The lattices began to shift through the colours of the spectrum. He almost missed it, the swift subtle play of light beyond the sapiens range.
'How did he die?' Zach asked. And thought, orange.
All the lines became orange.
'Who?'
Violet, please. An indisputable display of violet appeared.
'Don't play the fool,' Zach said, striving to keep a smile from his face. 'Mateus, of course.'
With an athlete's speed Randall crossed the room. The slap cracked like thin ice under a skater's blades.
'I see we need to tighten discipline at the Foundation,' he said.
Zach held himself still, refusing even to lift a hand to his cheek. There would be no apology. Let the bastard throw him out, the dispensation was little more than a pretext anyway.
Cybil, somehow I'll find a way to help you. But you mustn't tell them about Max. Promise me you won't. Promise me with green.
'It was suicide, you know.' Randall flicked a glance at the tabletop, now displaying a spring meadow green with promise, and removed a coin from his pocket. He curled his hand into a loose fist, held the coin between his thumb and forefinger, and with a bland smile, walked it across the back of his hand along the first phalanx of his fingers. In an unbroken manoeuvre the coin travelled the underside of his hand and returned to the starting position. He repeated the trick several times, watching Zach the entire time. 'It takes a bit of practice. Care to try?'
When Zach shook his head, Randall flipped the coin into the air, where it seemed to hang for a moment, winking like a miniature beacon, before beginning its descent into his outstretched palm. He caught it deftly and tucked it back into his pocket.
'I've never heard of a simu killing himself,' Zach said. 'It must have been kept very quiet.'
A metallic gleam lit Randall's eyes. 'Of course. Surely you understand the need for circumspection. Suicide is always distressing, particularly when the victim is young. Think how Laura's parents would feel under similar circumstances.' Nothing so boorish as a smile, but the gleam intensified. 'Still, if she succumbed to a rare virus like the recent one, her father, outstanding medical man that he is, would be racked just as much by guilt. Don't you agree?'
* * *
In the lift Zach rested the back of his head against a wall panel and closed his eyes without keying in a destination. Ligeti's difficult, anguished second bagatelle. Lamentoso. Seven bars in, his inner voice ran down like a rusting clockwork mechanism. He straightened and stared at the touchpad. Music had been his home, and his refuge, as long as he could remember. Now it threatened to become an empty box, bereft of all but time's ratchet and clack.
Unlike Randall, Zach didn't keep small change at the ready in his pocket. After entering the code for the lift to return him to the laboratory floor, he withdrew three coins from his wallet and amused himself with a simultaneous three-coin walk, first with his right hand, then with his left. Randall was right about one thing: like music, it required practice.
* * *
The lift door slid shut before Zach realised that he'd got off at the wrong floor. Instead of the corridor which to the left led to a series of small offices for the neurotechs, a kitchen and conference room, a bioelectronics workshop, and Litchfield's own suite (his theatre and clean rooms, however, were in another wing), and to the right, the double security doors barricading the cognoscens interface unit, Zach found himself in a cramped, featureless vestibule. The walls were white, the floor covered in black coin-patterned PVC, and the air smelled faintly antiseptic, reminiscent of the chlorine which clung to Laura's hair when she rinsed it hastily after training. Oddest of all, another lift graced the opposite wall not two metres away. Despite his curiosity, he gave what amounted to an inner shrug and turned to summon his own lift again. After his session with Randall he had no desire to be caught wandering where he didn't belong, and in any case, Andy would be just about ready to vaporise a few billion of Zach's dendrites by now.
At first he wasn't alarmed not to see a call button for the lift. The facility engineers were always installing some sort of new gadgetry. He passed his hand in front of the door, then along the metal surround, then up and down the adjacent walls. He stepped back and approached again. Nonplussed, he tried enunciating a command. Politely.
'What the fuck?' he finally muttered.
The security centre would know his whereabouts; everybody was tracked. Why weren't they responding? There were never fewer than three people on duty, despite near-perfect algorithms for authentication.
The door behind him opened.
'Right, mates,' he said. 'If you prefer the other one.'
