‘Isn’t it?’
The descent stopped. Rafaella stood, and the craft-bubble’s walls shivered apart, leaving only the floor. They were now on an exposed quickglass platform suspended by a hundred-metre thread from the vault ceiling, at the centre of this huge space, far below the surface city.
‘The architecture above is just the tip of everything,’ said Rafaella. ‘People would know this, if they bothered to look.’
Alisha stood, her legs wobbly.
‘I . . . Can we go back up now?’
‘In a moment. See over there? You gave me the idea.’
‘I’m sorry?’
A row of long, silver-scaled dragons hung in place, their wings diaphanous red, their crystal eyes bulbous. Quickglass dragons. Huge.
‘For Last Lupus,’ said Rafaella. ‘I thought we might end Festival with something spectacular. Your little mannequin inspired me.’
Alisha’s bottom lip hurt. She realized she was biting it.
‘And you gave me the Zajinet,’ Rafaella added. ‘You have no idea how helpful that was.’
‘I don’t—’
‘My capacity for expansion is now effectively infinite. Isn’t that something wonderful?’
Shaking her head, Alisha found the surrounding marvels blurring as tears filled her eyes.
‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? I don’t know why, but you are.’
‘Oh, no. You’re thinking of the old me.’ Rafaella’s mouth turned up at the corners, but the expression was not a smile. ‘I do things differently now.’
Her eyes appeared to expand.
Oh, God. Oh, no.
Vampire code poured through Alisha’s plexnodes.
THIRTY-EIGHT
EARTH, 1939-1940 AD
The Bohr Institute, home of startling ideas, was everything it should be: stone walls, an atmosphere of grandeur, the great man’s coat of arms upon the walclass="underline" heraldic icons around a yin-yang. When Bohr had been knighted, he had chosen a superposition of classical and new, of west and east.
It was all very appropriate; but Gavriela found it hard to care.
‘Florian Horst.’ Her Danish was almost non-existent. ‘Please.’
In German, such abruptness was rude enough for insolence. She did not know if Danish was as formal. Perhaps her accent might mitigate offence.
‘You’re from Berlin?’ asked the woman behind the desk, in fluent German.
‘Oh, thank God. Yes, originally. You can recognize regional accents?’
‘Not much, but it’s hard to mistake a Berliner for anything else.’
There was an old joke about the difference between someone from Berlin and a doughnut - nothing, they’re both Berliners - but she pushed it aside. Danish bakeries probably didn’t even make Berliners, though Swiss bakeries did.
She had eaten so little food for the past fifteen days. At least, she thought it was fifteen days.
The trek across wild countryside had been long, and she survived only because it was not her - she had no other way of thinking about it. Her body had lived off the land, trapping small animals in ways she should not have known, slipping past troops and civilians, always afraid.
As for what she had done to the three Gestapo men, if that was what they were—
‘Fräulein?’
‘I’m sorry. You were saying, about Florian Horst?’
‘He left for—Ah, Fräulein. Are you Frau Horst’s friend?’
‘You mean Elke. Oh, yes. In fact I introduced them, Elke and Florian. I’m Gavriela Wolf.’
‘Could you wait a moment?’
The woman slipped from behind the desk, and went down a corridor to the rear, high heels clicking. There were sounds of two men talking, a knocking - someone tapping his pipe free of old tobacco - and then a rustle of paper. Then the woman came back, carrying a large envelope.
‘For you, Frau Doktor.’
‘Thank you.’ Gavriela took it. ‘But what’s inside?’
‘There are so many . . . They’re trying to help as many as possible. Professor Bohr is a marvel.’
She opened the envelope, finding several typed sheets, a small box and some banknotes: various denominations of Kroner.
‘What—?’
‘I’ll take you through to meet the Professor,’ said the woman. ‘Your . . . friend made certain arrangements.’
‘Florian?’
‘Not Doktor Horst. He’s . . . He went missing, along with Frau Horst.’
‘Missing?’
‘Perhaps they returned home.’
‘To Zürich?’
‘I understand Doktor Horst was from Stuttgart originally.’
Now Gavriela understood the woman’s reaction.
‘Oh. I can’t believe he’s . . . one of them.’
‘It was Herr Doktor Krause who made the work arrangements for you, before he left for England.’
Lucas is in England?
The woman tapped the envelope in Gavriela’s hand.
‘Save as much as you can,’ she said. ‘You might need it later.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My cousin captains a fishing-trawler. But he never works for free.’
Six months later, Gavriela was throwing up over the side of that exact fishing-trawler, into the North Sea. In between bouts of paroxysm, she huddled inside the small wheelhouse with captain and crew, straining to make sense of reports broadcast by the BBC.
The woman at the Bohr Institute was Helga, and her forecast had been correct. April had been the beginning of spring - and of Nazi occupation. As grey-uniformed soldiers swarmed the streets, few citizens were anything but cold to them; but neither did they have illusions about their ability to fight back.
Not just Helga, but a whole string of friends helped Gavriela and others escape the country. When Gavriela asked why Helga stayed, Helga’s eyes had been fjord-grey, as unreadable as wild sea.
‘I have work here,’ she said.
Now the trawler captain, Helga’s cousin, spat through the open wheelhouse hatchway, and turned up the volume on the radio.
Far south of here, in France, from an obscure seaside town called Dunquerque, an incredible evacuation was taking place: a flotilla of military and private boats alike, thousands of them, taking the defeated British troops to safety, to their island fortress where they might regroup.
Nazi forces were sweeping like a riptide through Europe; the commentators were casting the story of Dunquerque as some kind of victory.
While on every side of the tiny boat, the massive ocean swelled and simply existed, huge and persisting, possessing a greatness no tiny, short-lived creature could enjoy.
THIRTY-NINE
THE WORLD, 5563 AD
Harij sat on the rough ledge, watching dawn come up over the canyon. Liquid highlights rippled on his silver skin, where his short tunic left his shining limbs bare. He was too hot already, while the rest of the townfolk would be sensibly asleep, deep in the cavern system behind him.
Below, the canyon was in shadow, almost hiding a mating-flight of dartbirds, the tri-winged creatures swooping as they swiftly joined in triplets before breaking apart, and soaring onwards.
The black-and-silver moon of Magnus was high to the east.
What’s that?
Surely he was the only one mad enough to be out in daylight. None of his classmates could imagine such a thing. But across the canyon, on the purplish mesa, a tiny figure was moving.
A Seeker?
Could it be? Distant, tiny, and robed against the heat. It had been so long since such a one had visited, but Harij remembered, and dreamed.
Then the tiny figure disappeared into a dip, was gone.
If only he could . . .
Something was in the void, just beyond the edge.
**A spin-glass Hamiltonian is analogous to an allele-suitability matrix in a context of fitness-suitability space provided gene mutations are epistatically interdependent in every—**