‘Stop.’
She considers. In general, she allows the Witness to check her own intuitions and to crunch numbers. She does not like to ask the machine for clues. The whole point of an Inspector is to follow her own path and find things that an analytical tool, however complex and algorithmically mysterious, cannot see. This next question falls somewhere in the grey area. Well. ‘Significant points of confluence: Kyriakos segment, Athenais segment.’
– Kidnapping; a journey into darkness; chaos; gods and monsters of the classical and Roman Mediterranean, especially Firespine and—
‘Stop.’
The recitation stops immediately, between phonemes.
‘Kyriakos doesn’t mention Firespine.’
– The Patriarch, Nikolaos Megalos, references it obliquely in his first meeting with Kyriakos: ‘We shall once more have fire in our spines, and Greece shall be torn no longer.’
‘Confidence?’
– There is no immediate ground to imagine it is significant, but it is a specific term with a low likelihood of random occurrence. The most plausible reason for its presence is that it meant something to Hunter and she included it unconsciously. That meaning need not be of interest, and yet it may assist in uncovering more about her.
‘Formal confidence rating?’
– The likelihood that it is directly relevant is fractionally less than eight per cent.
Mielikki Neith stretches her shoulders against her pillow, wincing as she finds bruises on the bone. First Kyriakos the banker, and now Athenais: fleshed, persuasive histories that do not belong in Diana Hunter’s head. Stories that hinder access to her thoughts under neural examination. It is posited in the academic literature – which the Inspector has now skimmed in preparation for her meeting with the perfumed Oliver Smith – but this is in her understanding the first sighting in the wild of an actual Scheherazade Gambit. Not one story but two, so that as the investigator begins to reach the bottom of the first, so another emerges to renew the defence. When that begins to fail, the subject can revert to the first stream, and so on, the graph of this pattern giving the technique its more formal name: Sine-reinsertive Occultation. It’s still futile, and no doubt incrementally more strenuous and damaging, which may well be significant in the Hunter case. Still: impressive to hold two such fantasies in the mind at once. Neith would have doubted it was possible.
She finds herself asking how the attending interview team would have reacted. Might they have assumed that such a complex defence entailed something troubling to defend? Perhaps, especially as the stories are not entirely disconnected. In each of them, a malign divinity touches the real, and threatens to tear the world apart. That tantalising hint of threat, unverified and – unless the walls can be brought down – unverifiable, is exactly the kind of thing interrogators have nightmares about. In which case they would have become urgent and even hasty. Was that haste fatal to a woman with nothing to conceal save her atavistic distaste for intrusion? But if it was, what about Regno Lönnrot?
– String not found, the Witness says. She must be speaking out loud.
She starts to compose her next question, but the white ceiling is endlessly far away. She settles comfortably into her sheets and closes her eyes. The machine will wake her in good time, and the bed is warm.
The Victoria Embankment these days always stands, to Neith’s eye, on the brink of catastrophe. The engineering genius of 1870 did not anticipate the consequences of two-hundred-odd years of global warming, and even the subsequent reinforcement only emphasises the comparative scale of the wide grey Thames and the sea beyond. A river man once told her, as they trawled the silty water for a lost tourist, that it required only the concurrence of three natural events – a spring tide, a storm surge driving water inward from the estuary, and a heavy rain over Wales and the Downs – to flood the Parliament buildings and some of London’s most expensive real estate. So far there had only ever been two out of three, but the day must come, he’d said. Sooner or later, it must.
Under a Victorian gaslamp now housing an organic diode bulb, Dr Oliver Smith stands waiting in a raincoat by Ede & Ravenscroft and a charcoal suit. There’s even a watch chain, the fob tucked into his waistcoat pocket. He wants to belong in the setting, the Inspector considers, or to it. Smith could be standing on the other side of a hole in time, a man from 1950 or 1890. He wears the sartorial markers of establishment and education without irony. He is not satirising the trace elements of the twentieth century and the public school system’s military caste, he simply is their inheritor in a better time – white, arrogant, brilliant – and doesn’t propose to pretend otherwise. Brown hair blows in the breeze coming in off the river. Age indeterminate, and she suspects made so by quite expensive cosmetic surgery. He is clean-shaven, but if he uses cologne – she had assumed, because of Tubman, that he used too much – the wind is snatching it away.
– Diffuse Imperial referencing, the Witness says, nostalgic reassurance associated with fictional and historic authority. Sherlock Holmes and Winston Churchill, with notes of romantic leading men: Fitzwilliam Darcy, James Bond.
She already doesn’t like him.
‘Thank you for meeting me here, rather than in the office,’ Smith says as he extends an ungloved hand. ‘I do treasure my outside time.’
Neith smiles, taking it. ‘So do I.’
The machine prompts her to turn outwards, inviting him to resume his contemplation of the water. She has engaged the rolling kinesic assistant for this interview; Smith is under essentially the same scrutiny he would be if he were strapped into a lie detector, the local observation cameras and audio pickups feeding the Witness, along with Smith’s own devices, with more than enough data to give a precise assessment of his levels of stress and excitement. Based on these perceptions, the Witness will instruct Neith on the timing of her questioning, the pace, the flow. The conversation will feel to Smith as if he has met a deeply interesting and sympathetic person and is sharing only what he always meant to.
