It’s Oliver. He’s doing something inside my head.
How would he keep such a secret? Hunter need only ask who he was, even in the chair, and the System would tell her, just as it would tell her the time of day or the temperature of the air. It gathers and distributes facts. It is not choosy.
Robert. He’s in my head.
And who is that, I wonder? Who is Robert, that he might help her against Oliver?
Oliver, not Smith.
They were friends.
And she wanted me to know.
The Inspector touches her terminal, and watches the crime wall assemble itself.
*
It has been growing in Neith’s awareness, this sense of a directed and intentional message, addressed if not personally to her at least to someone like her. Nothing Hunter did was only one thing. She turned herself in: very well. What else did she achieve in doing so? She knew she would resist, and that that resistance might cost her her life. Thus she knew there would be an investigation of her death – or whatever serious injury she might suffer – and attached to that investigation must come an Inspector.
Whose clues do I follow? The ones I want or the ones that are left for me?
And how are they different?
But even that is not the question. Think ahead: at the end of a trail must be a thing, a place or a time where Hunter wanted an Inspector.
A conjunction, as it were. Yes, all right, say it aloud: symbolically speaking, Hunter wants Mielikki Neith to find the Chamber of Isis.
The truth would be that a god ate you, because you were unfaithful.
For someone who likes obliquity, Hunter is fairly direct about consequences.
The Inspector’s hand flutters at the seam of her trousers, and she closes the fingers quite deliberately for a moment into a fist. It is the infuriating instinct of Constantine Kyriakos, vicariously learned, to tend to his balls, of which he is constantly conscious in a way she has not previously encountered in a received memory. She feels, even now after the other characters have been introduced, and plenty of time as herself, a phantasmal and irritating urge to scratch.
It’s not a trivial observation. Hunter’s memories have a seductive depth. They cannot actually be endless, but the Inspector feels instinctively that she might, inside the recording, freeze everything and walk out on to imagined streets, explore a whole world of dreams. It can’t be so. Perhaps the false memory only extends in the direction you look, a paper-thin reality creating itself at the limit of your borrowed senses. She makes a note to ask – firmly discarding, at the same time, a vertiginous query that occurs to her a moment later: how do we know that the real universe does not also work that way?
She catches herself once more reaching down with particular intent, and gives a frustrated hiss. She is Mielikki Neith, working a difficult case, and while she is possessed of many virtues and some few vices, nowhere in that array does she feature testicles.
She has also forgotten to do her dream check.
Careful not to work from memory, she reads the poem off the wall, all the way through, and then once more for luck. ‘Between the kisses and the wine …’ and precious little of either recently. She cranks the handle of the lantern and smiles, as she always does, at the cracked image on the wall. She fumbles the tennis ball as it comes down, and it thuds dully off into the corner of the room. The laws of physics are indeed intact, and that is all the reassurance the universe will provide. The other recognisable traits of dreams are more difficult to separate from waking life. The endless re-encountering of the same people, for example, and the echoing restatement of the same conversations, to the point where it seems that only a few humans actually inhabit the earth and all the other billions exist simply as shades and mannequins, is also an experience common to both post-industrial society and the worldview of sociopaths.
She looks back queasily at the poem on the wall, taking in the title.
‘Non Sum Qualis Eram Sub Regno Cynarae’ – ‘I am not what I was under the reign of Cynara’. A perfectly innocent example of its type, chosen by a simple software script. Except for that one word, which is now, and for the duration of the case, a name: Regno.
So what is she – or what is the world – sub Regno Lönnrot?
Angry, she reminds herself, is what she is, and not under any reign of any sort. ‘Cynara’ is tickling at her mind, as well: something unpleasant. A jellyfish? She queries the Witness. No, that would be ‘Cyanea’. An animated picture pulses in front of her, obscenely billowing. She looks at the scale and realises it is large enough to engulf her, feels a flush of revulsion.
Well, the text is Cynara of the only somewhat faithful suitor, not Cyanea of the million mouths: small mercies.
She prints off a new poem and puts it up above the terminal anyway, and wonders how much of all of them she is now carrying around in herself, these orphan stories. According to the science, it takes about forty-eight hours for the brain to adapt to a new sense input like a pair of mirrored glasses that make you see everything upside down. At the end of that time, upside down becomes the right way up and you function naturally. Then you take them off and everything is weird again for another two days. This has never been relevant to reviewing interrogation data because interrogation data is never this long, this intense. Well, if Diana Hunter has broken new ground in her death, Neith can do the same in sorting it out.
As a prelude, a sort of neutral gear, she checks her media coverage, the unsparing assessment of her peers. Lönnrot’s ambush, considered from this distance, has not significantly damaged her standing, although a vocal minority evidently feels – like her – that she should have been more careful. The most common reaction is a collective dismay that someone was bold and bad enough to, as Lionel Jeffries once put it, slosh a bogey in the execution of her duty. The polis has not missed the implication of serious crime in that choice, the possibility of cover-ups and murder. The first question in hand is whether a foreign intelligence service has dared to interfere in the inner workings of the System. The Inspector has no reason to think so, but acknowledges the concern, and queries the Witness for an assessment of relevant overseas chatter. The response is immediate, and negative, though that in itself is not evidence of absence.
