Joe has swapped the car’s number plates with those of another of the same make, and Polly disabled the satellite tracker, so the stolen vehicle has effectively vanished unless someone looks at the engine block. There’s a strange feeling of freedom on the open road, however illusory.
“What’s at Bletchley?” Polly asks, as Milton Keynes draws closer ahead of them.
He grins at her. “A train,” he says, and sees her answering smile.
After the motorway, the road to Bletchley is flat and dull. It winds between bits of contoured landscape and modern box houses; the strange, tame outskirts of Milton Keynes, created whole and inviolate by the planners and somehow never quite human in its execution. Bletchley Park is on the outskirts, served by a spur road which opens onto what may once have been a machine-gun emplacement. Joe parks the car very neatly in a space. Even though it shouldn’t be there, the English curator-type will usually ignore something which isn’t in the way.
The dawn is coming, and with it comes a measure of risk. Joe hesitates, briefly worried that some late watchman or early modeller will catch him in the act, then remembers that he doesn’t really care about that. He clambers onto the roof of the ticket office and peers around in the twilight.
Ted Sholt’s instructions are not clear, were never exactly lucid. Joe lays them over the terrain like a pencil sketch, and adds another layer of his own, his Night Market instinct for concealment and deception. If I were hiding an unlicensed boxing ring… And sure enough, there it is, a long, low barrow which is too straight and too unexpected to be a natural rise, but too big to be easily recognised as artificial. And yes, it does indeed give onto a curve in the old railway, a suspicious valley with long grass at the bottom which he has no doubt will reveal a short stretch of track. He points. Polly nods, but when he makes for the mound directly she shakes her head.
“Over here,” she murmurs, and draws him to the small, shattered remnant of a hut away to one side. A sign reads “Officers’ Water Closet: upper ranks only.” Inside, she produces a torch from her bag—which also contains, somewhat to his surprise, Edie Banister’s dog—and illuminates a hatch in the floor which leads down into a passageway beneath ground level. She grins, and Joe nods, acknowledging her score.
Hand over hand, they climb down into the earth.
The passage smells of musty concrete and damp. At the end of it there is a door, very solid and serious. Hermetic, Joe suspects. He could have blown it, with the right gear—and where would he get that? The question of proper gangstering tools is next on the agenda, and right speedily.
But he doesn’t need to blow this one, and that’s for the best, given what may be behind it. The combination lock is old and rather pretty, rich brass dials engraved with Roman numerals. Done by hand, he thinks. Open the door with Lizzie’s birthday, Sholt said, and yes, indeed: XXI-IV-XXVI does the trick, the arrival in this world of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
When he opens the door there is a rush of air inwards. Beyond it there’s another door, forming a kind of dust trap, and hanging on the wall is a row of wind-up lanterns. He lifts one down, turns the handle a few times. Then he steps through the inner door.
The room beyond is comparatively narrow—it’s more of a tunnel—but it’s enormous. It slants gently down into the earth; the near end, the one leading out into the world, is at ground level. And there, in front of him, is what he came for. Endless scrolling patterns ripple along lines of sheer power. The boiler is taller than he is and long as a bus. The sections fade away into the distance—ten of them? Twelve? Each is as perfectly made as the last, and each one is subtly different. The name is cut into the black iron cowcatcher at the front: Lovelace.
The exterior looks like metal, but it could be something else—resin, ceramic… Joe runs his hand over it. The surface is cool and a little damp, because there’s a layer of protective oil. He smells coal and a cosy, storage-space scent of leather and wood. As he moves the beam of the lantern up and around, he begins to get a sense of the thing, its scale. Trains are familiar things, clattering drones which rush by or wander through the countryside; passenger trains have windows through which one can see harried parents or commuters squeezed like chattels. Goods trains, these days, are rare. You have to watch for them on local lines or sidings, or sit in Polly Cradle’s bedroom and feel them go by. Joe Spork glances at Polly. She is walking along behind him, silent, one hand tracing a single finger along the skin of the Lovelace. He can see a tiny rim of dust and rubble building up where she’s touching the carriage. She’s smiling as if he’s given her diamonds.
The next door has the goose-foot symbol on it. The dog Bastion barks suddenly, and yearns towards it from his bag. Polly shrugs.
“This one, then,” she says.
They open the door and climb aboard. There’s a faint hiss as the door unseals, and a whisper of motion as a ventilation system starts working. At least, Joe hopes it’s a ventilation system and not, for example, a deadly gas attack. He sniffs, then feels like an idiot, but since he doesn’t fall over and die he assumes this is not poison, and steps forward.
Inside, the lantern picks out two workbenches. One of them is cluttered and covered in a now-familiar scrawl, rows of mathematical notations and scraps of metal and other substances more obscure. The other is perfectly neat, almost prim. A vise, a selection of tools… Daniel.
Yes, boy. This one was mine. We sat back to back and worked, and I listened to her frustration and her triumph and I never told her how much I wanted her back, because I knew she had no room for me any more. For Mathew. For you. She was just desperate to make things right.
Joe reaches out and touches the bench. It is a caress, a gesture of fellowship.
Then he hears a voice, and turning, sees a woman made of light.
“Hello,” the woman says. She walks forward. Her body is an outline, like a shadow in reverse. Looking around, Joe realises that she is composed of bright beams from a hundred tiny lenses around the compartment, reflecting off a column of moisture in the air. Her face is indistinct. Just barely, he can see her profile when she turns to one side, and the outline of her mouth when she speaks. Her voice is a recording, much better than the ones in Daniel’s record collection—and with that realisation he names her, of course. Frankie Fossoyeur.
He studies her features, or tries to, feels fleeting recognition as the image turns and moves, though whether it is from old memories of Frankie or her reflection in Daniel and Mathew he does not know.
The whole numinous vision is… well. Not otherworldly. It’s quite simple, just brilliantly executed. A three-dimensional magic-lantern show. Holograms without lasers. Exactly what you’d expect from the kind of genius who builds a truth machine in the shape of a beehive.
Frankie cocks her head to one side. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are. I hope Edie is there, somewhere. Or Daniel. Or both of you, perhaps. Maybe you are in love. That would be tidy… Mais non. I am cruel. I am sorry, both of you.
“So sorry…” She waves her hand, brushing all this away.
“You realise that this is just a recording. A clever one. But no doubt by now this sort of thing is commonplace and I look hopelessly old-fashioned… Bien. And perhaps the entire conversation is out of date, and everything is well. But in case it is not, and since you’re here, I’m going to ask you to save the world for me. I hope that isn’t too much trouble.” She laughs, and then coughs. The cough is the bad kind, the kind which doesn’t get better. “Nom de chien…”