The Curve of The Earth

27

They flew in low over Deadhorse. It was a town there for one reason only, and that reason was becoming increasingly irrelevant. It was kept going because it was important that it wasn’t abandoned. That was all.

“Ten years ago I gave you the means to produce all the energy you wanted, simply and cheaply. The world’s awash with oil, and yet you’re still up here, doing it the hard way.” Petrovitch circled one of the drill rigs, hidden inside its insulating tower. There was another half a k away, and another beyond that. The whole landscape was punctuated with these strange monoliths, grey and glowing in their arc lights.

“It’s commerce,” said Newcomen. “Part of the strategic reserve, too.”

“It’s not commerce. Do you know how much of a subsidy ARCO get for simply being here?”

“No, I…”

“Ask your link. The guys down at Dawson have their own fermenter that knocks out methanol at cost.” Petrovitch turned the nose of the plane back towards the airport. “It’s stupid to keep on doing the old thing when the new thing is so much better.”

“Don’t you think you lose something when you reject the past?”

“You mean like retrofitting DNA and growing babies in artificial wombs?”

Newcomen was silent, and Petrovitch snorted.

“Compared with you, I’m virtually normal.”

“Just… just land, will you? I’m not in the mood.” Newcomen turned his head away. “I assume there’s things like hot showers and hot food down there?”

“There’s a hotel. The Caribou. It even has cable.”

“And they’re expecting us?”

“We’ve had reservations for days.” The runway lights lined up in two lines, pointing to the horizon. “We’ve a show to put on, and I hate disappointing my public.”

Other airports of comparable size would have had a drift of light aircraft on the apron, but in the far north, the weather was hard on airframes. Instead, there was a row of hangars, each one big enough to hold a wide-bodied jet.

He contacted the tower for permission to land. It was a formality: they weren’t going to say no, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Everything was converging on this point: none of them had any room for manoeuvre. He almost felt sorry for the spooks, consigned to the near-perpetual darkness. He was guessing that most of them had no idea why they were up in the frozen north. The more of them that knew, the more likely there’d be a leak that’d get picked up by the Freezone’s data miners.

The required permission came, nevertheless, along with a hangar assignment. Petrovitch dropped the plane on to its wheels and steered it towards the opening doors. Inside the hangar, it was bright and full. There were only a couple of bays that were still vacant, all the others taken by functional light transports bearing the ARCO livery.

He applied the brakes when he was within the yellow lines, and cut the power. As the turbines wound down, the heavy gears that closed the external doors cranked into life.

Still Petrovitch sat there, staring at the blank wall in front of him.

Newcomen unbuckled his harness, but Petrovitch wanted to wait for a moment, to savour the tension in the air.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “It’s here. Everything’s just fallen into place — us, them, Lucy. The game’s ready to begin.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“Yeah, yeah, it is. Just because we’re all going to die doesn’t mean that we’re not playing. Your lot have the advantage: you hold all the cards bar one. But I’ve gambled more on less.”

“At least I’ll die clean and fed, then. But not warm.”

“Don’t be petulant. Perhaps it does suit you, but I don’t have to listen to it.” Petrovitch hit his own buckle and shrugged the straps away. “Believe it or not, it’s actually warmer outside than when we were in Canada. Snow’s due in the next twenty-four hours.”

He called for the door to open and the steps to lower. On the way, he scooped up his bag. He was half expecting a welcoming committee: cold-hearted killers, bright-eyed analysts, pipe-wielding heavies. Waiting to impress on him the importance of his mission, the urgency of it all. Find her, they’d say, you know you want to.

And he did.

But there was no one. They were alone in the hangar, with nothing but cold still air to greet them.

“Isn’t it about now someone says that it’s too quiet?” asked Newcomen. He was fastening his parka unbidden, and Petrovitch thought that there might be some hope for the man.

“Only if they’re in a bad detective movie.”

“And we’re not?”

“Different kind of movie altogether.” Petrovitch’s mouth twitched. “We have to check in, then we’ll do a tour of the sights.” He reached out and patted the fuselage. “Need some more fuel for the bird.”

