“No it isn’t.” I paused for a moment, admiring a display of brightly woven tartans in a shop window. (We were heading down the high street on foot, braving the shopping crowds of tourists, en route to the other main railway station.) “If there are any profilers looking for signs of an evacuation, they won’t be expecting small children. They’ll be looking for people like us: anonymous singletons working in key areas, dropping out of sight and traveling in company. Maybe we should ask Sarah if she’s willing to lend us her son. Just while we’re traveling, of course.”
“I don’t think so. The boy’s a little horror, Bob. They raised them like natives.”
“That’s because Sarahis a native.”
“I don’t care. Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”
I chuckled-then the laughter froze inside me. “Don’t look round. We’re being tracked.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not armed. You?”
“It didn’t seem like a good idea.” If you were questioned or detained by police or officials, being armed can easily turn a minor problem into a real mess. And if the police or officials had already been absorbed by a hard take-off, nothing short of a backpack nuke and a dead man’s handle will save you. “Behind us, to your left, traffic surveillance camera. It’s swiveling too slowly to be watching the buses.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me.”
The pavement was really crowded: it was one of the busiest shopping streets in Scotland, and on a Saturday morning you needed a cattle prod to push your way through the rubbernecking tourists. Lots of foreign kids came to Scotland to learn English. If I was right, soon their brains would be absorbing another high-level language: one so complex that it would blot out their consciousness like a sackful of kittens drowning in a river. Up ahead, more cameras were watching us. All the shops on this road were wired for video, wired and probably networked to a police station somewhere. The complex ebb and flow of pedestrians was still chaotic, though, which was cause for comfort: it meant the ordinary population hadn’t been infected yet.
Another half mile and we’d reach the railway station. Two hours on a local train, switch to a bus service, forty minutes further up the road, and we’d be safe: the lifeboat would be submerged beneath the still waters of a loch, filling its fuel tanks with hydrogen and oxygen in readiness for the burn to orbit and pickup by the ferry that would transfer us to the wormhole connecting this world-line to home’s baseline reality. (Drifting in high orbit around Jupiter, where nobody was likely to stumble across it by accident.) But first, before the pick-up, we had to clear the surveillance area.
It was commonly believed-by some natives, as well as most foreigners-that the British police forces consisted of smiling unarmed bobbies who would happily offer directions to the lost and give anyone who asked for it the time of day. While it was true that they didn’t routinely walk around with holstered pistols on their belt, the rest of it was just a useful myth. When two of them stepped out in front of us, Eve grabbed my elbow. “Stop right there, please.” The one in front of me was built like a rugby player, and when I glanced to my left and saw the three white vans drawn up by the roadside I realized things were hopeless.
The cop stared at me through a pair of shatterproof spectacles awash with the light of a head-up display.
“You are Geoffrey Smith, of 32 Wardie Terrace, Watford, London. Please answer.”
My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said. (All the traffic cameras on the street were turned our way. Some things became very clear: Police vans with mirror-glass windows. The can of pepper spray hanging from the cop’s belt. Figures on the roof of the National Museum, less than two hundred meters away-maybe a sniper team. A helicopter thuttering overhead like a giant mosquito.) “Come this way, please.” It was a polite order: in the direction of the van.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked.
“You will be if you don’t bloody do as I say.” I turned toward the van, the rear door of which gaped open on darkness: Eve was already getting in, shadowed by another officer. Up and down the road, three more teams waited, unobtrusive and efficient. Something clicked in my head and I had a bizarre urge to giggle like a loon: this wasn’t a normal operation. All right, so I was getting into a police van, but I wasn’t under arrest and they didn’t want it to attract any public notice. No handcuffs, no sitting on my back and whacking me with a baton to get my attention. There’s a nasty family of retroviruses attacks the immune system first, demolishing the victim’s ability to fight off infection before it spreads and infects other tissues. Notice the similarity?
The rear compartment of the van was caged off from the front, and there were no door handles. As we jolted off the curb-side I was thrown against Eve. “Any ideas?” I whispered.
“Could be worse.” I didn’t need to be told that: once, in a second Reich infected by runaway transcendence, half our operatives had been shot down in the streets as they tried to flee. “I think it may have figured out what we are.”
“It may-how?”
Her hand on my wrist. Morse code.
“ EXPECT BUGS. ” By voice: “traffic analysis, particle flow monitoring through the phone networks. If it was already listening when you tried to contact Doctor Durant, well; maybe he was a bellwether, intended to flush us out of the woodwork.”
That thought made me feel sick, just as we turned off the main road and began to bounce downhill over what felt like cobblestones. “It expected us?”
“ LOCAL CONSPIRACY. ”
“Yes, I imagine it did. We probably left a trail. You tried to call Durant? Then you called me. Caller ID led to you, traffic analysis led onto me, and from there, well, it’s been a jump ahead of us all along the way. If we could get to the farm-”
“ COVER STORY .”
“-We might have been okay, but it’s hard to travel anonymously and obviously we overlooked something. I wonder what.”
All this time neither of the cops up front had told us to shut up; they were as silent as crash-test dummies, despite the occasional crackle and chatter over the radio data system. The van drove around the back of the high street, down a hill and past a roundabout. Now we were slowing down, and the van turned off the road and into a vehicle park. Gates closed behind us and the engine died. Doors slammed up front: then the back opened.
Police vehicle park. Concrete and cameras everywhere, for our safety and convenience no doubt. Two guys in cheap suits and five o’clock stubble to either side of the doors. The officer who’d picked us up held the door open with one hand, a can of pepper spray with the other. The burn obviously hadn’t gotten far enough into their heads yet: they were all wearing HUD s and mobile phone headsets, like a police benevolent fund-raising crew rehearsing aStar Trek sketch. “Geoffrey Smith. Martina Weber. We know what you are. Come this way. Slowly, now.” I got out of the van carefully. “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘prepare to be assimilated’ or something?”
That might have earned me a faceful of capsaicin but the guy on the left-short hair, facial tic, houndstooth check sports jacket-shook his head sharply. “Ha. Ha. Very funny. Watch the woman, she’s dangerous.”
I glanced round. There was another van parked behind ours, door open: it had a big high bandwidth dish on the roof, pointing at some invisible satellite. “Inside.”
I went where I was told, Eve close behind me. “Am I under arrest?” I asked again. “I want a lawyer!”
White-washed walls, heavy doors with reinforced frames, windows high and barred. Institutional floor, scuffed and grimy. “Stop there.” Houndstooth Man pushed past and opened a door on one side. “In here.” Some sort of interview room? We went in. The other body in a suit-built like a stone wall with a beer gut, wearing what might have been a regimental tie-followed us and leaned against the door.
There was a table, bolted to the floor, and a couple of chairs, ditto. A video camera in an armored shell watched the table: a control box bolted to the tabletop looked to be linked into it. Someone had moved a rack of six monitors and a maze of ribbon-cable spaghetti into the back of the room, and for a wonder it wasn’t bolted down: maybe they didn’t interview computer thieves in here.
“Sit down.” Houndstooth Man pointed at the chairs. We did as we were told; I had a big hollow feeling in my stomach, but something told me a show of physical resistance would be less than useless here.
Houndstooth Man looked at me: orange light from his HUD stained his right eyeball with a basilisk glare and I knew in my gut that these guys weren’t cops anymore, they were cancer cells about to metastasize.
“You attempted to contact John Durant yesterday. Then you left your home area and attempted to conceal your identities. Explain why.” For the first time, I noticed a couple of glassy black eyeballs on the mobile video wall. Houndstooth Man spoke loudly and hesitantly, as if repeating something from a TelePrompTer.