There was no operating panel. 'Third floor,' he said. The door shut almost noiselessly. Later he would berate himself for not being observant. And much later he would come to pinpoint this, albeit arbitrarily, as the moment when he left off expecting to disentangle the enigmatic-the utterly glorious-polyphony of life; when reason became counterpoint to the cantus firmus of his song of songs. No lift, whether at the Fulgur campus or elsewhere, lacked an alarm and emergency controls, and even a position indicator was required by city by-law. Almost at once, however, he noticed that the cab was descending. His luck, they'd stop at every sub-basement to hell, and every floor and mezzanine on the way back up.
'Listen, I'm late enough as it is. Can't you take me straight to CI?'
The lift halted. 'You are about to enter a restricted zone. When the door opens, please remain still during the security check.'
'There's some mistake. I want the third floor.' The situation was so singular, however, that he found his curiosity mounting. Randall would just have to make it good with Andy. Whatever the CEO had in store, it wasn't likely to be dangerous, not at this point, not till he got his money's worth.
The door slid back to reveal an impervious blue light, dense and clouded at first like a wall of ice, then clearing for a moment so that the only barrier to the cave beyond, its pool and bats and glittering flowstone, was his fear.
'Cybil?' he whispered.
In response the lift door shut in his face. 'Entry denied at this time. Please see Dr Zhou for clearance.'
'That's impossible.' he said. 'Zhou's dead.'
He could feel the lift begin to ascend.
'No, wait. Stop, please stop! Let me have one more look.'
But there was no answer; no voice, except the lyre of his own disordered, yearning thoughts that wander through eternity to return, narrowly, to the lived moment.
Chapter 40
Pitched echoes descant above the sound of water. Zach follows the flight of two-no, three-small silvery bats, wondering how the course of history would have differed if humans had been able to comprehend the language of animals. Less bloodshed or more? Sapiens have always preferred to rid themselves of inconvenient voices.
He studies the cave at length, then moves towards the pool. The light reminds him of l'heure bleue just before nightfall, a favourite of photographers and filmmakers. In summer it's the time when flowers release their heaviest opiate, but it's also an hour of uncertain visibility, particularly for simus whose aconal photoreceptors and subsidiary optic nerve play havoc with, temporarily, their superb eyesight; the hour in fact of his only motorbike accident, when he skidded to miss a girl on a bicycle, narrowly, dislocating a shoulder and breaking his collarbone. No one would have cared that her lights weren't working, himself least of all.
Even with blindsight he would sense if Laura were here, which doesn't stop him from peering behind the toadstools for a discarded towel, a pair of jeans, her trainers or socks. The yellow rubber ducky with motorcycle helmet she'd given him for a razz only proves that his memory is still intact. He picks it up, squeezes it, recalls how she laughed at the expression on his face at the awful squawk: 'An authentic biker's mating call, they swore at the shop. Or my money back.' The cave is warm, and he removes his mitts and cap and then his parka. When he reaches for her pendant, hunger swells within him, within and against and despite, its pressure compelling. Why does he always have to tremble?
After the funeral he bought himself a small handbuilt raku pot, misshapen and costly, whose torn mouth gives it the appearance of having been pounced on and chewed by a dog at the leather-hard stage. Most people would dismiss the pot as worthless, unable to see that its fragile beauty rests in its very imperfection, not least the contrast between the lustrous metallic blues and the crazing lines typical of raku firing, which is so unpredictable that pieces may explode from thermal stress.
His skin feels hot underneath the chain, on the verge of crackling. And still he is shivering, always shivering: shivering when her fingers played over the touchpad of his tattoo, as if entering a code to unlock his innermost self; shivering when she kissed his back, shivering when she brushed his hair, brushed and plaited it. In those moments he heard nothing, not even the gun which his neurons fire whenever there is silence. Semen is the body's own morphine for the disease of time.
On impulse he digs out his pocket knife, tests its edge, and whets it on the nearest rock, then loosens his hair from its leather tie. He lops off the plait of white and black hairs, and twists it round the seal, then drops the whole back over his head. It may be that Fulgur is arrogating his memory to its incomprehensible, and probably reprehensible, ends. It may be that Lev is merely some fancy bit of programming, determined from the very outset of the run. It may be that quantum entanglement of mind is an illusion, and Laura will no more hear him than the god to which her grandfather prays. Zach shuts his eyes and hugs his ribs; his shivering is getting worse.
