Authors: Ken MacLeod
‘Just in case you change your mind,’ Fiona said. ‘One tablet, down with water. The sooner the better, obviously, but it can sort out quite a lot even after six months.’
Hope shifted her gaze from the packet to Fiona’s face. She flexed one shoulder.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
Fiona made for the hall.
‘You will think about it, won’t you?’ she said as she shrugged into her fleece.
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Hope, opening the door.
Fiona gave her a tight smile and went out, into the now thicker snow. Hope got the door closed before she started crying. Fiona wasn’t a villain. Fiona was just a person who represented an impersonal system closing in and grinding them down. That was how Hope saw her.
That morning, Hugh arrived at his work shortly after 9.30. He wasn’t late: as far as he was concerned, the billed-for day began when he set off on his bicycle, and he’d set off at 8.00 prompt. The shower had ended as he reached Acton – or rather, he was out from under its cloud, which he could see behind him whenever he
glanced over his shoulder. Which was often, given that many of the vehicles on the road were almost as quiet as his bike, and a lot faster and heavier, and the cyclists more dangerous than any of them. Unlike most of the heavier vehicles, bikes were steered by humans, and almost all by cyclists. Hugh rode a bike, but he didn’t consider himself a cyclist.
As he whizzed through the traffic and raced across junctions and around roundabouts, Hugh found himself preoccupied – though not distracted, because the parts of his brain that dealt with cycling in traffic had long since laid down reflexes that operated below the level of his conscious thought – by the vision, indeed the full-sensory hallucination he’d had the previous evening. Sight, sound and smell; and to all appearances an awareness of Hugh’s presence, though perhaps not that of anyone or anything else in the hall or in the house.
Hugh, for reasons that will later become painfully clear, was a confirmed scoffer about anything that smacked of the supernatural or even of the paranormal. He was less troubled by his visions than might be supposed. In his early teens he had read with delight the poem of Lucretius, in a tatty old paperback published by Sphere Books in 1969 with a Max Ernst picture on the cover. He’d found it in the attic of his parents’ house, which had once been a Free Church manse, amid a stash of dusty old rationalist works, presumably from the minister’s library. (Hugh had only made sense of this when he’d noticed that most of the books were critiques of the historical record of the Roman Catholic Church.) On the inside cover, the pencilled words were just legible:
Here rolls
The large verse of Lucretius, who raised
His index-finger and did strike the face
Of fleeting Time, leaving a scar of thought
The rain of ages shall not wash away.
No source for the quote was given. For years, Hugh had attributed the lines to the long-departed minister himself, inspired no doubt by the prevailing weather of his parish. It was an obscure thrill imparted by the lines that impelled him to turn over the pages of the book, and then to read it. He found a great deal in those pages that left imprints on his brain, but none more than the poet’s explanation of how the existence of the gods was known: because they were seen and heard, in visions and in dreams. From their distant milieu between the worlds – in outer space, as Hugh read it – faint images were transmitted, which sometimes impinged on human senses, producing impressions of the gods: correct impressions, as far as they went. The existence of the gods was an entirely empirical matter.
From this Hugh had concluded, to his great relief, that when he saw and heard people that other people couldn’t, he wasn’t crazy. He was
seeing things
all right, but seeing things that really were
out there
, in a quite literal sense. At thirteen he’d heard and read enough about dark matter and exotic particles and quantum uncertainty and the possible infinity of possible universes to be convinced that the nature of things was as yet unfathomed. Perhaps he was seeing the same gods that the
Greek materialists had perforce admitted that they – like everyone else – saw. A few years later, further reading and online searching led him to speculate that the people he saw, in their barbaric attire, were perhaps real people from the past – not that he was seeing ghosts, but seeing into the past, reflected in some mirror of the face of fleeting Time – and that they, in seeing him (as he did not doubt they did), saw into the future. He even wondered, idly, what they made of him – a mage perhaps, able to conjure strange powers.
