Constantine saw her. She clutched her bottle as she scuttled across the flags, head low and shoulders hunched as if she was trying to make herself smaller. Constantine caught up with her and placed one hand on her shoulder.
“Mary,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
She turned to him, and her face was a picture of panic and fear.
“Go away, please,” she whispered. “They told me what they’d do if I tried to contact you again.” She waved the bottle in his face. “They gave me this when I promised not to speak to you.”
It was a good brand, noted Constantine. He felt a pang of real pity for this poor woman, driven further down the road to destruction by his supposed protectors. Mary turned and began to march away. There was a blur of movement and for a moment there were two Marys. One frozen before him, the other staggering toward the escalators. The pity inside Constantine evaporated instantly as he recognized what was happening. She wasn’t real. She was just part of the simulation in which he was trapped. He stepped forward, into the picture of Mary that remained smeared on the air before him, and the picture vanished as he moved within it. Poor old Mary. Just another object that wasn’t repainted properly.
Blue pointed it out as they waited their turn in the line for the elevators.
– I wonder why they’re running the Mary storyline for you? What are they trying to say?
Constantine walked all the way back to his hotel, stopping on the way for a meal in one of the cafes that seemed to appear suddenly as evenign fell. He ate sausages and sauerkraut with cold lager and then sat back with a large pot of coffee to listen to the conversation inside himself. Nobody was speaking. In the end he lost interest, paid the bill with his untraceable card and pushed his way back out into the warm night.
The floating building was parked outside his hotel. Its base hung only a couple of meters above the ground, the lit doorway of his hotel’s lobby shining through the gap. The top of the tower rose up into the night sky; there was a light shining from one of the windows in the higher floors. A dark figure seemed to move within, but Constantine couldn’t be sure. It was too far away to see clearly.
Jay was again leaning on her balcony, her arms folded on the rail as she watched Constantine approach.
He grinned up at her as he reached the base of the tower, reminded of Romeo and Juliet. Constantine rather liked this Jay. Her dark hair surrounded her thin face as she leaned over to look down at him and he noted again how much more vulnerable she looked in this incarnation.
“Hello.” Constantine smiled up at her.
“There’s something going on,” she replied, looking worried. “About three hours ago there was a rush of activity like I’ve never seen before.”
– When we saw Mary, suggested Red.
– Or when we were watching the concert. The time is too imprecise, said Blue.
– We need to know, continued Red.-You’ll have to ask her. We need to know what they’re after.
Constantine shook his head. He felt as if he was being nagged.
“I know, I know,” he muttered. He raised his voice.
“We need some help, Jay. We need to know what the enemy is trying to find out. We’re being tied in knots. We don’t know what to say or when to keep quiet. We need information.”
Jay shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer.”
“Very well. Ask DIANA. They must have some ideas.”
Jay slumped forward, elbows still resting on the railing. She looked thoroughly fed up.
“I can’t speak to DIANA.”
Constantine frowned. “I thought they were working on a way to get me out of here.”
Jay’s expression was a mixture of guilt and sadness. “Don’t you realize that the only reason that I can exist in this place is because I have no links with any other object inside the simulation?”
– Except us, said Red.
“Except me,” said Constantine.
Jay frowned. “I know that, and do
Constantine felt chastened. He looked down at his feet for a moment. The tower cast no shadow here, he noticed; the moon lit up the entire pavement before him.
He sighed slowly. “I’m sorry, Jay, but we’re running a great risk speaking to those people in the quorum. Either we tell them the secret they’re trying to find out, or, worse, we say nothing and raise their suspicions that we’re holding something back.”
Jay said nothing. Her hands slid up her face and she began to fiddle with her earlobes in the manner of a little girl. She suddenly realized what she was doing and snatched her hands away, then stared up the side of the tower at the lit upper window.
Finally she spoke. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. We’ll have to take the risk. I don’t like it, but there you are. I’m going to try and send a message to the real world. I hope our steganography is good enough. Give me a minute.”
She turned and walked through the open door behind her into the tower. Constantine stood alone for a moment, a forgotten man beneath the night sky. The moonlight picked out the edges of the dark clouds high above with white highlights. Behind him was the brightly lit lobby of his own hotel. He wondered at the way its guests and staff didn’t notice the huge black tower floating just outside their door.
Jay walked back out onto the balcony, holding something in her hand.
“If they don’t pick this up the moment it leaves the vicinity of the tower, we should be okay. Heaven knows how they’ll get a message back, though. Catch it, we don’t want it to break.”
She tossed the object in Constantine’s direction. It tumbled end over end as it fell. There was a brief discontinuity just before it hit the ground when it seemed to shift in its position slightly to the left. The effect reminded him of a stone being dropped in water.
He dived for it too late. A bottle. It bounced on the ground, once, twice, but didn’t break. His heart pounding, he bent to pick it up. An empty green wine bottle, the space inside it twisted into significant forms.
A message in a bottle? Constantine straightened to look back at Jay but she had gone. The tower was already two hundred meters up and rising.
He suddenly felt incredibly lonely. Gripping the bottle tightly, he walked into his hotel.
Herb 4: 2210
Herb was in the entertainment tank watching an old movie: a black-and-white flick called
Johnston stuck his head above the trapdoor.
“Okay, Herb, we’re on. Let’s go.”
Herb felt his heart thumping in his chest. His hand involuntarily tightened around the hard little machine that Robert had given him, now wrapped in a white linen napkin to prevent Herb cutting himself on its sharp edges.
“No. I thought we had to prepare further. We’re not ready.”
“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Robert replied. “Come on. Don’t you want to see my ship?” He ducked down into the secret passageway.
Herb looked around the comfortable surroundings of his own ship and wished it a sad good-bye. He wondered if they would have white leather and parquet flooring where he was going. He doubted it. He gave a sigh and stepped into emptiness over the trapdoor. His body swung smoothly through ninety degrees as he entered the connecting space between the two ships.
