When was the last time you saw your brother, Miss Rechnov?”
“You’ve seen my statement. A month before Yonna found him gone. He came to my apartment.”
“And you’re positive you did not see him again?”
“Of course I’m positive.”
“Did you come here?”
“No.”
“Did you make any effort to see Axel?”
“No, I-no.”
“Did you ever feel angry with your brother, Miss Rechnov?”
“Are you interrogating me now?”
His mild expression did not alter.
“We both have our questions, Miss Rechnov. You have yours and I have mine. If you do not believe that I wish to solve this riddle because I care about what happened to your brother, at least believe I will do so because it is my job.”
She stared at him. “Everyone gets angry with the people they love.”
“Of course.”
“You should trust me,” she said. “I knew him. The rest of my family had no interest in Axel after he changed. He was an embarrassment to them. A problem.”
“It’s late, Miss Rechnov,” he said quietly. “You should go home.”
He called the lift. She understood that it was for her. Not far above them, the huge wheels started to turn and the cables rushed through their bindings. They waited, each intent on the incalculable drop beyond the glass doors. People said Hanif was a good man. His quiet manner, his level tone, all were suggestive of a man of integrity. But everyone was corruptible, and the Rechnovs had more money and influence than anyone in Osiris. How far could she really trust him?
The roof of the lift swept up. The doors parted. She stepped inside. As the lift started its descent his calm unhurried face vanished, then his torso, and finally his polished shoes.
Adelaide curled up on the futon. The wall opposite flickered with a continuous projection of black and white films, but the sound was off, and she did not really see the images.
A week after her eviction from her home, Axel turned up at Jannike’s apartment where Adelaide was staying. He was distracted. He asked her to come back but she refused; she was scared of him. Axel could not understand why she wouldn’t come back, and she was too humiliated to tell him. After that, the visits stopped. The rift cut like acid.
The Red Rooms were her home now. So she kept telling herself.
Four in the morning and Osiris was quiet. She knew the night’s fluctuating dynamics, the grace notes that marked a creaking machine from the floor above or the generators shifting to beta mode. By four o’clock, Osiris was always quiet.
She refilled her voqua glass. Clean, clear, uncomplicated.
In less than twelve hours, she was due to meet Vikram. Although she had made the appointment with no intention of keeping it, something about his face, his stillness, lingered with her. He was the angriest and the calmest person she had ever met. It was like stumbling upon a ticking device; the horror of what might happen was only equalled by her desire to see the mess. She imagined him waiting at the restaurant tomorrow. Today, now. Had he drawn up a plan of action? Was he running through the arguments he might use?
He’d lost someone too. Mikkeli. The name burned, as though Mikkeli’s vibrancy in life had passed into a flame that needed no oxygen, only a vessel. Adelaide did not know how tall Mikkeli was, or the colour of her hair, but the girl was present with the ghosts circling the city. She hid behind wave crests. She lay supine in troughs.
Axel is alive, Adelaide told herself. Otherwise I would see him like I see that girl. With salt in his lungs and frozen crystals in his hair.
Occasionally, when she was very drunk, Adelaide wondered if other cities had been like Osiris. If other great metropolises ate away at sanity by hurling people through their gates, more and more people, an overdose of life, until the crowds became drugged with their own gluttony. She studied photographs of lost civilizations and touched the imprints of the people in them and in her head she moved them to Osiris and watched their faces change. And sometimes she moved herself from Osiris to those long gone places and watched a different Adelaide walking on streets. That Adelaide had the same eyes, lips, hair. She had the same indolent walk. But the ground was different. It pressed onto her feet and sometimes it tripped her and sometimes it hurt. But she felt it. She knew it, with the witless intimacy and the trust offered only to a stranger.
Ground-dreams. Everybody had them. Adelaide poured herself another splash of voqua. Osiris was clever. Osiris made you think too much.
She sank back against the cushions, her eyes half-closed. The projection played out its muted scenes. Vehicles with silent wheels and boats that flew. Moving stairways held rivers of people. Their eyes forward. Their eyes all-knowing, knowledge in every part of them, injected into their blood, in the machines that lived in their heads. Now steps lead to a door: a house with four walls. How functional. Trees leaning out of the ground. Wind moving the arms of the trees, the vehicles rushing past them, careless of the ground, of roots or earth.
The whirrs and tics of everyday life in some other world. Worlds, she reminded herself, that had failed.
Out in the ghost-sea, the girl Mikkeli breathed. She had a message for Adelaide. Don’t give up. Keep looking. Follow the silver fish.
/ / /
In the morning, a whim sent Adelaide across the city to see Linus. He was in a meeting when she arrived. She busied herself reading the news headlines on her Surfboard. Home Guard arrest key Juraj gang members in all night fire battle. Council announce budget increase for western perimeter reinforcements… The moving text made her dizzy. She stopped reading.
After ten minutes her brother appeared. He escorted her directly to his office, glancing around the reception area as though she might have inflicted unmentionable damage in the short time she had been waiting. The room was smaller than Feodor’s, but meticulously organized. She supposed this was the impression Linus wanted to create: geometric and clinical. His walls were covered with incomprehensible graphs.
Linus sat behind his desk and indicated the chair opposite.
“To what to I owe the pleasure, Adelaide?”
“Sarcasm already? You know I am still very angry with you, Linus.” But she didn’t want to talk about Tyr, and added quickly, “Any Council gossip?”
“We steer clear of that.”
“Oh.” The chair had wheels. Adelaide used one foot to propel her in circles, aware that he was watching her. “I wonder why you do it,” she mused.
“I’m not going to explain myself for your entertainment. You have no idea what’s going on in Osiris.”
She paused spinning. “Have you and Vikram formed some sort of conspiracy?”
“You’ve met him again, have you?”
“I had a visit.”
“And?”
On the Neptune, a long-finned angelfish swam forward until it filled almost the whole of the oval oceanscreen. Its mouth opened and an envelope floated out.
“You have Reefmail,” said Adelaide.
“So I see.”
The angelfish swam back and forth.
“Seems important,” Adelaide commented.
“It can wait. When did you see Vikram?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to help him.”
Linus propped one arm on a filing cabinet. “He’s right, you know.”
“Of course you think that.”
“Look, you and I have grown up with this divide. But that’s not an excuse to accept it. Our parents’ generation won’t talk about it, they feel too guilty. It’s up to us.”
