With his espersense expanded, the group’s emotions impinged directly into Greg’s synapses, a clamour of blood-lust and anger and secret guilt. They were feeding off each other, building up a collective nerve for the finale. It would end with a shot-gun blast, the cottage set on fire, consuming bodies and direct evidence. And the police would turn a blind eye; overstretched, undermanned, and still trying to regain public trust, to shake off the association with the People’s Constables. They couldn’t afford to be seen taking sides with PSP relics.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ Greg asked, and there was no need to force a tired tone into his voice, it came all too easily.
‘The bastard’s Party, Greg,’ someone called.
‘No messing? Have you seen his card? Was it signed by President Armstrong himself?’ He was aware of Eleanor coming to stand behind him. Her presence sparked off a ripple of severe agitation in the minds around him.
‘He’s guilty, Greg. The Inquisitors said he was an apparatchik over in Market Harborough.’
‘Ah …’ he said. The Inquisitors (actually, the Inappropriate Appointee Investigation Bureau) had been set up by the New Conservative government to purge PSP appointees from Civil Service posts, where it was feared they would deliberately misuse their positions to stir up trouble in their own interest. Identifying them had turned out to be an almost impossible task, a lot of records had been lost or destroyed when the PSP fell. Nearly all the old Party’s premier grades had been routed out, they were notorious enough in their own areas for the Inquisitor teams not to need official datawork; but the small fry, the invisible Party hacks who did the committees’ groundwork, they were hard to pin down. A lot of suspect names had been leaking from the Inquisitors’ office lately. Rough justice eradicated the tricky problem of no verifiable evidence.
‘An official charge has been brought against him, has it?’ Greg asked.
‘No,’ Douglas Kellam said. ‘But we’ve heard. Bytes that came straight from the top.’ His voice changed to a slicker, more appealing tone. In his mind there was still the hope that he could win through, a refusal to admit defeat. And nervousness that was beginning to churn up through his subconscious, like all of them, all disquieted by Greg and the infamous gland.
Sometimes, Greg reflected, an unending diet of tabloid crap could be useful. He smiled humourlessly. ‘Sure they did. Your cousin’s friend’s sister, was it?’
‘Come on, Greg. He’s Red trash, for Christ’s sake. You don’t want him around Hambleton. You of all people.’
‘Me of all people?’
Kellam squirmed, searching round for support, finding none. ‘Christ, Greg, yes! What you are, what you did. You know, the Trinities.’
‘Oh. That.’ No one in Hambleton had actually mentioned it out loud before. They all knew he had been a member of the Trinities, Peterborough’s urban predator gang, fighting the People’s Constables out on the city’s sweltering streets; the stories, fragmented and distorted, had followed him over the water from the Berrybut estate. But the New Conservatives, as a legitimate democratically elected government, could not officially sanction the massive campaign of hardline violence which had helped rout the PSP. So Greg’s involvement had earned him a kind of silent reverence, a wink and a nudge, the only gratitude he was ever shown. As if what he had done wasn’t quite seemly.
‘Yeah, me of all people,’ he said deliberately, looking round the troubled faces. ‘I would have known if Roy was Party. Wouldn’t I?’
They began to shuffle round, desperately avoiding his eye. The high-voltage mob tension shorting out.
‘Well, is he?’ Kellam asked urgently.
Greg moved forwards. Collister was groaning softly on the floor, fresh blood oozing out of the gashes which Foster’s heavy rings had torn. Foster and Sutton exchanged one edgy glance, and hurriedly scrambled to their feet.
‘Do you really want to know?’ Greg asked.
‘What if he is?’ Kellam said.
‘Then you can call the police and the Inquisitors, and I will testify in court what I can see in his mind.’
Kellam gave a mental flinch, stains of guilt blossoming among his thought currents. Panic at Greg’s almost casual reminder that he could prise his way into minds triggering a cascade of associated memories.
‘Yes, sure thing, Greg, that’s fine by me.’
There was a fast round of mumbled agreement.
