And at this point, the business analysts suggested, serious money would start to roll into the coffers of EI and the other private agencies involved. Even I would be getting a consultancy fee, I was assured. Capitalism would save the world, but only so long as it showed a profit.
That was the plan. To achieve it there was still a hell of a lot of work to do, for all of us. Even Tom and Sonia had carved out a role as a kind of watching brief on the project, which was turning out to be surprisingly useful. They couldn’t contribute much technically, but they had a good sense of the impact our project was going to have on the high-latitude communities on which its infrastructure was going to be “imposed,” in Tom’s word. They added a degree of cultural sensitivity which our little engineering community perhaps lacked.
And while all this was going on we had to deal with the fallout from the Poole family circus-show.
On the day itself, Ruud Makaay explained the Morag incident away to Edith Barnette as a personal issue for me and Tom. She clearly didn’t buy this, but her only comment was that it was a good thing there had been no press here to see it. After all the center of the incident was me, who everybody knew was the originator of the whole project in the first place; it couldn’t have been more high-profile.
As for everybody else, Deadhorse was a pretty desolate and uninspiring place, and I was suddenly a valued source of scuttlebutt. Makaay was irritated at the way his people were distracted by “this stupid sideshow,” as he called it; it was “getting in the way” when there was already too much work to do. Shelley was more circumspect. She didn’t say much, and I knew she would support me in trying to resolve this knot of strangeness in my life. But I think she, too, wished it would all just go away.
As for Tom, he avoided me for days.
I took Shelley’s advice not to push him. He had a lot to absorb, after alclass="underline" this was the first time he had been haunted, too. And besides, as Sonia confided in a discreet moment, his pride had hurt. Whatever the cause, a thousand people had seen him crushed and weeping on the frozen ground. So I tried to give him space.
But I had to follow it up myself. I parceled up the records of that day and beamed them over by high-bandwidth link to Rosa, my wizened, black-clad aunt in Seville, to see what she made of them.
A week after that strange day, Rosa called me back.
Ruud Makaay, bowing to the inevitable, gave us one of his conference rooms to take Rosa’s call. Tom and Sonia were there — though I gathered that Sonia had had to twist Tom’s arm. I could understand his reluctance, but my son was no coward, and I knew he would face up to all this strangeness.
However I asked Shelley Magwood to attend, too. I had often observed that we Pooles behaved better toward each other when outsiders were present. Or maybe I just felt I needed an ally. Gea, my strange artificial companion, was there, too.
So we sat around a simple circular table, Gea’s little toy-robot avatar rolling back and forth on the tabletop.
And Rosa materialized among us, a dark, brooding presence in her black priest’s garb. The VR facilities were functional rather than corporate-luxurious, and you could see a ghostly second surface where the projection of Rosa’s table was overlaid on ours.
“So,” Rosa smiled at us. “Who’s first?”
It was actually Gea who started us off. She had been analyzing the surveillance records of the day. She conjured up a snippet of the visitation, played out by manikins on the tabletop, ten-centimeter-high models of me, Morag, Tom, and Sonia. The resolution was good, far better than Rosa’s image of the Reef; the whole area around the marquee and the offshore rig had been drenched with sensors. And the data went beyond human senses. Gea was able to show us an X-ray image of Morag, for instance; we saw bones, a regular-looking skeleton, the ghostly images of internal organs — a brain, a heart.
“Whatever this creature is,” Gea said dryly, “the body of ‘Morag Poole’ responds to our sensors, every one of them. It has mass, volume, an internal structure. It is in our universe. It is no hallucination, and no ghost, in the sense of the word as I understand it. It is really there. ”
But who was this? Gea snipped out a little volume around Morag’s head and blew it up until it was life-size, a disembodied head with a serene, somewhat vacant expression. Gea overlaid this with an X-ray image of the skull within, and she compared it to images of Morag from her medical records and my own personal archive. Rapidly we were taken through a point-to-point matching of facial structures, of the deeper bones. All this was completed in seconds. The implication was clear: any forensic scientist would have concluded that the face in our image was indeed Morag.
“But,” Gea said, “there are anomalies.”
The Morag creature was dense, massive, in fact about twice my weight. Gea had been able to measure that by studying seismic echoes of her footsteps. The sense I’d sometimes had that Morag was somehow more real than me and the rest of my world seemed to be borne out. But Gea’s sensors had detected only flesh and blood and bone, and it wasn’t clear what form her invisible mass took.
For all her intense reality, the sensors had no clear record of where Morag had come from, or where she had gone to. It was as if the myriad artificial eyes just looked away, and she was gone.
As Gea went through all this, Rosa watched Tom carefully. She seemed fascinated by his reaction, his emotional state. Tom was expressionless, but even that was eloquent, I thought.
Rosa said at last, “Whatever we are to make of all this, one thing is clear. The visitations are now part of our consensual reality. Michael may indeed be crazy, but we can’t explain away his experiences that way anymore.”
“Thanks,” I said warmly.
“Well, personally I’m awed,” Sonia said. “Scared.”
“Me, too,” Shelley said. “It’s a ghost story suddenly coming true.” But she didn’t sound scared, or particularly awed, and neither did Sonia; they sounded curious. I was impressed by the resilience of their minds, the minds of a soldier and an engineer. It wasn’t just their professions that gave them such strength, I suspected, but a deeper robustness of the human psyche.
I said, “There’s no reason to be afraid. If strangeness spooked us we’d still be competing for gazelle bones with the hyenas out on the savannah. We’ll deal with this—”
Tom turned on me. “That’s typical of your bullshit, Dad. What we’re trying to deal with here is my mother. Or rather, that thing that looks like my mother. And all you can come up with is some fucking pep talk about walking out of Africa.” His voice was controlled but brittle.
Rosa said evenly, “We all need ways of coping with this, Tom. You must find your own path, as your father is finding his. This is a reality Michael has accepted for some time, I think. But now suddenly this isreal for you. You were even able to approach your mother—”
“It wasn’t my mother,” he snapped.
Rosa nodded. “Very well. You were able to approach the visitor closely, to inspect her, as I hadn’t been able to in Seville. What did you feel?”
Tom wouldn’t reply. He shot me a resentful, pitying glance.
As for me, I truly believed that this visitor was, on some level, Morag, it really was her. I had always believed that. So how was I supposed to feel? I had never known that, not since my first visitations as a child. My reaction was to figure it out, try to make sense of it. But maybe I was the weak one; maybe the true, strong reaction was actually Tom’s, his devastated weeping on the plain; maybe he felt the reality of this return, its strangeness in ways I was incapable of.
Shelley’s hand crept over mine.
Rosa had been concentrating her own studies on Morag’s speech. She played us a sample. Once again a disembodied head floated over our tabletop; once again I saw that beautiful face, those full lips. But Morag spoke strangely and quickly, a string of syllables too rapid to distinguish, her tongue flicking between her lips.