Francesque leant on the banister of the wrought-iron stairwell, and gasped. One more floor and he should be at ground level. Then he would need clothes, a doctor"s white coat perhaps, a disguise to get him out of Charenton before any of the new staff dared to interrupt Major Henri"s latest interrogation of the Directory agent. The pain in the left side of his chest was growing worse, but he knew he was going to make it. Ever since he had left the Pink Room he had been getting pre-cog flashes. The sky, the clatter of hoofs, a smell of orange blossom. He was going to make it.
"The nearer we get to the chapel, the less the vegetation is affected by the weather," Chris said. "Have you noticed?"
160.
Jarre prodded a jasmine with his finger. It felt like a cold, wet plant, not like a frost sculpture. "It must provide some shelter." It sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.
"The plants are wrong too," Chris continued, memories of his father and mother"s neat garden nestling in his mind. It was a relief to find something he knew about. "They"re all out of season. Growing in the wrong soils. Flowering with the wrong colours. This pure black pigmentation in the roses is concentrated delphinidin. It gives delphiniums their name and their colour."
Jarre glared at him. " S o ? "
"So it doesn"t give roses theirs. It"s entirely alien to the species" chemical composition. It could not be imparted by hybridization or breeding." It would take detailed genetic artistry, he thought. Hard science. Future science.
"Master Tomas was accounted an excellent gardener, sir."
Chris almost jumped. The man who had let them into the garden had left the chapel doorway and was now at his shoulder. He had moved perfectly silently. Too silently.
Chris caught Jarre smirking. Thank heavens for naturally good peripheral vision, and the better-than-natural night vision he had spent his first month"s stipend on. Hardwired in, it had survived his brief flirtation with body-beppling, and had another five years on its warranty. " H e " s the agent who reported the murder, isn"t he?"
"Of course. Fortunately he wasn"t here when it happened or no doubt they would have killed him too. Doctor, Monsieur Kasper. Monsieur Kasper, Doctor - what did you say your name was again?"
"Oh, quite unp.r.o.nounceable, I a.s.sure you," Chris said hurriedly. That at least was practically true. He changed the subject. "Kasper moves very quietly."
"He does, doesn"t he?" Jarre said, approvingly. "Kasper was the finest cat-burglar the roofs of Paris have ever produced.
He can put salt on a sparrow"s tail if he wants, our Monsieur Kasper."
Chris felt a moment"s nausea. The past was always only one step away from barbarism. Hunting sparrows, ugh.
161.
Didn"t they eat blackbird pie in this century?
"Perhaps he should show us the body," he said.
Nurse Evette always ran through the Pink Room on tiptoe. It was the doctor"s territory, and nursing staff were forbidden to enter it without a physician in attendance, but it was smack in the middle of the Asylum. It cut ten minutes off her route.
Besides, it was somehow restful. She always felt more awake after pa.s.sing through it, and its single patient was no trouble.
Normally asleep when she started her shift, she had seen him awake only occasionally when a doctor had wanted her to attend him, but he had never been violent or disturbed.
This morning something was different, but it took her a moment to realize what it was. The man was not in his bed.
Instead the sheets were pulled up on another bed, a huddled ma.s.s motionless under them. Curious, Evette slowed her pace. Had he died in the night? Surely the duty nurse would have been alerted, but why had his body been placed in another bed? She twitched back the sheet.
Claudette Engadine ran the bone comb through her hair, and wailed voicelessly as a handful came away with the primitive implement. The indignity of it all. Down the bone-slopes from her temporary shelter among the refuse of the dead, her lord moved his puppets in the spotlights of his followers"
eyes. If hate or disgust could kill, the thoughts and feelings in Claudette"s head would have burst the villain"s heart in his thin wizened chest, or would have set the spa.r.s.e dry hair of his blotched scalp aflame, like straw burning.
The thought of his body revolted her. The thought of her own, of what had been done to it, was scarcely better. She was an Engadine; a leader of fashion, not a thing to be remade to a man"s impulses like the paper dollies she had dressed as a child from sc.r.a.ps of muslin and lace. He had not even found her desirable in the form in which Tomas had left her, but had changed her further into a more fitting subject for his feeble l.u.s.ts.