Greg pursed his lips thoughtfully, and squatted down beside Roy Collister. He focused his espersense on the solicitor’s mind. The thoughts were leaden with pain, sharp stings of superficial cuts, heavier dull aches of bruised, probably cracked, ribs, nausea like a hot rock in his belly, warmth of urine between his legs, the terror and its twin, the knowledge that he would do anything say anything to make them stop, a bitter tang of utter humiliation. His mind was weeping quietly to itself. There was little rationality left, the beating had emptied him of all but animal instinct.
‘Can you hear me, Roy?’ Greg asked clearly.
Saliva and blood burped out from between battered lips. Greg located a small flare of understanding amid the wretched thoughts.
‘They say you were an apparatchik, Roy. Are they right?’
He hissed something incomprehensible.
‘What did he say?’ Mark Sutton asked.
Greg held up a hand, silencing him. ‘What were you doing in the PSP decade? Don’t try and speak, just picture it. I’ll see.’ Which wasn’t true, not at all. But only Eleanor knew that.
He counted to thirty, trying to recall the various conversations he and Roy had had in the Finch’s Arms, and rose to his feet. The lynch mob stood with bowed heads, as sheepish as schoolboys caught smoking. Even if he said Collister was guilty, there would be no vigilante violence now. The anger and nerve had been torn out of them, sucked into the black vacuum of shame. Which was all he had set out to do.
‘Roy wasn’t an apparatchik,’ Greg said. ‘He used to work in a legal office, handling defence cases. Did you hear that? Defence work. Roy was supporting the poor sods that the People’s Constables brought into court on trumped-up charges. That’s how he was tied in to the government by your bollock-brained Inquisitors, his name is on the Market Harborough legal affairs committee pay-slip package. The Treasury paid him for providing his counselling services.’
The silence which followed was broken by Clare Collister’s anguished wail. She ran over to her husband, sinking to her knees, shoulders quaking. Her fingers dabbed at his ruined face, slowly, disbelievingly, tracing the damage; she started to sob uncontrollably.
Douglas Kellam had paled. ‘We didn’t know.’
Greg increased the level of his gland secretion, and thought of a griffin’s claw, rigged with powerful stringy muscles and tendons, talons black and savagely sharp. Eidolonics took a lot out of him, he had learnt that back in his Mindstar days: his mind wasn’t wired for it, which meant he had to push to make it work. On top of that, he hated domination stunts. But for Kellam he’d overlook scruples this once. He visualized the talon tips closing around Kellam’s balls. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, it was a dismissal order. Black needles touched the delicate scrotum.
Kellam’s eyes widened in silent fright. He turned and virtually ran for the door. The others filed out after him, one or two bobbing their heads nervously at Eleanor.
‘Oh sweet Jesus, look what they’ve done to him,’ Clare groaned. Her hands were covered in blood. She looked up at Greg and Eleanor, tears sticky on her cheeks. ‘They’re animals. Animals!’
Greg fished round in his overall pockets for his cybofax. He pulled the rectangular palm-sized ’ware block out, and flipped it open. ‘Phone function,’ he ordered, then told Clare: ‘I’ll call for an ambulance. Some of those ribs are badly damaged. Tell the doctors to check for internal haemorrhaging.’
She wiped some of her tears with the back of a hand, leaving a tiny red streak above her right eye. ‘I want them locked up,’ she said, fighting for breath. ‘All
of them. Locked up for a thousand years.’
Greg sighed. ‘No, they didn’t do anything wrong.’
Eleanor flashed him a startled glance. Then understanding dawned, she looked back down at Clare.
‘Nothing wrong!’ Clare howled.
‘I only said Roy was innocent,’ Greg said quietly.
She stared at him in horror.
‘When the ambulance comes, you will leave with it. Pack a bag, some clothes, anything really valuable. And don’t come back, not for anything. If I ever see you again, I will tell Douglas and his friends exactly whose mind is rotten with guilt.’
‘I never hurt anybody,’ she said. ‘I was in Food Allocation.’
Greg put his arm round Eleanor, urging her out of the lounge. The sound of Clare Collister’s miserable weeping followed him all the way down the hall.
