Degrees of Freedom

11

Petrovitch crept downward, steadying his progress by holding on to the metal beams of the tunnel supports. Madeleine, rather than facing the steep incline head-first, turned around and backed down, searching the cool, damp rock and mud for any handholds that she could find.

He waited for her at the next level, where his tunnel broke through a thick brick wall.

“There’s a drop on the other side. Not far, but if you’re not ready for it…” He put his feet on the lip of the hole and jumped off into the darkness. From where he now stood, Madeleine was framed by the light behind her, crouched and uncertain.

“What is this?”

“It’s the Tyburn river.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s the beauty of using it. No one can follow me down a river lost to memory.”

She looked longingly back at the faint string of light that ran back up to the car park. “You found out about it.”

“That’s because I’m brilliant.” He shrugged. “And I was looking for it, too. The deep underground lines are full of water and collapsing in on themselves, but rivers are supposed to be there. They fill up when it floods, and they empty when it doesn’t.”

She smelled the air. “Are you standing in shit?”

“Me? No.” Petrovitch moved his feet to either side of the thin ribbon of glassy water flowing down the center of the tunnel. “It’s a sewer, too, but hardly anyone’s been using the mains to flush their govno away for nearly a year. It’s as clean as it’s going to get.”

“And you have one—count them—one pair of socks.”

“Meh. They dry out.” He reached into his bag for the wind-up flashlight he kept there. He gave the handle a few twists, and switched the blue-white beam on. The curve of the brickwork overhead shimmered with reflections, while the walls glistened and shone. A channel was cut into the floor, and it contained the slow-moving stream of weedy-green water completely.

Madeleine lowered herself carefully into the culvert. “Go on, then. How far?” She stood up slowly, and discovered that the roof was high enough even for her.

“About five hundred meters and no surprises. They knew how to build stuff in those days.”

“And how old is this? Before I risk my neck.”

“The newer parts are a hundred and fifty, two hundred years old.”

“Newer? Terrific.”

“C’mon.” He banged his fist against the brickwork. “Second World War, the New Machine Jihad, cruise missiles. Nothing we want to do is going to bring it down.” He turned the flashlight against the run of the river. “We go up there. Doesn’t take long. Need the buckets first, though.”

Ten large buckets, battered and dirty, were stacked in two equal piles just inside the tunnel. They were heavy enough while empty; when full, they were a fearsome weight. Short lengths of thick rope were tied to each handle in turn. Madeleine went to lift both piles, while Petrovitch reached into the topmost bucket and pulled out a sphere. He flicked a switch, and the buckets clanged into the cool, damp air.

“Sure I mentioned these,” he said, and went to turn on the second set of buckets. He tied them together, and pulled them along behind him like a pair of reluctant dogs.

The one intrusion of modernity into the Victorian construction was the thin cable stapled to the glazed brick roof. It ran from the hole the entire length of their walk along the underground stream. Though there were side tunnels and places where rusted ladders led upward toward the hidden surface, the cable ran unerringly along in an unbroken line.

Then it disappeared at right-angles to the line of the river, through another dark hole made near the upper part of the wall.

Petrovitch gave the flashlight another wind, and the light pulsed in time with his efforts. “I had to make the opening above what I could expect the water level to rise to when it rained. I almost got it right, too. Last autumn was a bit of a pidaras, so I lost a week or two just bailing everything out.”

Madeleine raised herself up and peered through the gap. “I cannot picture you down here with a pickaxe and a shovel.” Her voice echoed in the space beyond.

“It’s the twenty-first century. Pickaxes are obsolete.” He threw his bag over the lip of the hole, then shoved the buckets through. They blithely drifted on until they hit something solid, then banged around until they were still.

He tried to climb up after them. His feet slithered on the tunnel side, but his left arm was proving an impediment. He let himself slide back, then edged one foot closer to the top. But he couldn’t do the splits, and he had to admit defeat.

“Need a hand?”

“May as well, since you’re here.”

She put her arms around his waist and lifted him off the floor, high enough that he could flick his legs over the edge of the hole and sit on the brickwork. She waited for him to ease himself down, then vaulted the wall in a single leap.

