‘Absolution.’
He didn’t get it, they never did. His death was a duty, ordered by guilt.
Greg had learnt all about duty from the Army, relying on his squad mates, their equal dependence on him. It was a bond closer than family, overriding everything – laws, conventions, morals. Civvies like Edwards never understood. When all other human values had gone, shattered by violence, there was still duty. The implicit trust of life. And Greg had failed Royan. Miserably.
Greg fired. Edwards’ mouth gaped as the maser beam struck his temple, his eyes rolling up as he fell forwards. He splashed into the thin layer of mud. Dead before he hit.
Greg holstered the Walther, breath hissing out between clenched teeth. He walked back down the hill to the Westland without giving the body another glance. Behind him, the goat’s bell began to clang.
He refused to think about the kill while the Westland cruised over the countryside, his mind an extension of the guido, iced silicon, confirming landmarks, telling his body when to shift balance. It would’ve been too easy to brood in the ghost wing’s isolated segment of the universe, guilt and depression inevitable.
Rutland Water was in front of him, a Y-shaped reservoir six and a half kilometres long nestling in the snug dark valleys of the county’s turbulent rolling landscape. A pale oyster flame of jejune moonlight shone across the surface. Greg came in over the broad grass-slope dam at the western end. He kept low, skimming the water. Straight ahead was the floating village; thirty-odd log rafts, each supporting a plain wooden cabin, like something out of a Western frontier settlement. They were lashed together by a spiderweb of cables, forming a loose circle around the old limnological tower, a thick concrete shaft built before the reservoir was filled.
He angled towards the biggest cabin, compensating for the light gusts with automatic skill. At five metres out he flared the wing sharply. Surging air plucked at his combat leathers; his feet touched the coarse overlapping planks which made up the roof, legs running, carrying him up towards the apex as the propeller blurred. He stopped with a metre to spare. The tan, scrumpy-like odour of drying water-fruit permeated the air, reassuring in its familiarity.
The Westland’s membrane folded.
‘Greg?’
He watched Nicole’s bald head rise above the gable end. ‘Here.’ He shrugged out of the harness.
She came up the ladder on to the roof, a black ex-Navy marine-adept dressed in a functional mauve diving bikini. He couldn’t remember her ever wearing anything else. Even in the moonlight her water-resilient skin glistened from head to toe; she looked tubby, but not overweight, her shape dictated by an all-over insulating layer of subcutaneous fat, protecting her from the cold of deep water.
‘How did it go?’
‘All sorted, no messing,’ he replied curtly.
Nicole nodded.
Two more marine-adepts swarmed briskly up the ladder and took charge of the Westland. Greg appreciated that, no fuss, no chatter. Most of the floating village’s marine-adepts were ex-Navy, they understood.
They’d colonized the reservoir around the time Greg moved into his chalet on the shore, seeding and harvesting their gene-tailored water-fruit. Their only concession to the convulsions of the PSP years was to store Greg’s military gear for him, and, very occasionally, provide sanctuary for an activist on the run from the People’s Constables.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ Greg told Nicole as he climbed into his ancient rowing boat. When the neurohormone hangover had gone, when the memory of Edwards had faded, when he felt human again.
She untied the pannier and tossed it into the boat after him. ‘Sure, Greg. Take care.’
Back on land he headed for the pub to forget the kill. The Army had taught him how to handle that as well. How to suspend human feelings in combat, to refuse the blame for all the deaths, the pain, suffering, horror. Greg had never woken screaming like others in the regiment had.
He knew what he needed, the release which came from drink and women, gluttoning out, sluicing away the memory of Edwards in a wash of basement-level normality.
He had a good feeling as he walked into the Wheatsheaf at Edith Weston; esper intuition or old-fashioned instinct, it didn’t matter which, the result was the same. Static-charged anticipation. He opened the taproom door grinning.
The Wheatsheaf’s landlord, Angus, had come up trumps; his new barmaid was a tall, strapping lass, twenty years old with a heart-shaped face, wearing her thick red hair combed back from her forehead. She was dressed in a long navy-blue skirt and purple cap-sleeve T-shirt. A deep scoop neck showed off the heavily freckled slope of her large breasts to perfection.
