And another voice, slimy, behind her: “Gimme, now!”
Help me!
Fear paralysed Gus’s throat, her mouth wide but silent, like a dying fish. Her mind would not process what was happening as big shapes manhandled her. Gus was utterly helpless.
I don’t want to…
“Hey!” An echoing voice.
Sound of a dog, barking.
“Bitch-girl.”
Impact on her face. Spurt of warm blood in mouth.
Then they were gone, vanished into the thickening fog, while she sat back, stunned, on cold paving-stones. Beside Gus, the young homeless man squatted, careful not to touch her.
“Are you all right?”
His dog growled at the departed muggers once more, then looked at Gus, stopped, swallowed wetly, then licked her face.
St. Catherine’s Dock is dark. Two figures hurry across the cobblestones: Aldo Guillermi, muffled against the cold, carrying a cane which he is careful not to tap against the ground, and his sister, Maria. The baby, wrapped in her shawl, is silent.
“Aldo, we will be late. If it sails, what of our baggage?”
“Hush. They won’t throw it off.”
“But…”
“It sails, and we sail onboard.”
But their voices carry, and dark figures step from the shadows behind a pile of netting and crates. There are three of them, big and burly, with short heavy jackets over their tunics, and heavy belaying-pins in their hands.
“Well, mates.” The first one spits a long stream of something dark onto the dockyard stones. “We’ve found a new friend, looks like.”
“No.” Guillermi raises his empty left hand, placating. “Sirs, I cannot. We’re about to sail.”
“ ’At’s what I said, innit?”
Press-gang? Or worse?
“I’m sorry.” Guillermi adjusts his grip on the walking-cane. “I don’t understand. Could you repeat that, please?”
“You deaf, or what? I said-”
The cane whips down and up, in an instant: downwards, across the leader’s right hand, then uses the rebound to arc backhand across the man’s face. His belaying-pin clatters on the cobblestones.
“Maria, go… ”
They are almost upon him, but Guillermi sidesteps, leading them away from his sister.
“Get ’im.”
A fencing-lunge, and he stabs the cane’s point into a second attacker’s throat, followed with a savate side-kick into the lower ribs. The man doubles up, but his mate has already seized Guillermi’s arms from behind, the grip unbreakable.
Strike like lightning…
Guillermi snaps his head backwards, feels the crunch of broken nose against the back of his skull. Stamps downwards, arcs his elbow back-impact-and spins away.
… and roar like thunder.
Charlemont’s never-forgotten words, as he drove his students to fight, scream now in Guillermi’s brain.
“Yaaah!”
His warrior-yell startles all three attackers. A circular fouettй, a whipping kick into a thigh muscle, and the first is down, leg paralysed. Guillermi spins to one side-half-heard: “I’ve got ’im”-then his heel takes another in the throat, quicker than thought, in a beautiful revers. Then an arcing series of la canne strikes drops the leader.
All three men are down.
A civilized man would stop now, but a soldier knows better. If his attackers have other weapons, this is the moment when they will use them. So Guillermi-as has been drilled into him-does not stop, but whirls and stamps onto ribs, onto heads, whips the cane downwards again and again, until the threat is gone.
He began training in le savate with spoiled young gentlemen, in a somewhat effete salon, during his Sorbonne days. But he moved on to study with the huge powerful champion Charlemont, who regularly lifted small cannon barrels overhead, and whose instruction was practical and deadly. In later years, Guillermi practised in the sun- drenched south, in the dockyard style of rough Marseilles, where sporting rules have never applied.
One of his attackers is curled up on his side, hands around his damaged knees, mewling, with a long wicked knife beside him. Guillermi kicks the blade across damp cobbles, out of reach. Another man lies still, softly snoring as though asleep. The third…
Moves!
Guillermi leaps back, startled by a flash of light- blade- and then a crack of sound. And the man slumps once more upon the cold dockyard cobblestones.
“Maria! Are you all right?”
Like a marionette with severed strings, the corpse lies with twisted neck, a pool of dark liquid expanding beneath its lifeless head.
“Yes, my brother.” Blue steel glints in her hand, beneath the baby’s form. “Let’s go.”
Her voice is very calm, as she slips the dark, six-inch Derringer pistol out of sight. It is a muzzle-loaded 1807 Derringer Phila, blued steel inset in polished wood: a percussion cap pocket gun which requires a steady hand and careful aiming. Guillermi is impressed.
Some good will come of this.
It is a strange thought for a protective brother to have. Yet Maria’s hysteria is suddenly gone, along with the dark depression of recent days: replaced by a quiet determination. And somehow her renewed spirit has kept the baby-the newborn boy she must protect-from crying.
“Yes. Three days,” he tells her, “and we’ll see Maman once more.”
There was a lecture to commemorate some obscure academic event-the anniversary of someone else’s lecture-and it began with a boring recitation of the history of computing. The lecturer’s accent was transatlantic, and his name was Ives, but Gus knew nothing of his work.
“And, before Turing’s life was tragically cut short in 1954, hounded by society to his death, though he almost certainly did more than any other single man to ensure Allied victory in World War II…”
Gus’s skin prickled.
Turing was here, in this place, she realized. He was real.
Buried in Ives’s tone, she thought, was a resentment towards the society which had caused the mathematician’s suicide. Perhaps not everyone in the room detected it-most of her colleagues were waiting in good-natured boredom for the meat of the lecture to follow-but on some level several of them did.
Ives was a visiting research fellow, and Gus followed his talk with interest: a brave attempt to bridge the conflicting software paradigms of formal specification languages and evolutionary algorithms. Most of the people sitting near Gus were Z experts, used to formulating system definitions with rigorous symbolic logic: they frowned at the anti-reductionist notion of creating code which had evolved, not been designed.
Gus was fascinated.
Afterwards, she found herself among a small group of faculty and students drinking tea in the hallway outside the lecture theatre. When someone suggested relocating to a common room, Ives put down his half-drunk tea, looking relieved, then made the counter-proposal of coffee in Starbucks.
“My treat,” he said, which swayed the balance.
