His clarinet case toppled over when she opened the front door, and she righted it with surprise. Was there some fundi reason he'd put it on the porch? Something to do with acoustics? It was one of several sturdy plastic models he owned for difficult conditions, and typical for him, a vintage instrument: a Bundy, wasn't it? Wooden clarinets tend to crack in the cold, he'd said.
She didn't have far to search. Yesterday she'd been yearning to make a snowman; this morning Zach had built one near the path she'd cleared. But not a snowman-a crow about the height of a fair-sized dog, a lab or collie. And in its beak was wedged a paper cylinder.
Laura unrolled the piece of paper. It contained a hand-drawn music staff, some notes. Across the top Zach had written in ink: Clarinet Sonata in E Major, For Laura. And at the bottom: to be continued . . .
It took her a few moments to recognise what she'd probably known all along-she'd better carry a ball of stout twine for the labyrinths into which Zach's mind would lead her.
'You crazy wonderful idiot,' she whispered.
Back in the house she nibbled on a hunk of cheese and an apple while she assembled the ingredients for scones. Plenty of homemade jam on the pantry shelves, packets and packets of longlife cream and milk. No matter how much she resented her mum's obsessions, there were times when they could be useful. As Laura dumped flour into a bowl and added baking powder and salt, her mind sifted through possible objects to leave for Zach as a reply to his message. She poured in cream, then stirred. Too thin, the dough looked like soft drifts of snow, her wooden spoon leaving sleigh tracks for the love-hungry to follow. That was it! Dropping the spoon with a grin, she wiped her hands on her jeans and went to rummage in Max's room. He never threw anything away; his old colouring books ought to be there somewhere.
In fact, it didn't take her long to find the yellowing book. Laura ripped out a picture of the haughty Snow Queen on her sledge, which Max had coloured mostly in blues and silver, with odd touches-long black fingernails, a purple shadow along one cheek and her throat. With a red felt tip Laura scribbled across the top: Come inside, she can't have you! Then she rolled it up, slipped an elastic round it, and dashed outside without bothering with boots and jacket to lever it firmly into the snowcrow's beak.
The scones were cooling on a rack when she heard the sound of the clarinet. Again she tore through the cottage and yanked open the door. There he was in the snow, nose and cheeks reddened, clarinet case slung over his shoulder by a strap, eyes golden with laughter, playing. A madman.
When he saw her, he launched into something soulful, and she stood hugging herself till he'd finished.
'It's wonderful,' she said. 'What is it?'
'It's by O.V. Wright, an American who died in the late 70s. The usual story-drugs, hard life. Some of his stuff really hurts. I've got a compilation of his songs back at the flat, if you want to listen to them.' His smile was hard to interpret. 'You've still got the key.'
'I'll wait for you.'
He tucked the clarinet under his arm and picked his way towards her, the sheet from the colouring book poking out of his pocket along with his gloves.
'What's this one called?' she asked.
'We're Still Together.'
* * *
'When did you realise that Max was a simu?' Laura asked, her mouth full of scone. 'How did you realise?'
'It's really your brother's story,' Zach said, then ducked. 'OK, OK.' He licked whipped cream from his forefinger and took a long sip of tea. 'Delicious scones.'
'And jam. And cream. And tea. When you've run out of stuff to compliment, you might try answering my question.'
God, but could he smile.
'For a long time-months probably-I'd noticed Max watching me at school, but at first I thought it was . . .' Zach fished a stray hair from his plate. 'You know.'
'You're too prickly. Sometimes it's just ordinary curiosity.'
Zach studied the hair for a moment before flicking it to the floor. 'Max hasn't told you about the mute swan?'
'Another animal he's rescued?'
'Not quite.'
Zach prodded a crumb with a fingertip, then skated it round his plate like a reluctant novice with wobbly ankles. Laura waited, silence her sharpest blade. Max had gone through an ice hockey phase when he was about nine or ten, reading everything he could find, dreaming of games and leagues and stardom-or had he? Once she would have sworn she understood him through and through, his skull as transparent as a new skin of ice on water-only the faintest refraction to distort his inner depths. The ice hadn't merely thickened; now coated with frost, it had become a half-silvered surface which transformed the entire world into his personal spyroom. Except, of course, that it had always been-in her own blindness she hadn't noticed.