The Leosich had a name for the phenomenon, he’d learned on oblique enquiry. They called it the second sight. That sounded natural enough to satisfy the strictest materialist – and, indeed, the Leosich saw nothing supernatural in the phenomenon. It was simply a gift some people had, no more remarkable than any other talent. It even followed the rules of Mendellian inheritance for a recessive gene, which (Hugh thought) quite possibly explained its former incidence among the locals.
There was a reason why his enquiry had to be oblique.
At Ealing, Hugh turned off the Broadway and around a few corners into Bidwell Crescent, a long residential side street of Victorian-built semi-detached houses. It differed from his own street, Victoria Road, in that it was three times longer, the houses were built of red brick rather than sandstone, most of them didn’t have basement flats, and about a third of them were empty: doors barred with nailed cross-planks, windows
masked with charred and spray-bombed chipboard, front plots or patios choked with weeds that in turn were being choked out by the fast-growing saplings of New Trees whose branches’ shapes – circular or rectangular, smooth or serrated, soft and pale or hard and dark – indicated to Hugh’s practised carpenter’s eye the type of product-plantation from which their seeds had (somehow, despite much small print and large promises) escaped.
He pulled in at number 37 and swung off his bike. He lifted the bike on to one shoulder and trotted up the steps to the door, which was already open. A buzzing in the sky made him glance up, though he knew what it was. He always looked back at police drones. This one, he watched out of sight, over the rooftops to the west. It was the drones you didn’t see you had to worry about. These flew at fifty thousand feet and struck without warning. This one was no doubt just keeping an eye out for Naxal pop-ups in Southall.
Inside, the floorboards were gritty with cement spatters and soft with dust. The stairway had been torn out. Access to the first floor was by ladder. Hugh parked his bike behind a stack of paint tins, unfurled his overall and climbed into it, and set his dust mask on his forehead. The elastic tugged at his neck hairs, then settled. He followed the Radio One sound into the front room, waved at Ashid the plasterer, backed out and stepped into the kitchen. The kettle was not long boiled. Hugh brewed up an instant coffee in the unwashed mug he’d used the day before, and ambled into the dining room. There, he stood and sipped for five minutes, contemplating. The electrics were in
place. Ashid had finished the plastering and painting. The floor was a tip. All that remained to be done was the woodwork. Its raw material was most of what made the floor a tip. Hugh’s tools, trestles and workbench, and some rubble and splashes from Ashid’s work, made the rest.
Cornices. Window frame. Door frame. The overmantel. Skirting boards. Their components had been grown to function, and now had to be cut to size and fixed in place. Hugh put his empty mug down on the raw windowsill and got to work. Through the morning the music from the radio trickled in whenever he paused. On the hour the news updates came: the war, the weather. The war was spreading from India and the weather was coming from Russia. Overshadowing both: the Warm War. No change.
Aberdeen. A city making a sharp turn, from oil rigs to windmills, with bits flying off – jobs, businesses, whole districts – from the centrifugal force of the swerve. A city of sharp edges, with a hole at its heart. You came out of the station and found yourself facing roadways, flyovers, walls; you had to walk half a kilometre and turn corners just to find shops. Apardion, the Vikings had called it, and Hugh liked that name. It called to mind a cold and barbaric past, like something out of the Conan stories, out of the Hyborean Age – itself named after the Greek word for the people of the far north, the Hyperboreans, the folk from beyond the north wind. The people in the sunshine beyond winter …
The barbarian he’d seen last night, for instance – he could have been a Hyperborean. Aberdeen, when Hugh and Hope had been students there – that had been Hyperborean too. That summer. The last good summer. The last one when you could feel the Earth’s warming in your bones. Ever since, you could see the warming on television and online, you could see the droughts and dustbowls and bergs, but you couldn’t feel it. What you felt was cold and damp. Hugh remembered taking the bus with Hope from the campus into town on what now seemed like many long, warm evenings, talking non-stop through the ride, walking and then reeling between the remaining city centre pubs, and taking the bus back after midnight with the sky still bright to the north and a half-light gloaming at street level when the nightly hours-long power cut had extinguished all the street lamps.
