the air above each car. In the darkened rear seats, someone always had their floral print up round their waist, laughing and grunting at the same time as their friend drove them into a corner in the luxury smell of leather. No one was afraid of the site any more. They came openly, just to enjoy a fuck in its aureole of weirdness. It was quantum sex, the news media said, and could even be good for you. Some of them were going as far as to leave their vehicles and wander the empty streets and piles of rubble in the mist beyond the wire, picking up objects they thought might make souvenirs.
These were not precisely crimes. What was she to do?
Still later, R.I. Gaines banged on the door of her room.
When she opened the door, he was laughing and running his hands over his scalp. The shoulders of his coat were wet — this time it looked real. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I hate the rain, and I bet you do too.’ Behind him, the port was full of activity. The shadows and lights of alien, fiercely contradictory theories-of-everything poured across the field: three ships landing at once, one of them the General Systems ‘New World’ starliner
‘First you open the door,’ Gaines coaxed her, ‘then you let me in.’
‘Why?’
He held out the flowers.
‘Because I brought something for you.’
Eventually she took the flowers and turned them over in her hands. She had never seen a red quite like it; but the stems were flimsy and brittle, already dry. One or two fell on the floor.
‘I’ll sit on the bed,’ she said. ‘You can sit in the chair.’
Gaines gave her an alert look. ‘Have you invented irony?’ he wondered aloud. In her room, by contrast with the mayhem over at the port, some fleeting piece of physics had washed and softened the light. He placed the suitcase carefully on the bed: its clasps being snapped, complex fields sprang to life, radar green on a velvety black backdrop, unwinding in endless strings around a strange attractor. Additionally, the case contained generous lengths of scabby rubberised flex and a pair of bakelite headphones clearly included for show. ‘Look inside,’ Gaines said. ‘See this?’
‘Are you really here this time?’
‘First look in the suitcase,’ Gaines said, ‘then we can discuss that.’
She looked.
Immediately she felt herself transported a thousand light years from Saudade City, out somewhere in Radio Bay, inside an EMC outpost so secret even R.I. Gaines had difficulty finding it. Her viewpoint toppled about at high speed. It was jerky and full of interference; once stabilised, it had a curiously assembled feel, as if it had been built up from three-dimensional layers. What the assistant saw was this: a trembling grey space with echoes and a sense of walls far back, and somehow suspended inside it a single perfect teardrop of light so bright she had to look away. It was the tiniest instant. Even her tailoring couldn’t slow it down. A tear, immobile but constantly falling, so bright you couldn’t really see it. Then darkness came down, the viewpoint gave the impression of tilting violently, and the image of the tear repeated again. By the third or fourth repetition, ‘tear’ had somehow translated in her mind to ‘rip’: at that everything stopped, as if such understanding could be, in itself, a switch.
She felt elated. ‘I don’t know what that was!’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘It’s a thing no one should admit to knowing about. Not you,’ here, Gaines gave a wry smile, ‘not even me.
‘We call it the Aleph. We believe it’s very old. When we found it, no one had been near it for a million years — perhaps more. When we ask it about itself, it asks for you.’ It was an artefact at least a million years old, he said, the deepest problem anyone had encountered to date in Radio Bay: a built object as far as could be understood, a machine constructed at the nanometre length, the purpose of which was
The Aleph, he said, was buried inside an abandoned research tool the size of a small star: and recently the thing it most asked for was her. The assistant stared at him, then down at the suitcase.
‘Is it in there?’
Gaines shook his head. ‘It thought for a week, then it asked for a police detective on a planet no one had ever heard of.’ ‘I don’t understand what I was looking at.’
‘For now,’ Gaines said, ‘we think it’s wise to keep the two of you apart.’ He closed the suitcase. ‘Given the weirdness of this.’ He added, in a kind of aside: ‘When we use the word “constructed”, we don’t rule out the idea of self-construction.’ Then he said:
‘We had some trouble finding you from the description it gave.’
TEN
Down to the River
Anna Waterman got up early and walked through Wyndlesham village to the downs. She preferred the village empty. Just after dawn at that time of year a soft, grainy light warmed its pantile roofs, flint facings and herringbone brick garden paths; the only thing moving was a cat.
From behind Wyndlesham church she took a muddy lane, then steepening chalk paths up through hawthorns to where the remains of a second village, long abandoned, lay like a geographical feature, a series of intimate sunken bays floored with sheep-cropped turf. Stands of elder had overgrown the old walls. What presented itself at first as a chalk bank, cut deeply by the footpath, suddenly revealed ends of Georgian brick. Anna loved that sense of enclosure, and then, as you walked further up the hillside, the way everything opened again suddenly to wide grassy re-entrants, long ridges dotted with isolated hawthorns and patches of burnet rose. She loved the way the wind opened everything out and moved it along.
By the time she reached Western Brow, the sun had come out. Skylarks went up and down like elevators in the clear air; though the curve of the downs obscured it, she could smell the sea; northwards the Low Weald stretched away towards London, scattered with villages in the morning haze — Streat, Westmeston, St Johns Without, then Wyndlesham itself, built around a bend on the B2112 not far from the Lewes Road. The village would be awake by now. Sought after because it was close to the Downs but out of their shadow, Wyndlesham was the sort of place where, even in these harsh economic times, everyone kept a pedigree Australian cattle dog. On the walls of The Jolly Tinker you could examine tinted reprographs of Victorian farm labourers, their impressive facial hair and rural machinery; but at Sunday lunchtime, only brand managers, retired CEOs and bankers of every stripe, especially investment bankers who had made their money before 2008, could afford to drink there. Their SUVs saw only trophy mud; their wives, though they rode well, in tight little jodhpurs and shiny boots, did not come from riding families.
Light struck off an opened bedroom window; the man who owned Dainty Dot’s Cafe & Bookshop came to his door and shook out a mat. Two or three ponies, suddenly delighted by life, ran about in a paddock. Looking down on the cat-slide roofs and higgledy-piggledy main street at 8am on such a perfect morning, it was hard to find anything to dislike. Then a van drew up to deliver the impressive range of French fermiers — air- freighted in with the dew still on them twice a week — for which the cheese shop was justly renowned, and you saw that while it yearned for vanished values, Wyndlesham had long ago priced out any representative of them. Anna set her back to Ditchling Beacon and the upland wind and walked east, where, beside the broad, flinty, footworn reach of the South Downs Way between Western Brow and Plumpton Plain, she came upon a clump of the brown poppies that had colonised her garden.
Up here, they grew taller and more vigorous: rather than being defeated by the wind, they seemed to thrive on it. The stems rattled together. The flowers yearned upward into the streaming light. Anna got out her phone