Buried in her mind was an order to kill him. She did not 162 need its prompting. He was still tormenting the Negress.
Claudette felt only grat.i.tude for that. It was another hour in which she would not have to minister to his desires, but the dolls that danced around him, leaping into the air and click-ing their wooden and porcelain limbs like insects, made her head ache. First she thought they were alive. Then she thought they were not. Then she thought they were. Watching them was like watching the pictures in the fire on a winter"s day. Only the pictures were all distorted and awry. They were les fayettes: les fayettes: the little fairies of her granny"s midnight tales. the little fairies of her granny"s midnight tales.
Even more than Montague, they terrified her.
Marcel savoured his black cigar. Smoking on duty was strictly forbidden, and once he would have made sure everything was spick and span before handing over to a new officer. These days, though, he just did not care. He had his cigars and a bottle of wine, he had eased his regulation boots off under the desk, and if that little prig Rober, the captain"s lickspittle, wished to berate him for it - well, let him.
Even the prisoners, the few there were in the cells, were quiet. Good, the last thing he wanted was another row on his shift. The night before last had been bad enough. Three street-walkers and a dwarf had been fighting over a painting, and had been locked up in adjacent cells to sober up. They had still been arguing at six in the morning.
A woman"s scream broke through his reverie. It came from the end cell. That was the cell into which he had put the man who had proof of Dreyfus"s innocence. As if the military courts would make mistakes.
Odd; he did not recall there being any female prisoners.
Possibly the clothing workers at the factory of the family Valjean had been fighting again, and one had been charged with affray before his shift had begun. She could have been huddled under the blankets in the cell"s far corner when he had locked the man up. She"d probably just got a fright when she stuck her head out for air and found a male prisoner snoring at her feet.
Grunting, Marcel levered himself up from his seat and 163 pulled on his boots. Typically Rober was nowhere in sight.
The man was never late unless something unpleasant was happening, and then he would disappear for hours at a time.
Marcel drew his baton; it might be amusing to rattle the bars and give the prisoners something real to worry about. A vengeful malice had risen up in him as a reaction to the gut-wrenching start the scream had given him. He could not remember now why he had not beaten the truth out of the man in the first place.
Marcel moved slowly towards the last cell, bending to get his ma.s.sive frame through the narrow low corridor. A spare oil lantern hung on an iron hook opposite the cell doors.
He took this and lit it with one of the white phosphorus matches from his pocket, striking the match between finger and thumb. A yellow, oily flare of light spilt into the cell through the tiny inspection hatch. It took Marcel a second to make out the shapes in the darkness, lit only by the fluttering patchwork light.
No, Marcel thought - his eyes unaccountably reluctant to rest on the central area of the cell - there was another source of light. The moon, shining in through a series of holes in the cell wall. He was sure that they had not been there before.
The holes were too small and too high up to be any use to the prisoners, even for pa.s.sing messages to the outside. Marcel was d.a.m.ned if he could see how they had been made. They looked like holes that vastly long needles might have made if thrust down from the distant stars, through the rough brick of the cell wall. The thought was somehow more shuddersome than the scream had been.
The scream! He had forgotten it. He had shied away from its implications. There was no woman in the cell. There was just a corpse. Just the body of the old levantine, and the thing on his chest. The thing with the voice of a woman crooning to itself in the dark, its features stained yellow in the lantern"s light. The thing whose war-cry had sounded like a girl"s scream. His mother"s tales of the little people born into flesh.
His eyes jerked away from the minute figure with its green jerkin and garish red belt and the ring of tiny knives, bright as 164 pins, skewered through the scarlet material. Its existence was unendurable.
Rising from it to the holes, Marcel"s eye caught shining lines made visible by moonlight, thin as spider silk. With a cry of horror he realized what they were. Puppet strings. The idea that this creature was not just some freak or aberration in an ordered cosmos, but that it had a controlling intellect at a distance, linked to it by some uncanny means, reached him like a revelation. He was not a thoughtful man, as a rule, and this thought coming almost from outside was worse than anything else.
