enough to be heard by enough people to amplify and spread the phony reassurance. ‘I have an idea as to what’s behind this. I’ll just have to check over some of your files, Mrs Lawson.’
He looked her in the eye and gave a tiny jerk of his head.
‘OK.’ She raised her voice to a pitch and volume that reminded him she’d once been a schoolteacher. ‘Do something else!’ she said to the rest of the room. ‘Read a manual if you have to!’
She shut the office door firmly behind them.
‘This place secure?’ he said immediately.
‘If it isn’t, nowhere is.’
‘Do you have a landlink to the security forces? The real ones I mean, uh, no offence to the Warriors—’
‘None taken.’
She smiled at his visible shock. Jordan continued hurriedly: ‘Could you check that the subversives aren’t starting a big push?’