He trotted to the bottom of the steps, and strode out across the hangar, looking back briefly. His borrowed plane was like a swan compared with the bulky ARCO service models. It was going to be a shame to lose it.

There was a human-sized door inset into the main motoroperated door. He opened it up and stepped outside. It might have been a few degrees warmer, but it was still double-digit cold.

Newcomen closed the door behind him, and they walked together towards the distant buildings. Somewhere under the ice were roads, and maybe they could have arranged a transfer to the hotel, but Petrovitch wanted the time to talk.

“This place will be wired, completely. Anything you say or do will be recorded in half a dozen different ways, right down to the volume, velocity and composition of your farts. Almost everyone you meet — who’s not an Inuit — will be a plant, and then some of them, too. There’s been a wholesale rerostering of ARCO employees: ringers with fake resumes straight out of central casting are in, regular Arctic workers out.”

“Won’t the company’s profits suffer for that?”

“The chairman of ARCO is so thoroughly Reconstructionist, I doubt he’d think twice about making the whole outfit a CIA front.”

“So, what? The whole town’s populated by secret agents?”

“I wouldn’t call it a town, but yeah. That gives us a surprising degree of latitude.”

“How so?”

“Ever seen Westworld?”

Newcomen frowned. “Don’t think so.”

“Made in the seventies. It’s about a special theme park, populated by robots, that rich people can visit to fulfil all their wanton, hedonistic desires. Fight, kill, have orgies, the lot. End of the day, the staff just clean the robots up and get them ready for the next bunch of tourists.”

“That sounds horrible! Gross, perverted.”

“And it is. The story does have a happy ending: the robots rise up and slaughter the humans.”

“That’s just as bad.”

“This is not a pointless anecdote,” said Petrovitch. “We’re in our own personal Westworld. We can do, more or less, anything we like, and it’s all consequence-free. They might decide to take our guns away if we kill too many of them, but that’s about it. As long as we find Lucy for them, they don’t care.”

Newcomen stared at him from underneath the fringe of his hood. He was aghast.

“We’re not going to do that, though. Right?”

“No one’s going to stop us. If I want to shoot someone in the head, then that’s okay by whoever’s in charge.” Petrovitch shrugged inside his heavy coat. “You’re not the only expendable agent here. Take a look at the eyes of everyone we meet: see if you can spot the fear in them. But us? We’re in a state of grace. We can commit no sin.”

They walked down the middle of what passed for a main street. The buildings — far apart, all raised clear of the permafrost by stilts — were functional and nothing else, and often little more than prefab sheds surrounded by discarded and partcannibalised equipment.

As the darkness drew about them, the day shorter still, he spotted the blinking neon sign for the Caribou.

“Take the receptionist at the hotel,” said Petrovitch. “He’s not the regular guy. He’s not even one of the occasionals. I’m guessing that last week he was working out of an office in DC, or New York. They’ve dragged him up north, no experience of Arctic conditions, little idea of why he’s here: he’s got a script, like they all do, all the ringers and replacements.”

He was at the bottom of the steps up to the hotel’s front door. He blinked away some ice crystals and wondered about adding antifreeze, or at least extra salt, to his tears.

“You’re going to try and make him go off-message, aren’t you?” said Newcomen.

“Chyort, yeah.” Petrovitch tramped up the steps and shouldered his way into the foyer.

It was simple enough: a desk, a chair behind it, and a slightly pudgy, slightly balding man rubbing his sweaty palms nervously on his trousers. He cleared his throat, once, then again, because the first time hadn’t quite got rid of the dry, prickling hoarseness he felt.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said.

“Dobre outro,” said Petrovitch. “We have reservations. Lots of them, but we’ve also got a couple of rooms booked. Petrovitch and Newcomen.”

“I’ve got your keys here.” The faux-receptionist slid two plastic cards across the desk at them. “I’ll need to, ah, see some ID.”