Eleanor Broady. Greg stored the name as she pulled him a pint of Ruddles County, topping it with a shot of Angus’s homemade whisky. It lasted longer that way, he couldn’t afford to knock back pints all night.
Greg sat back and admired her in the guttering light of the oil lamps. The Wheatsheaf was a run of the mill rural pub, which reverted true to the nineteen-hundreds ideal with the demise of the big brewery conglomerates. Flash trash fittings melting away surprisingly fast once mains electricity ended and beer had to be hand-drawn from kegs again. Either relaxing or monumentally dull according to individual sensibilities. Greg liked it. There were no demands on him in the Wheatsheaf.
He was wedged in between a group of local farm workers and some of the lads from the timber mill, billeted in the village’s old RAF base. The resident pair of warden dodgers were doing their nightly round, hawking a clutch of dripping rainbow trout they’d lifted from the reservoir.
Eleanor was a prize draw for male attention. Slightly timid from first-night nerves, but coping with the banter well enough.
Greg weighed up her personality, figuring how to make his play. Confidence gave him a warm buzz. He was seventeen years older, but with the edge his espersense gave him that shouldn’t be a problem. What amused her, topics to steer clear of, he could see them a mile off. She’d believe they were soul twins before the night was out.
Her father came in at eleven thirty. The conversation chopped off dead. He was in dungarees, a big stained crucifix stitched crudely on the front. People stared; kibbutzniks didn’t come into pubs, not ever.
Eleanor paled behind the bar, but stood her ground. Her father walked over to her, ignoring everybody, flickering yellow light catching the planes of his gaunt, angular face.
‘You’ll come home with me,’ he said quietly, determined. ‘We’ll make no fuss.’
Eleanor shook her head, mute.
‘Now.’
Angus came up beside her. ‘The lady doesn’t want to go.’ His voice was weary but calm. No pub argument was beyond Angus; he knew them all, how to deal with each. Disposal expert.
‘You belong with us,’ said her father. ‘You share our bread. We taught you better.’
‘Listen—’ Angus began, sweet reason.
‘No. She comes with me. Or perhaps you will recompense us for her schooling? Grade four in animal husbandry, she is. Did she not tell you? Can you afford that?’
‘I worked for it,’ Eleanor said. ‘Every day I worked for it. Never ending.’
Greg sensed how near to tears she was. Part of him was fascinated with the scene, it was surreal, or maybe Shakespearian, Victorian. Logic and lust urged him up.
Angus saw him closing on the bar and winced.
Greg gave him a wan reassuring smile – no violence, promise.
His imagination pictured his gland, a slippery black lens of muscle nestled at the centre of his brain, flexing rhythmically, squirting out milky liquid. Actually, it was nothing like that, but the psychosis was mild enough, harmless. Some Mindstar Brigade veterans had much weirder hallucinations.
The neurohormones started to percolate through his synapses, altering and enhancing their natural functions. His perception of the taproom began to alter, the physical abandoning him, leaving only people. They were their thoughts, tightly woven streamers of ideas, memories, e
motions, interacting, fusing and budding. Coldly beautiful.
‘Go home,’ he told Eleanor’s father.
The man was a furnace of anger and righteousness. Indignation blooming at the non-believer’s impudence. ‘This is not your concern,’ he told Greg.
‘Nor is she yours, not any more,’ Greg replied. ‘No longer your little girl. She makes her own choices now.’
‘God’s girl!’
It would’ve been so easy to thump the arrogant bastard. A deluge of mayhem strobed through Greg’s mind, the whole unarmed combat manual on some crazy mnemonic recall, immensely tempting. He concentrated hard on the intransigent mind before him, domination really wasn’t his suit, too difficult and painful.
‘Go home.’ He pushed the order, clenching his jaw at the effort.
The man’s thoughts shrank from his meddling insistence, cohesion broken. Faith-suppressed reactions, the animal urge to lash out, fists pounding, feet kicking, boiled dangerously close to the surface.
