Polly tells him.
“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “that was insane. But apparently it was also a good idea. I find the combination unsettling. Please try not to have any more good ideas until I get there to measure them against the possibility that you have gone entirely off your rocker.”
Polly Cradle sits close to her old television set and waits. She has crossed her legs in a position which Joe finds almost yogic. On her right is a yellow legal pad and in her hand she has a pen. One of two pieces of up-to-date technology she owns, a digital TV recorder, is running so that she can replay the news. The other—a chunky laptop with a thick cord snaking out of it to the wall—rests on a stack of thick foreign dictionaries so that she can follow the signals chatter of the internet.
“Do you speak all those languages?” Joe wonders aloud.
“No,” Polly Cradle says. “That’s why I have dictionaries.” She wiggles and waves her arms, and by this strangely powerful method she conveys an image of herself, with a stack of documents, painstakingly working out the precise meaning of each, phrase by phrase.
“Watch!” she says abruptly, and turns up the sound. On the screen, a fishing fleet in mid-ocean, seen from a helicopter. The newsreader is playing for drama. His voice is filled with the special “keep calm” tone which suggests crisis. The shot cuts to a shot from on board one of the boats.
It is awash in perfect, golden bees.
There is no one on board.
And, as the camera pans, so it is across the entire fleet.
The news cuts away to a coastguard ship a few miles away. The sailors are here, in life jackets and blankets.
“We had to abandon ship,” one of them says.
“Why? Why did you have to abandon ship?” the reporter demands.
“Too much,” the man says obscurely.
“Too much what?”
The man doesn’t answer immediately. He looks up and off to the side, remembering. “I understood things,” he says at last.
“What sort of things?”
“Just things.”
“I see—”
“No,” the man says. “You don’t. You think you do. But you don’t.”
“I don’t think people will understand what you mean.”
“No. They won’t. Not until it happens to them.”
“Is it going to, do you think?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely. And when it does, they’ll know what I know.”
“Which is?”
“Too much,” he says again. “Questions I ask myself in my head, and don’t really want the answers to. I knew them, I couldn’t not know. I have to go home and apologise to my wife. I screamed at her before we left. And my kids. I was wrong and I need to be better. I need to eat right, too. And my uncle, he’s a monster. I’ve told the police: he beats my aunt. I don’t know why I never said it before. That’s all right, I suppose, but it’s hard feeling it all at once. But then there’s more and more. There’s too much of it. You do what you can and there’s never an end, just more things wrong that don’t have to be.” He shudders, and starts to cry.
A moment later, the bees depart skyward in a great rush, and the show cuts back to the studio where people with no notion of what is going on speculate on what it all means. There is a note of panic, and fear.
Mercer comes through the door about ten seconds later.
He looks at his sister, and then at Joe. His eyes open very wide.
“Oh, God,” he murmurs. “As if there wasn’t enough trouble in the world, you two have had sex.”
“We made speculative love,” Polly replies airily.
“What?”
“Honestly, you sound just like him. Well, no. That sounds wrong… I mean that he also asks an enormous number of questions about perfectly obvious things. We made speculative love, Mercer. We had sex pre-emptively, in case we fall in love later. I think of it as an investment in satisfaction.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then you’re right. We had really great sex.”
Mercer appears to consider this for a moment.
“Suddenly,” he says, “I find that my present line of questioning has lost its appeal.” He glances at Joe. “Well. Not before time. The rest of the picture, as you see, is not so bonny. So… Fasten your seat belts, my lad and lass. This could get rocky.”
A moment later the doorbell rings, and one of the Bethanys is standing on the stoop with a concerned-looking man in his forties.
“Mr. Cradle? Mr. Long is here to see you.”
“How does he even—” Mercer breaks off as Polly drums her fingers on the desk. “Fine. Mr. Long, who he?”
“A curator.”
“Is he relevant?”
“No. He has a kind face and he keeps cats and I thought… yes, Mercer, of course he is. This is what I do.”
Mercer waves his hands vaguely, as if already wanting his teacup.
“Sorry.”
Bethany—it’s number two, Joe Spork is fairly sure—follows this exchange with a suffused expression of concealed but potent delight.
Mr. Long is a damp sort of specimen with a jowly neck and a large, square head. Joe thinks of him immediately as a nervous local darts champion.
“Mr. Long,” Polly murmurs, bringing him inside, “would you like some coffee?”
“Oh!” Mr. Long says, his balloonish nose pointing briefly at the ceiling as he tosses his head to indicate enthusiasm. “Oh, yes, that would be marvellous. Only not too much.” He makes an apnoeac clunking noise in his sinuses which is apparently indicative of humour. “Ahaha knuu haha, because it makes me extremely jumpy! Aha ha hnn.”
Polly favours him with a devastating smile.
“Mr. Long,” she murmurs as she lounges out, “is the director of the Alternative Paradigms Institute at Brae Hampton. I believe he may also be the victim of some sort of confidence trick.”
“Oh, I am!” Mr. Long nods again. “I am. A rather wicked trick has been played upon us. At least, I trust it’s a trick. I do hope it’s nothing more serious.”
Mercer looks at Joe. This one’s yours. I do coppers and spies and lairs and monsters. I don’t do curators.
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your organisation,” Joe murmurs invitingly.
“Oh, no one is. We’re very quiet. Although recently we’ve been getting some tourism for the tank exhibit.”
“Tank? Like…” Joe mimes a vague armoured vehicle, machine gun firing.
“Oh, not like Panzers, oh no! Knuu-knuu haha! We have the largest freshwater tank in Great Britain, and the largest enclosed one in the world, for the exclusive use of model-boat enthusiasts, you see. Just a sideline, of course.”
“A sideline?”
“Oh, yes. The purpose of the Institute is to preserve lines of research science and technology which are presently unfashionable. So, for example, we carry the translated notes of Akunin, the eighteenth-century Russian specialist in bacteriophage medicine.” Mr. Long smiles as if this should make things perfectly clear; a wide, millennialist’s grin filled with genial crazy. “Treasures which one day, when they are retrieved from obscurity, may greatly benefit mankind… although between you and me some of them should probably stay hidden, they’re a bit daft. Ahah knuu! Ahahah.”
“And you also have…”
“Oh, yes, a collection of… well. I say ‘a collection’… in fact it’s several collections, classified together by the Institute. They’re all Second War, you see. There’s the Pyke Papers. There’s a very small set on Tesla’s work, donated by an American gentleman, and some Russian documents regarding psychical research which I personally regard as disinformation, like the SDI programme in reverse…”