Petrovitch eyed the sign behind the desk, telling him he wasn’t allowed either firearms or alcohol in his room. The corner of his mouth twitched. “ID? Sure.” His hand dipped into his pocket and retrieved a plastic eyeball, which he buffed against his sleeve.

When it was shiny, he rolled it towards the man, who stopped it with his fingertips and looked up at Petrovitch, then Newcomen, and back to Petrovitch again.

“Maybe we should waive the formalities this once.” He held out the eye and dropped it into Petrovitch’s waiting palm. “Your rooms are through that door, second and third on the left.”

“Aren’t you supposed to ask whether we want bugged or unbugged?”

They looked at each other again, and the receptionist’s tongue attempted to moisten his lips. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

Petrovitch dumped his bag on the desk, and made an ostentatious show of thumbing the lock, unzipping it, and rummaging around inside, his brows rising and falling as he felt each object in turn.

He pulled out a small wand, with a series of lights running up to the tip. He pressed a button on its base, and the lights pulsed once, settled down, then started rising again.

“Ooh, what do we have here?” Petrovitch held the wand up and traced arcane lines in the air. “The place is alive, Newcomen. We’ll have to mind our language, and everything else.”

He suddenly stabbed the wand at the chest of the receptionist, who jerked back, but only as far as the wall behind him. He was still within easy reach of Petrovitch.

The stubby wand crawled up his neck, his chin, his nose, and hovered, poised, over one eye. The man swallowed and watched the lights flicker near to their maximum.

“You’re wired,” said Petrovitch. “This whole place is wired.”

“I…”

“That was a statement of fact, not a request for information. I’d just like to take this opportunity, now that I know your controllers are listening for sure: you think you’ve got me. You couldn’t be more wrong.”

He pulled back the wand and dropped it in his bag. He passed Newcomen one of the keys and threw the other in the face of the receptionist, who flinched and tried to duck.

“Like I ever needed one of those. Come on, Newcomen.” Petrovitch grabbed his bag and took a step back towards the door outside. “Let’s go and put more fuel in the tank and take that tour.”

Back out in the snow and the dark and the cold, Newcomen rounded on him. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Just letting them know we’ve arrived, and we’re not scared.”

“You mean, you’re not scared.”

“Sorry, projecting. I assumed you’d grown a backbone, but I managed to be wrong, yet again.” Petrovitch frowned. “That better not become a habit. A lot depends on me being right.”

Newcomen ground his teeth. “Can you manage to be a little less rude next time?”

“What? You mean the desk jockey back there?” Petrovitch stopped in the middle of the street. “Yobany stos, man. He’s got orders to kill me. Why the huy should I be polite to him?”

“And you’re a prophet now?”

“That man has been sent here to see you, me and Lucy in an early grave. They all have. They’re the teeth in the trap. Just because you share an employer doesn’t mean you’re going to escape what they’ve got planned for you.” He started walking again. “It hasn’t so far, has it?”

“In the end, they’ll not do that. If I can convince them I’ve done my duty…”

“Okay, let’s try something.” Petrovitch put his bag on the ground and pulled out his pistol. He tugged his mitten off with his teeth, and pressed the barrel of the gun against Newcomen’s forehead.

Newcomen was very, very still. “Doctor?”

“Right,” called out Petrovitch. “You can see me, right? You going to stop me? Here’s an FBI agent. He’s one of yours. Come and save him from the big bad Russian.”

There were figures in the shadows: he could see them in infrared, the bright colours of their faces, muted greens and lighter blues where their clothing shielded them from the cold. But no one asked him to lower his weapon, no one came out to press his gun hand down.

“What are you waiting for? Don’t you care?”

Newcomen closed his eyes.

“No one? No one at all?” Petrovitch shrugged, and tossed the weapon back into the open bag. “Guess not, then.”

He pulled his mitten back on and grabbed the bag’s handles, but didn’t move from the spot.

Newcomen opened one eye, then the other. He shuddered. “You, you…”

“Wouldn’t have shot you? No. You won’t get the same offer anywhere else in this town, though. You’d better remember that.”