Greg thrust them back into the subconscious, knowing his nails would be biting into his palms at the exertion.
The father flung a last imploring glance to a daughter who was genuinely loved in a remote, filtered manner. Rejection triggered the final humiliation, and he fled, his soul keening, eternal hatred sworn. Greg sensed his own face reflected in the agitated thoughts, distorted to demonic preconceptions. Then he was gone.
The taproom slowly rematerialized. The gland’s neurohormones were punishing his brain. He steadied himself on the bar.
There were knowing grins which he fended off with a sheepish smile. Forced. A low grumble of conversation returned, cut with snickers. An entire generation’s legend born, this night would live for ever.
Eleanor was trembling in reaction, Angus’s arm around her shoulder, strictly paternal. She insisted she was all right, wanted to carry on, please.
Greg was shown her wide sunny smile for the first time, an endearing combination of gratitude and shyness. He didn’t have to buy another drink all night.
‘Kibbutzes always seemed a bit of a contradiction in terms to me,’ Greg said. ‘Christian Marxists. A religious philosophy of dignified individuality, twinned with state oppression. Not your obvious partnership.’ He and Eleanor were walking down the dirt track to his chalet in Berrybut Spinney, a couple of kilometres along the shore from Edith Weston. The old time-share estate’s nightly bonfire glimmered through the black trees ahead, shooting firefly sparks high into the cloudless night. A midnight zephyr was rucking the surface of Rutland Water, wavelets lapping on the mud shallows. He could hear the smothered-waterfall sound from the discharge pipes as the reservoir was filled by the pumping stations on the Welland and Nene, siphoning off the March floodwater. The water level had been low this Christmas, parched farmland placing a massive demand for irrigation. Thousands of square metres of grass and weeds around the shore that’d grown up behind the water’s summer retreat were slowly drowning under its return. As the rotting vegetation fermented it gave off a gas which smelt of rancid eggs and cow shit. It lasted for six weeks each year.
‘Not much of either in a kibbutz,’ Eleanor said, ‘just work. God, it was squalid, medieval. We were treated like people-machines, everything had to be done by hand. Their idea of advanced machinery was the plough which the shire horses pulled. God’s will. Like hell!’
Greg nodded sympathetically, he’d seen the inside of a kibbutz. She was chattering now, a little nervous. The restrictive doctrine that’d dominated her childhood had stunted the usual pattern of social behaviour, leaving her slightly unsure, and slightly turned on by new-found freedom.
Greg felt himself getting high on expectation. He was growing impatient to reach the chalet, and bed with that fantastic-looking body. Edwards’ face was already indistinct, monochrome, falling away. Even the neurohormone hangover had evaporated.
The tall ash and oak trees of Berrybut Spinney had died years ago, unable to survive the Warming. They’d been turned into gigantic gazebos for the cobaea vines Greg and the other estate residents had planted around their broad buttress roots, dangling huge cascades of purple and white trumpet-flowers from stark skeletal boughs.
He’d spent long hours renovating the estate for the first three years after he moved in, putting in new plants – angel trumpets, figs, ficus, palms, lilies, silk oaks, cedars, even a small orange grove at the rear: a hurried harlequin quilt thrown over the brown fungal rot of decay. The first two years after the temperature peaked were the worst. Grass survived, of course, and some evergreen trees, but the sudden year-round heat wiped out entire ecological systems right across the country. Arable land suffered the least; farms, and the new kibbutzes, adapted readily enough, switching to new varieties of crops and livestock. But that still left vast tracts of native countryside and forests and city parks and village greens looking like battlefields scoured by some apocalyptic chemical weapon.
Repairs were uncoordinated, a patchwork of gross contrasts. It made travelling interesting, though.
Greg and Eleanor emerged from the spinney into a rectangular clearing which sloped down to the water. The dying bonfire illuminated a semicircle of twenty small chalets, and a big stone building at the crest.
‘You live here?’ Eleanor asked, in a very neutral tone.