How keen he’d been then to learn, to graduate, how eager he’d been to get to work, to get the wave and wind turbines turning! Green power to pick up the slack and fill the gap left by the black coal and the peak oil and the unbuilt dirty nukes. And then,
wham
, sudden as a mine closure, solar panels had started spreading across the Sahara like lily pads, powering half of Europe and the African Lion economies into the bargain, and syn bio tech had come on stream, springing full-grown from the bench like the Incredible Hulk bursting his lab coat, a great green monster that sucked carbon from the air and sprouted wood, pissed oil, and shat diamonds.
Hugh found his gaze wandering to some uninstalled window panes out in the lobby. Precisely sized to fit the frames – you
couldn’t cut the panes. There was nothing to cut them
with
. You could cut glass with diamond, but these panes
were
diamond. Laminated industrial sheet diamond. The very existence of such a thing still astonished Hugh. He’d read all kinds of excited speculation about its possible applications as a new structural material, but the diamond age was still a long way off. The stuff could still only be made in laminated sheets, or thin films like the surface layers of Hope’s work glasses. Even as sheets, though, it was already being used in America for far more than windows: there, you could buy entire prefabricated houses as kits – walls and windows and roofs – and just glue the slabs together. This would come here, he knew, before too many years had passed. It would not be long before the whole of a house would be pre-shaped diamond and new wood, and its assembly a job that any clueless householder could do with an Allen key and a tube of superglue, like flat-pack furniture from IKEA. And then building-site work would be – what? Digging a hole and maybe laying foundations.
When Hugh had been a lad, back on the wind-power farm where his father was an engineer, he’d looked up to the labourers. The steady labourers, that is, not the natives like Murdo Helmand of the glass eye, who when he wasn’t working simply drank. A lot of the Leosich were like that: they worked when they felt like it, and the rest of the time they drank. They got around the prohibitive alcohol taxes by distilling their own spirit, a harsh thrapple-burning usquebaugh they called peat-reek. Others – or sometimes the same people; the groups overlapped, or alternated, serially – frowned on the drink and
went to church and sometimes under the preaching they got the
curach
, the concern about their souls, and after moping for a while found that God had their names in His book, and they changed their ways. They gave up the peat-reek and the ceilidh and the poaching. But they never shopped the location of the illicit stills and the smoky bothans, or the snares and shotguns. The English and Polish labourers were different: calm, deliberate men with steady hands and steady girlfriends, and when he was a wee lad they’d been Hugh’s idea of a man. He’d always felt slightly awkward, slightly soft and posh and middle-class in their company, and in that of their kids – boys and girls alike, as it happened. He’d known he was going to be an engineer, he’d always known that, but he’d determined to be as tough as the roughest bricklayer on a site.
And now here he was, sawing new wood to size. Joinery. A posh, soft, middle-class job. That was just the way of it, all over the bloody world. When Ashid the plasterer knocked off for a break and came in with coffee, he – as nearly always – talked about his PhD in economics. He had a grudge that he deserved better.
At least you got as far as a fucking PhD, Hugh thought, wiping the back of his wrist across his mouth. What he said was: ‘Things will pick up.’
Ashid laughed. ‘This
is
things picking up.’
Hope left the carton containing the fix on the table all morning, ignoring it while she worked. Every so often she’d take off
her glasses and look at it. When she stopped for lunch, she reached over, picked up the packet, and opened it. Inside were a folded leaflet and a plastic and foil card with a single bubble about a centimetre long. She turned it over in her hands. The bubble was transparent. The fix itself was a grey, almost metallic-looking capsule that tapered from the middle to two blunt ends. Like a fishing weight. A magic bullet. After a while she pushed the leaflet and the card with the fix back in the box.