He thrust his black metal keys into the cell"s iron lock. He would smash this thing, this elf, this doll. Break it, and bury its body in the latrines. Hang the Jew by torn blankets from the door. Block the tiny holes in the wall with s.h.i.t and dirt.
So clear; so simple. Then everything would make sense again.
The body was nailed up above the little chapel"s altar. The whole north end of the chapel narrowed to focus on the life-sized cross. It might have been designed to make it impossible to look away from the crucified figure. Its body was that of a youth but the face, that part of it which remained, was old and locked by death into an expression part sly and part exulted.
Chris felt sick, but he couldn"t show it. The Doctor was immune to nausea, and he was the Doctor. This was worse than the bath. Even Jarre looked green under his baggy skin. Only Kasper seemed unaffected, a presence at once solid and barely perceptible; like the shadow of a block of marble.
The cause of death was the head wound, that much was obvious, but it was also clear from the blood at the wrists and ankles that it had been inflicted after the victim had been lifted up and nailed onto the crucifix. Why crucify someone and then shoot them, Chris wondered. At the very least it was hardly sporting. He winced. Was that how the Doctor thought of humans? A protected species, trembling on the verge 165 of extinction? Once he would have thought that laughable.
He had been raised under the banner of an Empire that commanded a thousand worlds in the name of humanity.
Only later had he encountered technologies that could have crushed Imperial s.p.a.ce like an eggsh.e.l.l. Technologies and other things.
"What do you make of the wound?" he asked.
Jarre glowered, and Chris remembered how infuriating it was when the Doctor drew people out with obvious questions. "Militarily speaking," he added quickly, remembering that Jarre had transferred back to the Surete from military intelligence.
Jarre considered. "It wasn"t made by a French army rifle. The spread of the wound"s too large. Too much muzzle velocity. We sacrificed power for portability. Could be German."
" S o ? " Chris prompted. He could get to like this. No wonder the Doctor was always one step ahead. You just had to nudge, and people did your thinking for you.
Jarre was looking round the chapel nervously. "So . . . " he echoed. "Someone with access to foreign weapons, and His voice hesitated, then picked up speed and volume. "And how did they get the body up there? No room to stand either side, no scaffolding, no hooks for pulleys."
"No sign that the cross was taken down," Chris added, and then felt foolish. If there was not room to lift a body, there would hardly be room to lift a body fastened to an even heavier cross.
Jarre looked as if he had said something profound. Of course, Chris realized, how had the cross been raised above the altar in the first place? The altar was built into the floor.
There was no means of access round it to the cross. The builders wouldn"t have put up a wall with a crucifix on it and then built the rest of the chapel round it. Would they? Jarre was moving his hands over the carvings on the altar rails. A carved creature lying on its back with a single giant foot stretched over its head like a parasol moved under his hand.
The altar and the floor into which it was embedded sank with the grinding of hidden gears. A black slab of darkness, 166 pierced by steps leading down and to the left, was revealed by its pa.s.sing.
Jarre followed Kasper and the Doctor down into the dark.
German, my a.r.s.e, he thought. The man had been shot with a high-powered sniper rifle. One of the specialist weapons devised by the Shadow Directory using the technologies derived from captured alien artefacts. Back-craftsmanship, the technicians called it. A couple of the models had been seized by the Ministry of War when the Dreyfus incident had cast doubt upon the loyalty of the Directory. Someone had been handing them out.
He wondered if the Doctor knew that. There had been a nasty undercurrent in the way he had said " S o ? " and paused.
Working with an alien gave him a slightly disgusting feeling.
167.
Chapter 14.
The Doctor stood in the pa.s.sage outside the attic and looked at the stars through the cas.e.m.e.nt window. The rain had thinned out, leaving a steaming mist that clung to the rooftops. The sky had a pre-industrial clarity. No defraction, no light-pollution to destroy the icy pin-points of the stars.
Illusion, of course; the industrial revolution had cut its way through France, like the rest of western Europe, albeit in a a form peculiar to the country"s temperament and history.