Neith turns obediently, and a moment later Smith does, too, unconsciously echoing her posture. Good.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but it’s necessary.’
‘No, of course,’ Smith says. ‘A woman died in custody. I understand entirely. Do you know yet – that is, if one may ask: was she guilty of anything?’
‘Resistance,’ the Inspector says after a moment, and lets the word hang there in the air.
‘Yes, a true Scheherazade, and you think probably autogenous. That would be remarkable.’
‘But not impossible?’
‘Not impossible,’ he agrees. ‘A level of difficulty greater than merely accepting an external structure. But perhaps the rooting in one’s own creativity is what gives it strength.’
‘Rooting?’ Orchids.
‘It grows from her, inevitably.’
‘It’s made of her. Perhaps of her life?’
‘Allegorically. Indirectly, it must be, surely? Who else does she have to work with? What is it like to be a bat?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Precisely. And if you imagine being a bat, what are you imagining?’
The Witness whispers in her ear, but she already knows the answer. ‘Being me being a bat.’
Smith beams. ‘Quite so.’
‘So these stories …’
‘Must by definition echo her own life. How closely …’ Smith spreads his hands. ‘But I’d bet each one contains elements that are significant to her, either by close analogy or symbolically.’
‘Could you identify those areas?’
‘I, personally? I’m not sure. My office, definitely, in time. Though exactly how much time would depend on what other material we had to help us. And time, of course, is the issue. We are fully contracted to the System, you understand, so how much time we could give you wouldn’t be up to me. Exigencies of our work.’
She nods, letting the Witness tell her when to turn and deliver her next question in response to his l
ook of readiness. The recommendation calls for schoolgirlish awe, but she doesn’t have any, and frankly wouldn’t know where to get some. She settles on student confusion, and reminds herself to recommend an update.
‘What is tidal flow, exactly? Why does the Turnpike Trust need experts in … whatever it is you do?’
‘Oh,’ he laughs, waving one hand in the air. Only in Britain do experts denigrate their own specialism. ‘We’re the masters of intangibles and prediction. It all begins with traffic jams, if you can believe it. The city is tidal, and not just because of the river.’ Fingers flick towards it, fold up again. ‘People come to work in the morning, leave in the evening. There are cross currents from tourists – transport hubs. It’s complex. We manage the interactions. When you get stuck in the Blackwall Tunnel, that’s me having a very bad day. The end of the football season is always a complete – well, I won’t use the word I was going to use, I’ll let you fill it in. And in the end it’s not real. It’s perceptual. The weather forecast says one thing, the public mood says another, the economy is up or down, the news is good or bad. What fuzzy variables produce what decisions that result in a snarl-up at Hanger Lane? You have to understand that over the course of a year, bad traffic is massively expensive in terms of lost business, public health, unnecessary consumption of resources, and that’s before you factor in the soft variables like how traffic delays influence whether people consider they have had a positive overall experience doing business here. Our performance at Tidal Flow makes a genuine difference to the figures for the capital. So we’re a hotchpotch. Behavioural economics, mathematics, of course neuroscience. Self-organising criticality. They hate us at university departments, because everything we publish is interdisciplinary and doesn’t fit their models, but it’s evidence-based so they have to pay attention. Models are never quite good enough. The territory is always new.’
She lets her face continue to register uncertainty, even confusion. Oh, Oliver, you’re so clever, I will never understand unless you say it straight out. He smiles, evidently encouraged.
‘We turn broadly unconnected data into narratives, narratives into data we can understand and work with. We investigate, and strive to influence, the sense of the world people invest in every morning when they choose their route to work, so that they actually get there sometime before noon. We have to know what they’re thinking and then give them the information they haven’t yet realised they want, so that they know which method will serve them best. Quite often, of course, they take one route over and over again, out of habit. Not much to be done there. But there are what you might call floating voters, people who are actively looking for the most efficient journey, or the most relaxed. I always envy those ones: soft seat commuters. It strikes me as a very good way to live. They’re generally employed by newer firms with flexible hours, they take their work home with them, show a high index of satisfaction. They live longer, too, and there’s no measurable difference in income distribution across the group … Well. One day, perhaps, I shall retire to one of those companies. But that’s what we do. We help people in their chosen direction. We remind them to ask themselves where they want to go and how they want to get there, and then we help them do it the right way. But the important thing is the how: by creating and understanding narratives and what they are inside the brain and where they touch the real world.’
He puffs air through his cheeks. ‘So I suppose we’re – all right, “experts” – who might be able to understand the sort of thing that the Hunter woman was apparently doing inside her own head. I say “might” because it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. In the past we’ve assisted your department, quite successfully, often with people who process differently, who maybe have had brain accidents in the past or even who are born with one or another sense missing and whose brains have repurposed the areas that normally deal with that sense to do something else. This is – well. It’s on another order, to be honest. I imagine some of the straight-out neuro people will work this one for years.’
The Inspector too puffs air through her own cheeks, sympathetic to his amazement.