'Laura,' he whispers, 'just this once, that's all I ask.'
Who is he fooling?
To fail now might well mean to fail forever. He passes his gaze one last time over the interior of the cave, over the objects he's furnished it with, as if to fix their thingness in his mind, then closes his eyes, brings his hands into position, licks his lips, and draws upon tactile memory. If every formation and every candle and every detail is perfect, why not this? Don't speak, he tells himself, afraid of the incantatory power of words themselves, which make and unmake in equal measure. Not in some primitive magical sense, but as interface between the amorphous white stuff out there and stellar dendrites or capped columns or needles, the beautiful yet impossibly fragile snow crystals of science, called forth only to melt away at the touch of your tongue.
No, don't speak, Zach. And above all, don't look. It may be that, like Eurydice, Laura belongs to the dark.
His embouchure forms automatically, his right thumb tenses to support the clarinet's weight, his other fingers flex above the keys, the reed welcomes his lower lip. Into his mind comes the memory of their second visit to the cave-his last, he'd sworn not to go back and transform it into a shrine to perfect happiness, perfect harmony, to that one perfect glissando, as fluid as the milky flowlight from candle and wall and pool which drips from Laura's skin when she clambers out and comes to him and lays her fingers on his wrist so that he stops playing but not the Gershwin which plays on and on her lips and will forever play in the cave of memory.
which
'Laura.'
darkens as if
'I've dreamt of you.' She lifts his hands one by one and kisses them gently. 'Angatkuqpak. Shaman of shamans.'
the candles are guttering
Unerringly she finds his tattoo, then her tongue meets his, and her forefinger strums the thickened vein in his cock.
in a chill draught
A low moan, and he opens his eyes to drag himself back from that cyanic precipice, that rhapsody in blue which is lethal to his concentration. At once the music is gone, above the sound of his harsh breathing there's only the keening of the wind, the crack and grate of the distempered ice. Lev is wrong, Zach can't do it on his own. Better the silence of the deaf than this strident lament: he blocks his ears but the tinnitus of his renegade blood merely amplifies his agitation. Time is an echo chamber with walls of bone. Which tone in a piece of music-which chord, which rest-is now? His mind is haemorrhaging ambient dread, is there internal bleeding oh god breathe there's so much noise just breathe just
With a cry Zach snatches up his parka. Shuddering with cold, he yanks it over his head. 'I told you to stay put,' he rages, jamming his arms into the sleeves. 'You bloody idiot. Why the fuck couldn't you listen?' He seizes the discarded knife and grabs a fistful of hair, wrenches it taut enough for his eyes to water, and hacks it off; another hank, then another. 'Damn you!' Slashing faster, he nicks a finger and howls. Moments later, he cuts himself again. Without bothering to staunch the blood he drops to his knees, letting the knife fall from his fingers, and begins to sob, a sound as raw as dying.
Except that death is inaudible, its diapason beyond even the cognoscens range.
Chapter 41
Obediently, the lift halted at the third floor. Zach stepped into the corridor, his eyes travelling from the familiar security doors to the ID card in his hand to the lens of the prominent surveillance camera. Mockery will get you nowhere, Jiao would say in a voice whose chilly menace had hovered over their days like a winged omen. Zach saluted the camera with a military gesture, then gave a tired laugh. Nowhere was exactly where he'd like to be.
'Where the fuck have you been?' Andy snarled as soon as Zach entered the prerun room.
'Randall insisted on seeing me.' Zach barely acknowledged Fabio, who ought to have explained. There was no other reason for his presence.
'I'll fetch Charles.' Andy limped away without a glance at his console, a sure sign his departure had been pre-arranged.
And sure enough, Fabio plunged into a rapidhit cross-examination which only ceased when Zach sank down onto a bench adjoining the neural imager and gripped his head as though it were too heavy to support without manual assistance. In the silence which followed, the carrion past smelled so sharp and rank that it brought tears to his eyes. 'Knackered,' he said in response to Fabio's frown. In a few days it would be Ben's birthday. Without a grave there could be no graveyard lilacs to sweeten the spring. The owlie's all rained and broken, Zach, can't you fix it? Not an owl, a crow, but don't touch, it's full of germs, must have been a cat.
