Theories of Flight

5

Petrovitch made the long walk in from Clapham, through ruined Battersea to the Thames. Waterlogged bricks had cascaded into the roads in blocks and sheets, exposing the rooms behind. Thick sulphurous mud was banked up either side of the road, oozing slowly back under its own gelatinous weight.

He wasn’t the only one walking, but that there were so few of them was disturbing. The heart of the city had been ripped out by the flood and the machines. Now the surrounding limbs were being severed by the Outies. His beloved Metrozone—he was doing what he could, but it wasn’t going to be enough. He’d saved it from the Jihad, only to see it die a slow, tortured death, rotting from the inside and eaten from the out.

Streets that were once so full of life were like the buildings either side of them: empty. So very sad.

The north end of the bridge was guarded by MEA troops. He’d remembered to put the Ceska back in its pouch when he’d got back from Wong’s. He had nothing left to declare, only his own genius.

It took time to pass through, all the same. Cities with checkpoints, with areas under curfew, with daily gun battles and bombings: they faltered, and the Metrozone was already on its knees.

Ahead of him in the queue, the soldiers caught some kid with a knife tucked in the top of his sock. They bundled him away into the back of a van, and the doors closed behind him.

The van didn’t drive away. It rocked and boomed, the light twisting off the mirrored windows. The doors hadn’t opened again by the time Petrovitch had walked under the screen’s arch. He took his diversion toward Green Park.

The nikkeijin, refugees once before, now had nowhere else to go. Sonja, showing some of her father’s skill, paid them when no one else would. They cleaned the corpses and the rats from the ground floors. They pumped and shoveled the basements. They used pressure hoses on the stone flags outside. They spread outward, scraping and sifting as they went.

Petrovitch passed one blue-overalled team as they shifted the filth off the tarmac with the aid of a bulldozer, then dug into the resulting mounds of ordure with spades, flinging it high into the back of a waiting truck. With hoods drawn tight over their heads and soft white surgical masks obscuring their faces, only their eyes were showing and they were giving nothing away.

Behind them, in the area they’d already swept that day and on previous days, were meters of tape between the lamp-posts, together with markers on the buildings to show their conditions. Much of it was in kanji script, and MEA had its own obscure coding underneath, strings of letters and numbers.

The kanji called to him. He had been able to read it once, fluent as a native. That it had been a trick, a contrivance of virtual reality, mattered less than the fact it had rewired his brain. If he caught it right, a momentary glance, he felt as if he could make out the meaning behind the symbols.

This house is uninhabitable from the second floor down. This house poses an unacceptable biological hazard. Five bodies were retrieved from the ground floor of this property.

He blinked, and it was gone. He looked up, and there was the Oshicora Tower, in the midst of fallen skyscrapers and broad, crushed concrete avenues. In front of the doors were two figures, both strangely slight, almost elfin.

One was a man, young, slim, as sharp and flexible as the blade he carried across his back. He had a carbine, too, folding stock already tucked into his right armpit. He wore armor, but it didn’t seem to encumber him in any way. He carried himself like the samurai he’d always dreamed of becoming—and now his loyalty to the one who had made that possible was absolute. And not a little scary.

The other: Petrovitch still remembered her as a furious, smoke-tainted hostage and as a savage katana-wielding avenger. Here she was as smart businesswoman, wearing a dawn-gray pencil skirt and tailored jacket. It didn’t fit easily with his memories, but maybe he was just uncomfortable around suits.

The man, Miyamoto, tracked his every step across the wide plaza, standing close behind his employer. He withdrew slightly as Petrovitch approached, not because he wanted to or because he trusted the other man at all: he was expected to, and that was all.

“Hey,” said Petrovitch, his breath condensing about him.

Sonja Oshicora smiled. “It’s good to see you.”

Petrovitch pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. And you.”

“It’s been a long time. You only work down the road. Maybe…”

“Or maybe not. You know why.”

“Are you happy, Sam?” she asked. She was wearing lipstick. She never used to.

“I’d be happier if the city wasn’t pizdets. We’re losing her: six months, a year, two. I don’t think it matters how long it takes. You can shovel govno by the barge-load, but it’s…”

“Inevitable? I know.” She stepped closer to him, and Petrovitch forced himself not to retreat. “You can always leave. Lots of people have.”