– There will be a break in the clouds in ten seconds, the Witness advises. The view eastwards will be striking.
They turn together into a blaze of oil paint fire: London out of time.
Smith looks over at her, and smiles. It is their first eye contact since they began to talk shop, and she responds before the System nudges her to do so, smiling in turn.
‘You have the serendipity flag active,’ Smith says. ‘Do you enjoy it?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s one of mine. A side benefit.’ He laughs. ‘Would probably have made my fortune, if I’d come up with it at the weekend, as it were, and it wasn’t covered under contract. I thought about pretending that was how it was. Really had to wrestle my conscience, until I remembered the System would know the answer perfectly well. So … “Easy come, easy go.” That’s tidal behaviour, too.’
A personal confidence. The kinesic assistant is in raptures. Green bars all the way up. Maximum rapport, subject entirely cooperative. The moment on which everything hangs – unbidden, the Inspector thinks: Kairos. ‘So what would you have done? With Hunter.’
For a longish while he doesn’t speak. Then finally he shrugs.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she? So one’s first responses are the wrong ones, by definition. I think I’d have reckoned just to push through. No one’s ever suggested a Scheherazade could be indefinitely maintained. But if it wasn’t working … A counter-narrative. Recombine Hunter’s sense of self. But it would be quite difficult. The issue would be … well. It would come down to who was the better artist.’
‘Could you have done what she did?’
He shrugs. ‘I suppose so, if I’d come up with it, and if I’d been sufficiently motivated. The possibility is there in the technology. And in the brain. But it’s a question of conviction. I don’t see the need, so I can’t imagine actually doing it. It seems so unnecessary.’
She nods, and drops her last question as if it’s a formality. Classic Columbo.
‘Have you ever heard of something called Firespine?’
He shudders. ‘Sounds like infrastructure.’
Summing himself up perfectly.
*
As the Inspector walks away from the riverside and back towards Piccadilly’s bustle, the Witness informs her that one copy of The Mad Cartographer’s Garden is available at an antiquarian bookseller which is very nearly on the way. She considers her physical state: tired again, but not so much so; aching, but not hurting.
– A rickshaw will be with you in two minutes, the Witness murmurs as she reaches her decision, and she smiles.
The rickshaw has a warm velour seat that almost swallows her, and for a moment she wants it to take her straight home. She stiffens her spine a little: this is what professionals do. Even tired, even injured, they show up and follow the clues. The rickshaw darts down two narrow streets, then turns and crosses over a third on a bright white walkway which rises from old London’s York stone like the tentacle of something from a deeper sea. She spots Shand & Co. immediately, a wood-panelled hermit crab nestling by the lower reaches of a coral tower, last survivor of some feeding frenzy among the starfish. The shopfront has split paint and mortise and tenon joints, and the new window glass with its safety mark in one corner is rippled in simulation of an old, uneven making. A bell on a coiled brass spring tinkles as she enters, the sound bringing out from behind the counter a genial middle-aged fellow in the fat uncle mode, who extends his hand.
‘I’m Saul Shand,’ he says, earnest, but with just a little bit of flash. ‘Welcome, and don’t let me disturb you. Browse and be silent or ask what you will in the certainty of discretion and scholarship. This is no lair of chattering bouquinistes; be assured there will be no tote bags and no branded pencils. We are – that is to say that I am – entirely at your service. Good morning.’
The Inspector retrieves her fingers ??
? Shand’s grip is pleasantly warm but a little succulent – and wonders aloud whether he might help her find his copy of The Mad Cartographer’s Garden.
Shand’s expression flickers with what might be a kind of sympathy, as for one stricken with an incurable affliction, but he nods. ‘We can but try,’ he agrees.
And try he does, first in the main shelves and then in among the more expensive first editions and the locked cases which house his treasures. Then he goes back behind the counter and consults first a predictably antiquated terminal keyboard, and then finally an actual ledger bound in cloth.
‘It should be here,’ he says finally, ‘but it isn’t.’
The Inspector frowns. ‘It’s misplaced?’
Shand glances up at her, and then seems to change gear. ‘Normally, I suppose. Or stolen, though these days we get very little of that. I take it you haven’t been trying to get hold of a copy for long?’
‘No. I’m investigating her death.’
Shand starts. ‘Hunter? Dead?’
She sees him consult the terminal again, the cool light playing up on to his wide cheeks.
‘Oh my. She was that Hunter. How extraordinary. I had no idea. Well, yes, but I mean: no. I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time finding her books, Inspector.’ He glances at her for confirmation; she nods back. Yes: Inspector. He must not be running recognition in real time, part of the olde worlde experience. It occurs to her that he’ll still have the mandated customer and enquiries list, and she opens the tile menu in her terminal for local options, requests the record going back a year. By itself, it won’t mean much, but it will serve as a reminder to run a search across all specialist vendors for anyone looking for Hunter’s work. From there she can build a profile of Hunter aficionados, those who are drawn to her thinking, and with a bit of latent attribute inference she’ll have a broad list of those who share her underlying mindset. It might or might not be important, but anyone she deals with in the context of the inquiry who is also on that list might bear closer examination.