Waiting, Laura imagined ice-skating with Zach on the lake, rolling the huge round base of a snowman, heating the sauna and rolling in the snow . . . Was there any way to keep him here for another day? Round and round her eyes chased his finger chased his thoughts. Laura, someone called. She jerked round, the sudden movement slicing into Zach's reverie.
'What?' he asked.
'Nothing. I thought I heard a voice.'
He listened carefully, then shook his head. 'Nobody's there.' Though she tried to keep her face blank, he reached over and took her hand. 'What's wrong?'
She shrugged, but his silence could be very insistent.
'It's nothing, really,' she said. 'Just sometimes, for a moment, I hear my mother.'
'Yelling?'
'I guess.'
This time he traced a finger along her lifeline, so delicately that she shivered at the sensation. It felt as though he were writing on her skin with a ghostly quill and invisible ink.
'She doesn't own you, Laura.'
Laura smiled, a decent effort. There was no point explaining that she could still hear the echo, as eerie as Max's mimic hootings of an owl. And was afraid she always would.
'You were going to tell me about the swan.'
His fingers went back to crumbling fragments of scone.
'Zach?'
'Max had never heard the voice of an animal before. It scared him. Terrified him. I came home to find him huddled against the door to my flat, but it took hours before he'd speak.'
'When was this?'
'Not long after the adder bite.' Zach spoke evenly, she couldn't tell if his gargoyle grin concealed a deep-running hurt. 'Just as well, otherwise your parents might have noticed something was wrong with Max.'
'Yeah, right.'
'Try not to blame your brother. It's been very difficult for him, and secrecy becomes a habit.'
'You ought to know.' When he looked away, she felt ashamed. Like poorly controlled blade edges, conversations with him always seemed to skate off in unwelcome directions. 'Listen, I'm sorry. All I meant was it's my parents, not Max, who'd be at fault. My mum sees only what she wants to see, and as for my dad-' She stopped short, annoyed to find herself on the verge of a rant. It was time to resurface the rink. 'Please, let's start over. What happened with the swan?'
'Max was coming home from football practice and made a detour through the docklands.'
'That's mad!'
'Yeah, well. He wanted to check up on an injured water vole he'd been nurturing. He was afraid the reed bed might have frozen over.'
'Don't voles hibernate in winter?'
'Not according to Max. They burrow into mudbanks, even under the snow.'
'What about the swan?'
'I'm coming to it. Max located his vole, fed it, tossed some stale bread to a group of swans in the river. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the heightened acoustic range of most simus, so the blisters were able to sneak up on him.'
'Who?'
'Simu slang. People who feed on kids. Not simus, obviously, otherwise he'd have sensed them.'
'Pervy types?'
'No. More like hucks who vend fresh meat to the highest bidder. Usually to China, where they're still exotic.'
'Shit. What happened?'
'The swan happened. A big brute of a cob, Max said. Told Max to throw himself to the ground, then flew in hissing like Vengeance itself. A few seconds later, several other swans joined the attack. Their wings are terribly powerful.'
Laura began to laugh. 'I don't believe it! Makes a good story, though. What did Max actually do? In football it's his imagination, and his snark, that make him so brilliant. He's always pulling something unexpected. Good thing there aren't any rules banning telepaths from playing.'
'If you'd seen Max, you wouldn't-' Zach broke off and tilted his head.
'What?'
He held up a hand, but after a few seconds flipped back his hair in a gesture that in fact reminded Laura of her grandfather, who kept his elegant silverwhite coif just a touch overlong. 'Like a mistress,' he liked to quip. Once Laura had overhead her Aunt Alice muttering vicious remarks to her sisters, though neither of them would have dared to say anything to their father openly. Otherwise there was nothing at all similar about Zach and Granddad, except perhaps their startling intelligence, their musicality. And their fondness for Max.
'My turn to be hearing things,' Zach said.