“What is this? ‘Everybody laugh at the cripple’ day?” Petrovitch crouched down to clip the lighting circuit in the new tunnel to the waiting battery. “Why don’t I just give the hospital a call and tell them to prepare for an amputation?”

“Sam…”

“Yeah, well. This thing was your idea. You could cut me some slack.” He straightened up, pressing a hand into the small of his back. “It’s uncomfortable, awkward and it’s always there. It does some things better, like hitting people really hard, but the stuff I need it to do now? It’s not fantastic. Frankly, I’m bored with it already.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” she started, but he cut her off.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Come on, we’re almost there, and the clock’s ticking.” He scooped up the handle on his bag and trailed it after him down the slope toward the tunnel’s blind face.

They had left the river behind; the noise of the trickling water, the drips from the ceiling, the occasional soft moan of the wind blowing up through the vast labyrinth had all been silenced. It was just the two of them, and the sounds they made: their breathing, the scratch and creak of material, the unexpected rasp of the Velcro patches on Petrovitch’s courier bag when he opened it again.

“I came up with the plan while I was lying in hospital waiting for them to fix my eyes. I figured I needed to do three things: get Michael out, blindside the UN Security Council, and make it look like I was doing neither. Doing both one and two, maybe half a dozen ways of managing that. All three? That’s where the standing on the remains of the Oshicora Tower every day came in. I’m in full view of the world, in defiance of two UN resolutions, picking up a rock and throwing it away.” He snorted. “They installed cameras on the nearby buildings to watch me better, in case I got carried away and brought in trucks and earth-movers, in case I actually got serious. Didn’t occur to them to install seismometers. Not while they could see me.”

“But if you don’t dig?” Madeleine pressed her fingers into the tunnel wall, a dense aggregate of gray-yellow clay and sand. She could scrape the surface layer away, but it was hard work. “Don’t tell me you use explosives. It’s that Valentina, isn’t it?”

“Leave Tina out of this. She has no idea what I do or where I go, just that I go and do something. If I needed an inexhaustible supply of semtex, I’m pretty certain she could’ve arranged it, just as I’m pretty certain she’d have got found out by you.” Petrovitch sat back against a prop. “Home-made stuff, sure: brew it up by the vat load, until we leave a smoking crater where our bomb factory used to be, and it’s not like we can pop down to the shops for precursor chemicals.”

“So how do you do it? How, on your own, could you have done all this?”

He revealed his hand, and in it was a small black resin sphere, chased with silvery lines.

“An anti-gravity device.”

“No.” He hefted it and held it out for inspection. “This is a singularity bomb. See, it’s a touch smaller, and the pattern on the surface is different—different inside too, of course.”

Madeleine couldn’t see because she was edging back up the tunnel. “Just put it down, Sam.”

“It’s fine.” He tossed it from hand to hand, not remembering for a brief moment that it was going to be difficult for him to catch it again. His arm shot out with a whirr of motors, and the sphere dropped neatly into his outstretched palm. “Excellent. Anyway, it’s not plugged in. Perfectly safe.”

He pushed a thick nail into the blind face of the tunnel, and knocked it in firmly with a lump hammer.

“You do this every single night?”

“Yeah. Don’t need as much sleep as I used to. I program myself for a few hours’ deep sleep, and I seem to manage. Because of that, I am now, according to my calculations, under the Oshicora Tower.” He spooled some double-stranded wire from a hidden reserve inside his bag and stripped the ends with his teeth. He spat out the plastic sleeving. “I only had Old Man Oshicora’s word for this, but he said ‘below this building’ when he talked about the quantum computer he used to run VirtualJapan. The tower went up in twenty-twenty, and there’s no record of a retro-fit. Which means that somewhere in the foundations, there’s a room large enough to fit the computer, an independent power supply and all the cooling it needs.”

She came a little closer. “You could be burrowing down here forever, trying to find it.”

“Except I’m not looking for the room. I’m looking for the shaft that connects it to the tower. It has to be wide enough to get technicians and equipment down to it, and the computer up if there’s a problem.” Petrovitch carried on working, using conducting glue to stick the bare wire to the bomb and holding them in place while they set. “And thanks to the miracle of ground-penetrating radar, I know that that very shaft is a meter and a half straight on.”

Closer still. “You honestly think you can just do this?”