‘Yes,’ he agreed cautiously. The chalets had been built by an ambitious time-share company in conjunction with a golf course running along the back of the spinney, and a grandiose clubhouse/hotel perched between the two. But the whole enterprise was suddenly bumped out of business thanks to the PSP’s one-home law. The chalets were commandeered, the golf course returned to arable land, and the hotel transformed into thirty accommodation modules.
Greg always thought the country had been bloody lucky the PSP never got round to a one-room law. The situation had become pretty drastic as the oceans started to rise. The polar melt plateaued eventually, but not before it displaced two million people in England alone.
‘I never asked,’ she said. ‘What is it you do?’
He chuckled. ‘Greg Mandel’s Investigative Services, at your service.’
‘Investigative services? You mean, like a private detective? Angus told me you had a gland.’
‘That’s right. Of course it was nothing formal in the PSP decade. I didn’t go legit until after the Second Restoration.’
‘Why not?’
‘Public ordinance number five seven five nine, oblique stroke nine two. By order of the President: no person implanted with a psi-enhancement gland may utilize their psi ability for financial gain. Not that many people could afford a private eye anyway. Not with Leopold Armstrong’s nineteenth-century ideology screwing up the economy. Bastard. I was also disbarred from working in any State enterprise, and social security was a joke, the PSP apparatchiks had taken it over, head to toe, by the time I was demobbed. Tell you, they didn’t like servicemen, and Mindstar veterans were an absolute no-go zone. The Party was running scared of us. As well they might.’
‘How did you manage?’
‘I had my Army pension for a couple of years after demob.’ He shrugged. ‘The PSP cancelled that soon enough. Fifth Austerity Act, if I recall rightly. I got by. Rutland’s always had an agriculture-based economy. There’s plenty of casual work to pick up on the farms, and the citrus groves were a boon; that and a few cash-only cases each year, it was enough.’
Her face was solemn. ‘I never even saw any money until I was thirteen.’
He put his arm round her shoulder, giving a little reassuring shake. ‘All over now.’
She smiled with haunted eyes, wanting to believe. His arm remained.
‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘number six,’ and blipped the lock.
The chalet’s design paid fleeting homage to the ideal of some ancient Alpine hunting lodge, an overhanging roof all along the front creating a tiny veranda-cum-porch. But its structure lacked genuine Alpine ruggedness: prefab sections which looked like stout red-bark logs from the outside
were now rotting badly, the windows had warped under the relentless assault of the new climate’s heat and humidity, there was no air-conditioning, and the slates moulted at an alarming rate in high winds. The sole source of electricity was a solar-cell strip which Greg had pasted to the roof. However, the main frame was sound; four by four hardwood timber, properly seasoned. He could never understand why that should be, perhaps the building inspectors had chosen that day to put in an appearance.
The biolum strip came on revealing a lounge area with a sturdy oak-top bar separating it from a minute kitchen alcove at the rear. Its built-in furniture was compact, all light pine. Wearing thin, Greg acknowledged, following Eleanor’s questing gaze. Entropy digging its claws in.
The corners of her lips tugged up. ‘Nice. At Egleton, there’d be five of us sharing a room this size. You live here alone?’
‘Yeah. The British Legion found it for me. Good people, volunteers. At least they cared, did what they could. And it’s all paid for, even if it is falling down around me.’
‘They were bad times, weren’t they, Greg? I never really saw much of it. But there were the rumours, even in a kibbutz.’
‘We rode it out, though. This country always does, somehow. That’s our strength, in the genes, no matter how far down we fall, we’re never out.’
‘And you don’t mind?’
‘Mind what?’
‘Me. I was in a kibbutz, that made me a card carrier.’
His arms went round her, hands resting lightly on her buttocks. Faces centimetres apart. Her nose was petite and pointed. ‘Only by default. Nobody chooses their parents, and I’d say you un-chose yours pretty convincingly tonight.’ His nose touched hers, rubbing gently.
She grinned, shy again.
The bedroom was on his right, behind a sliding door. A tiny pine-panelled room which was nearly filled by a huge double bed, there was a half-metre gap between the mattress and the walk.
Eleanor flicked him a quick appraising look, and her grin became slyer, lips twitching. Greg leant forward and kissed her.