Out there, small firms made up of men trained under the old guild system vied with the ma.s.sive textile mills of the outlying districts which employed predominantly female workers, cheaper and less protected by the Confederation Generale de Travail. Out there, the metalworks would soon fire up for the dawn shift-change, spilling burning fossil fuels into the winter air, ignoring the law pa.s.sed in 1892 that limited the working day of their women employees to a maximum of eleven hours. It was possible to see the coming century from this vantage point alone. A hundred years dominated not by aliens or ideologies, but by an underlying dependency on a mineral slime and the ethics of the production line.
Now, however, the sky was clear. The gas lights were out below, blown out into shattered and melted fists of gla.s.s and cast iron by Monsieur Montfalcon"s power.
Above the pale thin houses, Capella and Aldebaran shone down. To the left of Aldebaran, Neptune and Pluto swung bleakly in the night. Dead worlds. Mars, with its underground 168 crypts and cold warriors, was below the western horizon. He could not make out Charon, Pluto"s moon, or the more distant Mondas. A portion of his mind performed a set of rapid calculations. Charon was eclipsed by Pluto now. As for the cyberworld, it was decelerating on its way back into solar s.p.a.ce. Light from it would be blue-shifted as it shed the relativistic velocities the cyber-engines had produced. His eyes made allowances. There. Almost overhead, hidden by the eaves of the houses, in the direction of the galaxy M40.
A faint smearing of light. The Cybermen. A billion souls wrapped in their machines, coming to Earth to die, if not at his hands then with his connivance. Less than a hundred years hence, a genocide written unchangeably into s.p.a.ce-time blinked balefully at him. Perhaps he should start looking at the gutter.
He knocked on the attic door.
"Tea and toast?"
The painful sounds of human grief came faint through the door. The sounds ended in the shaky confusion of a.s.sumed human fort.i.tude. So admirable in many ways. Such courage in only one life.
The man opened the door. He looked dreadful. He wore the painter"s body like a shroud. It was clearer than ever that he wasn"t Veber. Small things. Fewer creases round the eyes. Something in the expression behind them. The Doctor pushed the tray forward and watched as the man reached for it. " I " m not sure about the arms," he said. "They always try to tell me they"ll ride up with wear, what do you think?"
< p="">
Now that we have drawn apart again it is even more vital that we do not miss this opportunity.) The surveyor flexed its fine-layered surfaces in puzzlement.
Truthseeker felt a twinge of unease, and a fleeting pattern of 169 horror rippled in response over its outer limbs. It clamped down on the reflex. No, painful as it was to he to its old friend, policy demanded it. - - Truthseeker used the unfamiliar term cautiously - < direction="" are="" limited="" and="" are="" always="" followed="" by="" a="" return="" to="" the="" universal="" median="" energy-level?)="" truthseeker="" used="" the="" unfamiliar="" term="" cautiously="" -="">< direction="" are="" limited="" and="" are="" always="" followed="" by="" a="" return="" to="" the="" universal="" median="" energy-level?)="" the="" surveyor="" crinkled="" its="" communicating="" surface=""> down. > < p="">worlds in time. Remember we have all the time in the universe. > Out-argued but barely convinced, the surveyor"s layered flesh slid aside and dark tendrils of doubt, thick and mottled, plucked at the interst.i.tial veins of s.p.a.ce-time. Truthseeker ignored its friend"s tiny involuntary display of distrust. It was, after all, perfectly justified in its suspicions.
Later, when the surveyor had withdrawn from the common s.p.a.ce, Truthseeker collapsed its limbs and huddled in the close-bound comfort between the fifth and sixth dimensions.
The crisis was coming, and it could see no way to prevent it.
Soon there would be no more excuses and the Oldest would demand reunification. They did not understand the horror that Truthseeker had discovered. The Home Worlds were not a haven from the Blight, but the central core of it. He could feel it, in the very structure of the Home Worlds. An emptiness. There was no real birthing matter there, only a hollow mimicry of it.