Eleanor kissed him lightly when they reached the EMC Ranger. There was no sign of the lynch mob. Nor the watching faces, Greg noted. The only sound was the bird-song, humidity gave the air an almost viscid quality.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. Her lips were pressed together in concern.
His head had begun to ache with the neurohormone hangover which was the legacy of using the gland. He blinked against the sunlight glaring round the shredded clouds, combing his hand back through sweaty hair. ‘Yeah, I’ll live.’
‘That bloody Collister woman.’
‘Tell you, she’s probably right. Food Allocation was a little different from the Constables and the Public Order Ministry.’
‘They took away enough of the kibbutz’s crops,’ Eleanor said sharply. ‘Fair and even distribution, like hell.’
‘Hey, wildcat.’ He patted her rump.
‘Behave, Gregory.’ She skipped away and climbed up into the Ranger, but her smile had returned.
Greg slumped into the passenger seat, and remembered to pull his safety belt across. ‘I suppose I ought to sniff around the rest of the village,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Make sure there aren’t any premier-grade apparatchiks lurking around in dark corners.’
‘That is one of the things we came here to get away from.’ She swung the EMC Ranger round the triangular junction outside the church, and headed back the way they came. ‘You and I, we’ve done our bit for this country.’
‘So now we leave it to the Inquisitors?’
Eleanor grunted in disgust.
They met Corry Furness on the edge of the village. Eleanor stopped the Ranger and lowered her window to tell him it was all right to use his bike again.
‘Mr Collister wasn’t one of them, was he?’ Corry asked.
‘No,’ Greg said.
Corry’s face lit with a smile. ‘I told you.’ He pedalled off down the avenue of dead trees with their lacework of vines and harlequin flowers.
Greg watched him in the mud-splattered wing mirror, envying the lad’s world view. Everything black and white, truth or lie. So simple.
Eleanor drove towards the farm at half the speed she’d used on the way in, suspension rocking them lightly as the wheels juddered over the skewed surface. The clouds on the southern horizon were starting to thicken.
‘You’ll have to give me a hand to get the lime saplings into the barn when we get back,’ Greg said. He was watching the way the loose vine tendrils at the top of the trees were stirring. ‘I’ll never get them planted before the storm now.’
‘Sure. I’ve nearly got the undercoat finished on all the first-floor windows.’
‘That’s something. It’s going to be Monday before I’m through with the saplings. After this downpour it’ll be too wet to get into the field for the next couple of days, and then we’ll have to spend Sunday clearing up, no doubt.’
‘Better make that Tuesday. We’ve got Julia’s roll-out ceremony on Monday,’ Eleanor said. ‘That’ll cheer you up.’
‘Oh, bugger. I’d forgotten.’
‘Don’t be so grumpy. There are thousands of people who would kill for an invitation.’
‘Couldn’t we just sort of skip the ceremony?’
‘Fine by me, if you want to explain our absence to Julia,’ she said slyly.
Greg thought about it. Julia Evans didn’t have many genuine friends. He was rather pleased to be counted amongst them, despite the disadvantages.
Julia had inherited Event Horizon from her grandfather, Philip Evans, a company larger even than a kombinate, manufacturing everything from domestic music decks to orbital microgee-factory modules. Two years ago she had been a very lonely seventeen-year-old girl; wealth and a drug-addict father had left her terribly isolated. Greg had got to know her quite well during the security violation case. Well enough for her to be chief bridesmaid at his wedding. Julia, of course, had been thrilled at the notion of adding a little touch of normality to her lofty plutocrat existence. The mistake of asking her had only become apparent when he and Eleanor had left for their honeymoon.
Every tabloid gossipcast in the world had broadcast the pictures. Greg Mandel: a man important enough to have the richest girl in the world as his bridesmaid. More millionaires than he knew existed wanted to be friends with the newly weds; buy them drinks, buy them meals, buy them houses, have them as non-executive directors.
Julia had also developed a mild crush on him for a while. A hard-line ex-urban predator and gland psychic, the classic romantic mysterious stranger. Of course, he had done the decent thing and ignored it. Hell of a thing, decency.
Greg found he was grinning wanly. ‘I don’t want to try explaining to Julia.’