This case may take you to places where you will not be safe.
The Inspector shrugs her shoulders, trying to displace the weight of other selves.
So let’s talk about Gnomon.
The counter-narrative is unexpected. It is the only story of the future, the only one which by definition cannot be historically true. It represents itself as a human mind composed of other minds, cannibalistic and osmotic. It is alien to Hunter’s creation, a strange voice inside her head, with Hunter’s identity comparably foreign in Neith’s own. Gnomon’s flavour is dry and inorganic, like the air after a fireworks display. Its pride is big enough to fill a universe by itself.
Gnomon: one who knows, on a mission to kill the other narrative strands using the Chamber of Isis as a doorway. The mission itself is enough to imply the collapse of Hunter’s separate stories into one another, the reintegration of her self. Not subtle, but maybe that’s the point. Hunter is subtle. Perhaps Smith reckoned to shock-and-awe his way through her maze. And it worked, at least in the first instance. Neith will swear that was the real woman under it all, even if only for a moment, before she dropped into some even lower, more unthinkable level of concealment, yielding all but the most fundamental parts of her cognitive architecture to the machine and hiding in those layers of her internal ocean beyond the reach of daylight.
The Inspector rolls her shoulders. She must concede, inevitably, that she has a certain amount in common with Gnomon. They both are tasked with uncovering the real Hunter, with diving into the past to find the woman in the dark. It is not an identification which pleases her, but it is familiar. She is the detective, and, in a very real sense, Gnomon may be the assassin.
Or, more properly for a made thing: the caus
e of death.
If Pakhet’s analysis is correct, Smith forced Hunter to accept the intruder as part of her existing logic by drawing it with reference to the stories under way – Kyriakos’s shark, Athenais’s magic room, Bekele’s visions – and the Chamber of Isis became an open door through which Smith might dance and do his worst. His worst in this case was Hunter’s exhaustion and death but not, seemingly, her defeat, therefore the result is a no-score draw. Though what the prize was is still unclear.
What a mess.
Unless Hunter, the Inspector supposes, wanted Smith where he was, and left those particular doors for him to find. If she knew enough to name the man and recognise the method, is it such a leap to suppose she might have anticipated them both as well? She did, after all, accurately predict almost everything else. Predict, or provoke.
What if Smith himself was the message she was sending, and her own death the medium of its transmission? It would be a curious, anticipatory piece of optography: Hunter staring at Smith in the hope that her retinas would record in death the face of her murderer and the reason for her killing.
But not the reason, not the full one. Why did Smith go out on a limb over this woman? Who was she, that she was worth this exposure? There is a missing piece, be it Burton the training camp or some other less fanciful truth. But whatever that piece is, is the root of all this, and so important as to be worth dying for, as well as killing.
‘She panicked him,’ the Inspector hears herself say in surprise, and knows it for the truth. ‘She did something he did not expect and forced him to a bad action, and from there he has been on the hop ever since.’
Yes. Smith was so very careful to appear unruffled, smooth. Perfumed, indeed. He exerted every bit of control over the situation that was available to him precisely because that control is an illusion. The so-cultured Oliver Smith is indeed on the hop, sliding in his leather soles across London’s treacherous pavements, all the while gritting his teeth and determined to appear the image of certainty. The imperially inflected suit, the casual meeting. All in the hope that he would be able to deflect her attention for long enough—
And here we are again. Long enough to do what?
Hunter. It comes back to Hunter. All this is reaction, and perhaps that means that Smith, too, is chasing her, and perhaps only a step or two ahead of the Inspector herself.
She must not let him regain his equilibrium. Even his awareness of the investigation, of her interest, though she would have preferred it otherwise, is an advantage of sorts. It is evidence of leakage, of his failure to suppress Hunter, and it will jostle him. She has never been a proponent of the muscular school of detection much favoured in Hollywood, in which the detective’s primary strategy is to blunder around breaking things until the criminal attempts to put her out of his misery. Still, if it works, she will not complain at having stumbled on to her suspect’s toes.
*
‘I’m sorry, Mielikki,’ Keene says, an eyeblink and several hours later, quite genuinely contrite as she stands in the doorway with two procedurally mandated orderlies, ‘you know how it is. The spotlight is random. I do appreciate that the timing is awkward, and of course we’ve only just seen each other. If you like, we can defer.’ Neith wonders if she knows about the dream – and if so, how.
The Inspector’s yellowing bruises are a swaddle of grating fatigue around her lungs. It’s true: an algorithm selects officers of the Witness for periodic emotional and behavioural checks, touching each officer on average once every two years. This one is fractionally early, but not enough to be unusual.
– Just outside the margin of error, the Witness murmurs in her ear, although she hasn’t asked. She wonders whether it deduced her question or whether Keene did.
‘No,’ the Inspector replies calmly, ‘that’s fine. Shall we go into the sitting room?’
‘The sitting room will be fine,’ Keene says, her patient having passed this first little test in good order, and so they go and sit in the sitting room, under the eye of her medical muscle. ‘Charlotte, would you mind getting us some coffee?’