“You stayed.”

“But you’re not staying because of me, are you?”

“No,” he said. “The world has become a complicated place, and I don’t know where I stand anymore. You heard about yesterday?”

“Of course.” She ran her finger through her fringe, and the hair fell back like it was made of rain. “Who’s the blonde?”

He didn’t know what she meant for a moment. “Oh. Her. McNeil. She’s a—she’s one of my students.”

“Does she have a first name?”

“Yeah. It’s,” and he screwed his face up, “Fiona. That’s it.”

“And what has Madeleine to say about it?”

“She hasn’t said anything. I’ve only just realized it doesn’t look brilliant and I’ve seen it a dozen times.” He shrugged. “I got caught up in the moment. I’m hugging Hugo just as hard.”

“Be careful, Sam.” Sonja looked up at him. “You might not recognize infatuation. But I do.”

Petrovitch wore a pained expression. “Really?”

She nodded.

He scratched at his chin. It rasped. Then he remembered what he’d come for. “Harry Chain.”

“Yes. Him. What does he want?” Her antipathy was clear from her tone.

“The CIA are in town, apparently, and not in an ‘if you have a few moments, I’d like to ask you some questions’ sort of way. Sorenson’s sister is here as well, and Chain thinks the two are connected.” He dug his hands in his coat pockets. “I suggested we just tell them everything rather than try and keep it all secret. Information wants to be free, and all that.”

“But what about my father?” asked Sonja. “The… you know.”

“That’s precisely why I’ve decided to keep quiet for now.” Petrovitch turned his face up to the sky. “It’s not something we can keep up forever, though. We have to start thinking ahead. Where do we want to be in five years? Ten years? We’re going from day to day with no clear vision of what we’ll become, and it’ll be the death of us. This is just survival, but we need more than that.”

“Sam…”

“I’ve spent years hiding. All that left me with is more to hide.” He let his head fall. “I’m tired, Sonja. I’ve got the world’s press waiting for me, and all because I made something the size of a grapefruit fly. That wasn’t even hard. What we did in the Long Night: now that was hard, and we can’t tell anyone about it.”

“You’re right,” she said. “If you want to escape, I have the money and the contacts: we could always run away together.”

Even though she was smiling, he knew she meant it. It cut deeper than Miyamoto’s sword ever could. His heart spun faster and his skin prickled with sweat. Then a thought, tentative and tantalizing, entered his mind.

“You know what?” said Petrovitch. “That’s not such a bad idea.”

She gasped and pressed one immaculately manicured hand to her crisp, white blouse.

“I thought they only did that in movies,” and he continued without a break. “No, really. We could all run away. This needs some serious work.”

She found her breath. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve got some answers. In the meantime, what are we going to do about Charlotte Sorenson?”

“And the CIA,” added Sonja.

“I don’t believe the zadnitza. But Sorenson’s sister will come here, and she didn’t look like the sort of woman who’d take govno from anyone.”

“I’ll deal with her.” She’d recovered from her momentary shock. “No need for her to even know you exist.”

“You don’t know what Sorenson told her.”

“So I’ll deal with her,” she repeated.

“Not that way.” Petrovitch finally got her meaning and he shook his head. “If she wants to see me, don’t block her. That’ll just look suspicious. And when it comes down to it, I killed her brother for lots of very good reasons. If I have to tell her about that, I will.”

“And I will protect my father, Sam. Even from you.”

“Yeah. I know.” He scratched the nape of his neck, touching the ring of cold metal that lay flush with his skin. “Look, I’d better be off. Find a back door to sneak in.”

“You should be happy, Sam. You’ve proved your equations were right.” She touched his arm, briefly, and Petrovitch stepped back from her, balancing on one heel and ready to turn. “Come up and see the park sometime.”

“I don’t know about that. I climbed all those stairs once: I’m not sure I want to do it again.” He bit at his thumb. “I do use lifts, now. Sometimes. But not yours.”

He spun away, raising his hand to the statue-still figure of Miyamoto. Petrovitch’s coat swirled about him, and he headed off toward Hyde Park.

He was in a foul mood by the time he made it to the lab. He threw his coat down on an acid-etched bench and kicked out at a stool.

“Vsyo govno, krome mochee.”