2
Nicholas Beswick looked out of his mullioned window, watching a near solid front of thick woolly clouds slide over the secluded Chater valley. It was mid-afternoon, and the storm was arriving more or less on time. The warm rain began to fall, a heavy grey nebula constricting oppressively around the ancient Abbey.
His room faced west, giving him a good view out over the long gentle slope of grassy parkland which made up that side of the valley. But the brow was no longer visible, in fact he was hard pressed to see the road slicing through the park outside the front of the building, beyond the deep U-shaped loop of the drive. Mist was struggling to rise up from the grass, only to be torn apart by the deluge of hoary water.
There would be no swimming in the fish lakes this evening, he realized ruefully, no opportunity of seeing Isabel in her swimsuit. The daily swim had become an iron-cast habit for the six students; Launde Abbey didn’t have any outdoor sport pitches or indoor games courts, so they clung to whatever activity they could make for themselves with a grim tenacity. The lack of facilities had never bothered him. He had been at the Abbey since October, and he still found it hard to believe he had been admitted. Launde Abbey was looked upon as a kind of semi-mythical grail by every university physics student in England: the chance to study under Dr Edward Kitchener.
Kitchener was regarded by most of his peers as the Newton of the age, a double Nobel Laureate for his work in cosmology and solid-state physics; his now-classic molecular interaction equations had defined a whole range of new crystals and semiconductors which could be produced in orbiting microgee factories. The royalty payments from the latter work had made him independently wealthy before he reached forty, which also kicked up the embers of envy among his colleagues whose work tended more to the intellectual. Nor did it help that he was slightly unconventional in the way he approached his subject matter; at his level of theorizing, physics verged on philosophy. He considered he had a perfect right to intrude on the country of the mind, to develop new aspects of thought processes. It had led to some fierce disagreements with the psychology establishment, and he didn’t always confine his arguments to the pages of respected journals – critics were often subjected to an open tirade of abuse and scorn at scientific conferences. Then twenty-two years ago, after nearly twenty years of ill-tempered confrontation with his fellow theorists, he had, with characteristic abruptness, resigned from his position at Cambridge and retreated to Launde Abbey to pursue hi
s theories without carping interference from lesser minds, his brilliance and loud vocal intolerance of the dry, crusty world endemic to academia creating a media legend of Bohemian eccentricity in the process.
When psi-stimulant neurohormones were developed, seventeen years ago, he awarded them an unqualified welcome, saying they gave the human mind direct access to the cosmos at large, presenting physicists with the opportunity to perceive first-hand the particles and waveforms they had only ever seen on paper and in projection cubes. Even after it became clear that neurohormones couldn’t produce anything like the initial over-optimistic results predicted, he never lost his conviction. Psi, he contended, was the greatest event in physics since relativity, exposing hitherto unquantifiable phenomena. Simply defining the mechanism of psi in conventional terms was enough to fascinate him, a rationale which would tie up nature and supernature, something beyond even the elusive Grand Unification theory.
This tenuous goal was one to which more and more of his time was devoted. But every year he invited three degree students into his home for an intensive two-year session of lectures, research and intellectual meditation.
And childish tantrums, Nicholas had discovered, at first to his embarrassed surprise, and then with secret amusement. Even the most brilliant of men had character flaws.
Launde Abbey wasn’t just about profound reasoning and scaling new heights of metaphysics. The human dynamics of six young people cooped up with an increasingly crotchety sixty-seven-year-old was weird. Fun, but weird.
Nicholas could now see a tributary network of steely rivulets coalescing on the grassland, trickling across the road and running down the slope into the first of the three little lakes to the north. The rain was incredibly heavy, and Globecast’s news channel said it would last for six or seven hours. The River Chater at the bottom of the valley would flood again; it was probably up to the rickety little bridge already.
There was some sort of vehicle crawling along the road, heading down towards the river. He frowned and peered forward, nose touching the chilly glass. It was a rugged four-wheel-drive Suzuki jeep. Probably the farmer who leased the park’s grazing rights checking to make sure he’d rounded up all the sheep and llamas.