< whatever="" G.o.ds="" there="" be;="" makers="" of="" my="" makers"="" makers,=""> the surveyor prayed, < grant="" me="" guidance="" from="" the="" past.="" teach="" me="" craft.="" bless="" my="" arts.="" forgive="" me="" the="" betrayal="" of="" my="" friend.=""> Doubt twisted in its core. Truthseeker had done so 170 much, helped so many. In the crisis of the last Blight when the Quoth had been driven mad, it alone had kept its senses. It had guided the mad Quoth into an orderly evacuation, not the insane exodus into the outer voids that the h.e.l.lish beat of the Blight had demanded. It and it alone had directed the great armada of the exodus to a safe haven in this birth-matter-bearing Cl.u.s.ter. The surveyor thought it could not imagine the loneliness Truthseeker must have experienced while its fellows suffered from the Blight. Then it tried to imagine it, and wished it had not. The thought of having no one to communicate with was profoundly disturbing. Under the Blight, Quoth do not speak or think. Its great force presses their minds down to a dimensionless point, and they follow its insane dictates with the methodical obsession of the mad or the mindless.
Had Truthseeker joined them in their mad tasks, the vast and meaningless re-ordering of this Cl.u.s.ter into the perfect image of the one they had fled? The long madness that had faded only gradually as the worlds re-formed into their old structures. Or had it shut down its senses for a hundred million pattern-lifetimes, a dead ma.s.s clenched in the forging chamber of a mad world? No wonder it had begun to grow apart from its kin.
A jagged shape of certainty formed in the surveyor"s patterns. It would ask the Oldest.
The scents of childhood awakened memory. Emil found his hands were holding a tray. He looked down. Thick-cut French bread, toasted and lightly b.u.t.tered, a scoop of red j a m at the side of the cream-coloured plate. A blurred dream of cylinders and living light died at the back of his mind.
Orange juice - out of season, except in the greenhouses of the rich, he thought confusedly - vivid in a tall, straight gla.s.s with a minuscule umbrella stuck in it. The umbrella reminded him of doll"s-house furniture, and the tray tottered in hands that would not respond to his commands.
The stranger, the Doctor, was at his side in an instant, balancing the tray on one hand, muttering apologies. Guiding 171 Emil with the other back to the bed with the faded green counterpane and the faint scent of lilies.
"He"s all right, you know. Simple bruising, nothing more.
A little lump on the noggin. He"ll be right as rain soon.
Blasting strangers to ash like a young man again, unless we can talk some sense into him."
Emil winced. The Doctor"s words washed over him, barely making sense. His mind felt dislocated, like the broken wrist he had suffered as a child after falling from a tree. His father had come running, eyes afire. Concerned and angry at the same time, he had grabbed Emil"s broken wrist with rough madness, burning his fingerprints into Emil"s dark skin. His mother had opened the door of the house in the rue Trianon and got as far as "Did you have a nice day in the park" before his screwed-up bawling face and his father"s livid anger had told her of the accident. She had not spoken to his father for a week. Aunt Jessica had made peace between them in the end.
joining their minds so his mother could read her father"s memories, see for herself that he had not been to blame.
The memory had remained with him although the damage had been minimal: half an hour"s pain, and a further hour with the bones in his hand untwisting themselves and re-positioning under his skin. It had made him feel sick to see the movement, so slow and so deliberate, so unlike the sudden changes of his anger, or of his father"s flash-furies. The bones had fitted back together perfectly; only the burn had never healed, perhaps because he had always thought he deserved it. Now he felt the same queasiness in his whole body, not because the movement was there, but because it wasn"t. With a sense of shame he realized he missed the power. Without it, who was he?
"You cannot know," he wept, clutching at the worn sleeves of the Doctor"s jacket. "This is not my body, and yet it is. It itches like harsh wool on the inside of its skin. When I move, its reach is wrong. The face in the mirror isn"t mine. You know, the ghost of your nose that you never see unless you squint down. I see it all the time, and it isn"t right." His voice was getting louder, and faster. He had both hands on 172 the Doctor"s cream lapels now, tugging insistently. A metal badge on the lapel scratched his right hand. He barely spared it a glance. "Who am I?"