“Yeah. Who’s going to stop me?” He gave the wires an experimental tug, and was satisfied they’d hold. “Unless you’re going to turn me in, I’m pretty confident no one will know I was even here.”

She was opposite him, face to face in the half-light. “But what are you going to do with Michael?”

He raised his eyebrows and blinked repeatedly. “You know, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Here I am, busting my yajtza to secretly rescue my friend from his concrete tomb, making sure that none of my friends could possibly be indicted as war criminals by the simple expedient of not telling them what I was doing, and I forget to consider the two Security Council resolutions calling for his immediate death should he ever escape. What a mudak.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” she said, even as she tried to suppress a smile.

“Yes, it does. My voice is permanently stuck between sarcastic and condescending, no matter how hard I try for the dizzying heights of irony. Never mind.” Petrovitch pulled a battery out of his bag and dangled it in front of her eyes. “Let’s do some science.”

“I’ve missed you.”

He had a retort ready. It was on the tip of his tongue and almost out, but he realized in time that the game had changed.

“Yeah. Well. I’m still the guy who hid an AI from his wife and thinks he did the right thing. And until I invent a time machine, I can’t go back and do it differently. Though there is a school of thought that says if time machines were going to be invented, our past would already have been altered, so maybe I did tell you and it was such pizdets I had to create an alternative timeline where I didn’t tell you in order to put it right again.” Petrovitch succeeded in distracting himself. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, it doesn’t say much for the others.”

She enfolded his hands with hers. “I’ve really missed you.”

He shivered. “Talking geek at you always made you horny.”

Madeleine didn’t deny it. “Everybody knew about Michael before I did. I was upset. Really, deeply hurt that you hadn’t told me. The more people asked me, the worse it got. Reporters would needle me with it whenever I made any sort of public statement. It got me so angry, the only way I could deal with it was—”

“To leave me. I know.”

“We’ve really fucked this up, haven’t we?”

“That depends,” said Petrovitch. “We’re fifteen meters below a collapsed building, crouching in a small tunnel cut through unstable quaternary alluvial deposits using miniature black holes, looking for a concrete pipe that might be blocked by fallen masonry, at the bottom of which could be a very crushed computer, while above ground, someone wants us to believe they have a live nuclear weapon ready to re-enact the attack on Paris.” He watched her face fall, then added. “But we’re here together. Where else would I rather be?”

“Martinique?”

“Big volcano. I like my tropical paradises tectonically stable. And mostly above sea level before you suggest an alternative. I remember a conversation I had with Michael—several conversations really, because he’d keep coming back to the same question. He wanted to know about love, and how it worked, and what it looked like, and what it meant. He wanted answers, and I was bad at giving them. That’s not new, though.”

He looked down at his hands, covered by hers. He had cracks and cuts and burns on his, and her nails had been gnawed down to the quick.

“What I’m trying to say is that he kept on asking me why I was doing this or that, risking my neck trying to find you, and telling me that the only thing that could possibly make sense of it all was that I loved you. And I wouldn’t have it. Until, eventually, it turned out he was right after all and it had taken a yebani machine to make me realize the truth of it. I never told you, because after that, everything between us got so impossible, I didn’t want to play that card; it wouldn’t have been fair. You were so very angry with me, and I wasn’t in any position to say you were wrong.”

He looked up again to find she was crying. He could do that; he could also fake it by squeezing excess lubricant over the surface of his eyes and blinking it away, but it was a cheap trick, and not worthy of either her or him.

He had rendered her completely speechless, though, so he kept on talking. “So, in answer to your question: yeah. We fucked it up. Doesn’t stop me from hoping that we have a choice about whether we keep on fucking it up or not. I choose that we don’t, but it’s really up to you. It always has been.”

Petrovitch ran out of steam entirely. Madeleine was holding his hands so tightly that the corners of the battery were making holes in his skin, and the contacts touching his damp skin were leaking current. His artificial middle finger was starting to spasm.

“Yobany stos, woman, say something.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” and in a stronger voice, “we’ll try to stop fucking it up.” She let go of him and scrubbed at her cheeks, sniffing.

Petrovitch eased his fingers apart and managed not to wince. The battery dropped to the ground, and Madeleine picked it up.

“Remind me again why we were down here?”