Charlotte, a small, neat creature in flat shoes, gives a clerical smile. ‘Of course, Pippa. Place on Capital Street?’
Keene shrugs: façon du chef. Charlotte leaves, and Keene settles into a chair. ‘Charlotte’s temporary,’ she confides, ‘but very good. Former services. They tell me she can bend a man into a suitcase. Though how they know, I can’t imagine.’
The Inspector wonders aloud whether this concession indicates that Keene is at ease with her subject’s emotional state, and Keene responds that she sees no immediate danger of personal assault. The remaining orderly retains his professional blankness, but Neith allows herself to laugh.
‘Tell me about the Hunter case,’ Keene says when they have discussed her continuing lack of a real social life and Keene has chided her, as she did twenty-one months and fifteen days ago, and urged her to have some fun.
(State holiday, Diana Hunter’s imagined ghost responds in the back of her head, all patriotic citizens will make merry, on pain of execution. The Inspector lets the reaction drop into the dark no man’s land between her and the memory of the dead woman. Erebus, she thinks, before she can disengage.)
‘It’s distressing,’ the Inspector replies. ‘I’m afraid there’s some evidence of culpability on our side.’ She doesn’t want to discuss it in detail. She has no idea who will read Keene’s report – it will be part of the public record, she doesn’t want to alert Smith – and then, too, she has to accept the possibility that Smith is not alone. Corruption is power that overflows its bounds. By definition, it rarely stays contained in a single location. She hopes her reluctance will read as professional discretion.
‘Oh dear,’ Keene murmurs, with a professional equivocation that suggests she would not be surprised to find it so, but nor yet does she necessarily accept that it is. This appears to be all she has to say for now, and the Inspector recognises the sticky sort of silence, the kind you’re supposed to fall into, and wonders whether she should. She feels no urgent need to fill it, but that might indicate to Keene an unhealthy disconnection from normative behaviour. On the other hand, Keene will be using the Witness to read her – damn Smith’s kinesic assistant, with several Welfare Office extensions, no doubt – and she will know that Neith is thinking rather than feeling right now, so an attempt to counterfeit emotional response will definitely appear deceptive. She shrugs.
‘It’s my job, Pippa. I don’t have to like what I find out. I just have to follow the evidence.’
‘And is that what you’re doing?’
‘Yes. Always.’
‘Did you,’ the faintest whisper of a smile flickers across the long, bland face, ‘did you really hold a semiotics undergraduate at gunpoint?’
‘Stun gun,’ the Inspector says. ‘Yes.’ She considers for a moment. ‘I take it he didn’t mention he was dressed as Hitler? Or Chaplin? The Witness tagged him as a threat – close enough to my description of Lönnrot, I think.’
‘That somehow slipped his mind. I saw, of course.’
Neith winces. ‘Did it look entirely mad?’
‘Eccentric, certainly. Although anyone bothering with your recent file would have understood. I imagine you’ve got some impressive bruises.’
‘You haven’t looked?’
Pippa Keene nods. ‘I have. Commiserations.’
‘I’ve been resting. Now I’m working. It helps. The case is important.’
Keene nods again. Understandable. Everything is understandable, if viewed from the right angle. ‘You have a warrant out for a Regno Lönnrot. But no luck yet, I see.’
‘It’s frustrating.’
‘Do you have any suggestion as to how this Lönnrot is able to avoid detection?’
‘The Witness posits technological countermeasures.’
‘And your own memory is hardly probative after what happened, I suppose. Still – well, no. I won’t tell you your job.’ She glances sideways at
the Inspector.
Neith shrugs. ‘If we don’t get anything soon, I’ll get them to take an image from me.’ It had not occurred to her that the beating might have damaged the recollection. It should have. That might well have been the point of it.
A few decades ago, that would have been a clue in itself: The suspect doesn’t want to be identified and believes we would immediately be able to do so, implying that we may have had contact before. Sadly, the very ubiquity of the Witness makes this almost tautologous.
Keene nods, ticks a box. The Inspector can hear the rotary ball of her pen. ‘You paid a visit to Oliver Smith recently.’
‘I wanted to hear what he had to say about the Hunter case.’ The literal truth.
‘Smith is a very talented man.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And you went to Chase Pakhet, too.’
‘The Hunter case has some technical aspects. The Witness can supply information and known expertise. I needed … hypothesis, I suppose. Human perspective. Instinct.’
‘You didn’t trust your own?’
‘I trust my reasoning. I don’t rely on it exclusively. Viewpoints from outside one’s own contextual frame are invaluable.’
‘And you ran a self-test.’ Keene glances up and to the side: picture-in-picture. ‘Another one.’
‘There was a traumatic section in the interview record. Hunter had a stroke. It wasn’t flagged on the file – I take it no one had time to review much of it before I did. The System … presumably assessed it as harmless, but it was pretty harrowing. I was checking my own continuing ability to perform my office at a high level.’
‘And you were reassured.’
‘Very much so. My score was perfect. I should probably have done a test before commencing – I may make it part of my routine in future. Clarity is crucial in our work, as you know, especially when the event under investigation is unprecedented.’