Then he realized he was alone for the first time in two hours, enveloped in a silence that made his ears ring. He sat down at a desk—it looked like Dominguez’s—and flipped his glasses off.

Next to a picture frame that scrolled Spanish views was a half-empty mug of coffee. Which meant it was half-full, and he fell on it gratefully, swilling the lukewarm brew down in gulps. He hadn’t done the eating thing either, and he idly rolled out the drawers, the same ones where he might keep his own stash of food in his own desk.

Nothing. And he wasn’t going to brave the canteen after the ludicrous scrum that had developed in the foyer. The paycops had been worse than useless, holding up their own cameras rather than trying to keep order. Even then, when he’d agreed to answer some questions, sitting on the reception desk to gain some height over the crowd, no one had the wit to ask him anything to do with the experiment itself. There’d been no attempt to understand the physical principles behind the effect or interrogate him on the direction of future investigations.

That had made him as angry as the constant shouts of “How do you feel?”

It was novelty they were seeking, not enlightenment.

He’d dismissed them all with a growl, and pushed through to safety with practiced elbows. Even then, he’d escaped from the frying pan only to find the fire.

The university hierarchy, with patent lawyers in tow, tried to stitch him up in words so complex he could barely fight his way out again. In the end, he’d signed nothing: no verbal agreement to any course of action, no appending his thumbprint to any document that would take longer to read than the lifetime of the universe.

“You can’t copyright physics,” said a voice.

Petrovitch looked up, saw only a blur. He patted around for his glasses and fitted the arms over his ears.

McNeil: she’d made no effort to dress up for the press either. Same old jeans, same old sweatshirt, no makeup or jewelry.

“Sorry?”

“What you said: you can’t copyright physics.” She sat down on the edge of Dominguez’s desk. “I agree.”

“Yeah, well. No one cares what we think. Not anymore.” He scratched at the corner of his eye. “Last night I dreamed that I was in a park—somewhere warm, not here—and the place was stiff with kids; little kids, babies, toddlers, teenagers, no one older than us, anyway. They all had spheres, and they were playing with them. Sliding them to each other, patting them so they bounced and spun, pushing them away and then running after them. Some of the bigger ones had made up a football-like game, with trees for goalposts, and others had stuck them to trays or bits of wood and were surfing on them. They all looked like they were having a really great time: certainly no one was telling them they’d have to hand their spheres back because they broke copyright.”

She reached across and picked up his—Dominguez’s—mug. “Want a fresh one?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

She busied herself at a sink, her back to him. “What are you going to do?”

“Now? I don’t know.”

Dominguez shouldered his way in. He saw McNeil and was about to say something, then he spotted Petrovitch and changed his mind.

Petrovitch wasn’t inclined to move. He sat, drumming the desktop with a fingernail tattoo, while Dominguez put his bag down on a bench.

“We have moved the mass balance downstairs, as you requested,” he said.

Petrovitch looked around. He finally noticed that the machine had gone.

“Yeah. So you have.” He sat up and stilled his hands. “Look, sit down, both of you. I think I do know what I’m going to do next.”

They pulled up chairs and waited expectantly. Petrovitch wondered what their reaction might be.

“We need a break from all this. We’re not going to get any proper work done around here for a few days anyway, until the dust settles and things get back to normal. So: we’re going to do something different. A gedankenversuch.”

“A what?” asked Dominguez.

“Thought experiment,” murmured McNeil, then to Petrovitch: “Into what?”

“Society. I want you to go and design me a human society. Not a utopia: one that acknowledges its faults and includes mechanisms to correct itself. One that’s better than the one we have now. Info-rich. Post-scarcity. Knowledge as currency. Stuff like that.” Petrovitch looked at their bemused faces. “Can you do it?”

Dominguez frowned his heavy brows. “I suppose so. Can I ask why? Is this part of our training?”

Petrovitch sat back, lacing his fingers together behind his head. “Yeah. It is. It’s a mistake to be an expert in just one narrow field. You need to be able to read widely and apply your smarts to any problem. Let’s see how you deal with this one.”

“You said a few days.” McNeil leaned forward. Her interest and enthusiasm had been piqued, and her usually pale cheeks were slightly flushed. “How long do we have?”

“What’s today?”

“Tuesday,” she said.

“Friday, then. On my desk by Friday.” He got up, pushing the chair back with a flick of his knees. “Don’t be late.”