Now her beloved brother was here. His leather eye-patch was clean, his face somehow harder than before, and he looked very handsome.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said as they sat down for supper. ‘Take a look at this.’
Reaching inside his suit jacket, he withdrew a card bearing broken rows of tiny square holes.
‘What is this?’ Gavriela took hold of it. ‘I’ve not seen anything like it.’
‘It’s a Hollerith card,’ said Ilse. ‘If you hang around Erik long enough, you learn these things.’
Erik smiled at her, an expression that told Gavriela everything she needed to know about their marriage. She grinned at them both, then returned her attention to the punched card.
‘They’re used to control mechanized looms,’ Erik said. ‘The pattern of holes effectively forms instructions for weaving.’
‘Very good.’ Gavriela caught on immediately. ‘If you change the pattern of holes, you obtain a different weave.’
She might not recognize prostitutes when she saw them on the street, but logical principles were clear to her, whether in theory or in mechanical devices.
‘So you’ve been visiting a clothing factory?’ she added. ‘Or is it carpets?’
‘Neither one. We’re using them now at the Bureau.’
Ilse passed plates around the table.
‘The Bureau has realized that taking census figures is boring,’ she said. ‘So they’re branching out into dressmaking.’
‘That would be one explanation.’ Erik smiled at her again. ‘Or there’s another use, storing information about people. One card, one citizen.’
‘You could decide what pieces of information you need to hold,’ said Gavriela. ‘And you could change the encoding accordingly. That’s interesting.’
‘Or one might write the information’ - Ilse pointed to a sideboard where a closed notebook lay with a fountain-pen on top - ‘on paper, in a manner comprehensible to actual living people.’
Erik spread his hands.
‘Try searching through millions of pages for the information you need. Machinery can do it so much better.’
‘It’ll never catch on, dear,’ said Ilse.
‘Whatever you say,’ answered Erik.
All was well. They ate their supper, chatting about trivia, enjoying their time together.
Later, Erik smoked and drank brandy - the latter a new habit - while Ilse did the washing up in the kitchen. Gavriela, at Ilse’s insistence, remained sitting opposite Erik.
‘Mother and Father,’ he said, ‘think you’re soft in the head, trying to get them to leave Berlin. But I’m glad Ilse and I made the move.’
‘She’s the best.’
‘Yes, she is.’ Warmth filled his good eye. ‘I am so very lucky.’
Gavriela thought that other people in his position would count their misfortunes; but Erik was better than that.
‘I think perhaps Ilse is lucky also, dear brother.’
‘Ha. I hope so. But it wasn’t only you that persuaded me, it was your friend Jürgen that night in Berlin, the night you never talked about.’
Gavriela’s happiness seeped away.
‘You never saw him. You were up in your room. And he wasn’t a friend, though he helped me.’
And his real name had been Dmitri Shtemenko.
‘Was that the only time you ever saw him?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. Erik, why does that matter to you?’
For several moments, he toyed with the Hollerith card, staring at it as if he were alone in the parlour. Then he looked up at her.
‘I’m a rationalist, you know that. Not to mention an atheist like yourself, good sister.’
‘A Jewish atheist, you mean.’
She remembered the awful woman in the train carriage. Eating pork was fine by Gavriela; it was the realization that she had passed a test by eating the sausage, showing herself to be a real person in the woman’s eyes - that was what had sickened her stomach.
‘It could be worse.’ Erik’s smile lightened the moment. ‘We could be Catholic atheists, and how guilty would we feel then?’
‘Right. So Comrade Dmitri Shtemenko, who called himself Jürgen . . . What about him?’
‘A Bolshevik? And Shtemenko was his real name?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘He—’ Erik stopped, lit another cigarette, and took two deep pulls. ‘He walks in darkness. I don’t know how else to say it.’
‘How did you—?’
‘It’s insane perhaps, but black - things - floated around him as he walked down the street, leaving the house. I was watching from my window.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘They were very faint, and I know it was only weeks after this’ - he pointed to his eye-patch, then his bad leg - ‘so I could have hallucinated. But my mind had knitted itself together by then, thanks to Ilse. I’m sure of it.’
Gavriela let out a long breath.
‘I don’t believe,’ she said, ‘that you can see the darkness too.’
‘What?’
‘I thought’ - she began to cry - ‘I thought I was the only one.’
Perhaps she could see it more easily, for the darkness that she detected was always hard-edged and strong, curling and revolving in impossible ways; but at least he perceived something.
Erik stared at her for a long time. Then he said: ‘There’s at least one other that we know.’
‘Who’s that?’ Gavriela dabbed at her eyes, recovering. ‘Who do you mean?’
‘Comrade Dmitri Shtemenko. He was aware of the shadows around him. He tried to shrug them off and walk away, but they moved with him. It looked as if he was used to doing it.’
‘Oy vay.’
‘Oy oy, indeed. He looked as if he was used to failing, too. To get away from the shadows.’
Gavriela stared into her own memory.
‘I saw something strange in the old school hall,’ she said after a time. ‘Not to mention the graveyard afterwards.’
Then she related all she remembered of the darkness-haunted orator, the real-seeming visions he conjured above the crowd, and later the apparition that appeared in the cemetery, distracting the thugs who were advancing on her and Dmitri, allowing the Russian time to use his blades, killing all three of them.
When Ilse returned, teapot in hand, she looked from one to the other.
‘Are you two all right?’
‘Talking about . . . dark things,’ said Erik. ‘Sorry, dear.’
‘Well, there is evil in the world, I know that much.’ Ilse put the teapot down. ‘But there are good things too.’
‘And you’re one of them, Frau Wolf.’
‘Thank you, Herr Wolf.’
Gavriela blinked.
‘I love you both,’ she said.
THIRTY-TWO
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Max gave it seven days, mean-geodesic time, before talking to the ancient Pilot whose title was Head of Records. His name was Kelvin Stanier, and they met in his office - that deprecated word again - because this was something that deserved to be done in person.
‘I’m here for a bad reason, Kelvin. Sorry.’
‘An operative deceased?’
Max nodded.
‘My condolences. Will there be a body?’
‘No.’
‘And the ship?’
Max looked down to his right, then straight at Kelvin. ‘Nothing.’
‘Okay.’ Kelvin gestured a holospace into being. ‘The officer’s name?’
‘Avril Tarquelle.’
‘Shit.’ Kelvin lowered his hands. ‘She’s so—She was a bright one.’
‘Not to mention young.’
‘Have we notified the family?’
‘There isn’t—She had no relatives. Or close relationships.’
Kelvin said nothing for a time.
‘It was that kind of mission, was it?’
‘Yes.’