'Not any swans, I trust?'
'Look, it's not like Max claims they have human language.'
'He's always had a special rapport with animals. You mean he hears their thoughts?'
'No, he doesn't. I'm not sure it's even possible cross-species. It would be interesting to see what would happen with an alien intelligence. If any are out there, which seems unlikely.'
'But you said-'
'-that the swan spoke to him. OK, that was the abridged version.'
'And the whole text?'
'Fulgur has been dabbling in some very freaky, very secret, and very illegal transgenic engineering.'
Laura stared at Zach while she worked out whether you could possibly adapt a human nervous system for a bird. 'Where would the brain fit?'
'It depends on how you define brain.'
'Could you please try to make sense?'
'Your dad could tell you a lot more about it than me. I'm not privy to that kind of information. But piecing together what I know about neurochip development, and what Max learned from the swan, it appears that Fulgur is playing with uploading consciousness in different ways.'
'AI, you mean?'
'Not exactly.' He hesitated, and Laura could see he was reluctant to continue. 'Look, I'm not supposed to talk about what I do there.'
'You don't seem particularly loyal to Fulgur.'
'They pay the bills.' He gestured angrily. 'They own us.'
'There's got to a be way to do something about the serum. I've been netting round. Isn't a monopoly on certain kinds of medicine illegal? Under the Essential Drugs Act?'
'Yeah, except who wants to bring a test case?' His laugh was short, and bitter. 'For a handful of freaks? And anyway, challenging Fulgur is never easy-or particularly healthy.'
'Aren't you overdoing the sinister stuff just a bit?'
'Then ask your dad what goes on when Fulgur exercises its simu option. Or better yet, what goes on when someone refuses to accept the contract. Ask him why he's kept Max's secret for so long.'
'Because my mum-' she began, then stopped. 'God, how stupid of me, I should have realised, Dad must have faked Max's gatlas.'
They were silent, both aware of the consequences of such a stratagem. Only someone who was very desperate, or utterly mad, skirted public exposure in quite that way. There had been dissidents in every society, they'd learned about the phenomenon in history and political science and even psychology, but this was different. The world had changed.
'You're afraid for Max,' Laura said slowly.
'Yeah.' He pushed back from the table and stood, resting his long beautiful hands on the back of his chair. 'For all of you.'
A brackish scum on the tea in her mug, and barely lukewarm. Nevertheless Laura swallowed some before getting up to help Zach, who had begun to clear the table. There was plenty of hot water from the range, and she enjoyed watching his hands at work-the sure, graceful movements for even the most humdrum task. They never seemed hurried no matter how fast his fingers flew. She touched him on the arm.
'Can we at least wait till afternoon before leaving? There's still so much to talk about, and I was looking forward to building a snowman with you.'
'My crow too tame?'
'Why did you pick a crow? Everyone thinks they're such pests.'
'A sadly maligned bird. They're clever and loyal and playful, if a bit noisy. Often fearless too.' He made a raucous sound in his throat, half laugh, half gurgle, and Laura groaned before aiming a finger pistol at his head. 'And hard to exterminate,' he added, now smiling in that wry way of his. 'Though individually not long-lived, their numbers are on the increase.'
'I like your crow just fine.' Laura slipped a hand under the waistband of his jeans so that her fingers rested over his navel. 'But once in a while I crave a nice round belly, something with heft.' She gave him enough of a pinch for him to yelp and grab for her, his hands dripping sudsy water. The ensuing scuffle might have given them a few more minutes if Zach hadn't stopped to remove a twist of hair from her mouth, but there's always a bully waiting behind a tuft of maram grass to kick your castle to ruins, your lives to arid dune.
Zach went still. An electric stillness, the sort Laura remembered from the one time on holiday that she'd been stung underwater by a jellyfish, and the excruciating surge of pain had cracked the hourglass of her skull, so that all thought and all volition drained into the sea, and there was nothing but sensation, she was nothing but pain, and she'd been unable, for a few seconds or as many minutes, to move. Or breathe, which had probably kept her from drowning in the strong undercurrent.
