I want to believe it was him. Shem Shem Tsien, like an old, bad dream, breaking my machines and pushing buttons. But he was not here, Daniel. I did this all by myself. I killed a multitude, and now they will close me down and the engine will never exist unless I can find a way alone.
I do not want to be alone, Daniel. I am sending you something. You must seal it away. No one must see it, because it is death; death such as no one has ever died until I came along. Death by destiny, by crystallisation, by inevitability. I killed their souls and left their bodies alive. In the history of human life, there has never been anyone so dead as they are.
I am the greatest murderer there has ever been.
And then she cries until the message comes to an end.
Almost unwillingly, Mercer turns the record over. Crackle, pop. Fizzle, splot. Crackle, pop. After the savage horror of the confession, it is almost soothing. They listen for a while. Finally, Mercer scoops another from the bag and sets it on the turntable. The voice is older, and mercifully the horror is absent, though in its place is a soul-deep regret, a sorrow which has weathered in and will never leave.
I confess, I thought you were an idiot. Yes, Daniel, I know, you have never given me cause and I am an impatient old baggage. I am what I am, and what life has made me. I try to be better.
You were right. I made the machine strong so that it would cover a larger area and that made it too strong for the mind.
Pause.
I know the solution, now. How to make it work. I knew even while it was happening, but it was too late. The answer is to retransmit. To have a great network, so that the signal can be very gentle and yet reach around the world.
Do you remember that we made love in the field outside my mother’s house? And you were stung on the rump by a bee and mourned for her because you said bees were creatures of creation, and having only one sting were loath to attack? That this was why almost every culture in the world venerates the bee and hates the wasp?
Make me a bee, Daniel. Just one. Make me a glorious bee which people will love, and I will make something wonderful. Bees will be the messengers of my truth. They will spread across the world and connect everyone.
Make it splendid, Daniel. Make it wild and pretty. The thing I do now must be so much more than a machine.
Polly Cradle is grinning, and so is Joe. Mercer frowns at them both.
“What?” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s just that they were still in love. I shall be sick.”
“No,” Polly says. “I was just thinking: maybe this isn’t a disaster. The bees. The machine. Maybe it’s a good thing that’s happening, and all we have to do is wait.”
Joe nods. Mercer does not. He opens his mouth to make some objection, but then three things happen on top of one another and whatever it was he was going to say is put aside.
The first thing is that the absent Bethany returns and passes a slim folder to Polly Cradle, who frowns at it and then lays it out on the table.
Two photographs, freshly printed from old images, most likely magazines or newspapers: a gorgeous matinée idol with a high forehead, smiling lightly into the camera, and his older brother, grim-faced and silvered, scowling from the hood of a cloak.
“Shem Shem Tsien,” Polly Cradle says, “also known as the Opium Khan. Think Idi Amin with a dash of Lex Luthor. And this Brother Sheamus of the Order of John the Maker. This is a picture of him from before they all started wearing veils all the time.”
Yes. The same man. Although… it can’t actually be the same Sheamus, now. A son, surely, taking up his father’s vocation.
I thought I had it rough, father-wise.
And then:
Does that mean the Opium Khan has reformed, or that the British government has been corrupted?
But while that’s a question which might have made sense a few years ago, no one seriously believes in the good conduct of their leaders any more.
Just as he is about to share this with the others, the second and third things happen, and the world changes.
One is silent and invisible; an intangible explosion which occurs entirely inside the head of Joshua Joseph Spork. The other is very public and very specific, and takes place three and one-half feet off the ground. They happen at approximately the same time, and so the strange, inaudible detonation which afflicts Joe is missed even by Polly Cradle, who otherwise would spot it clearly for what it is.
Between two records—one claiming mendaciously to be by Duke Ellington and the other labelled with equal falseness as being by Eddie Lockjaw Davis—is sandwiched a single sheet of shiny accounting paper, split down the middle into two columns with a single sure stroke of red pen. It has no timer, no spring, and no pineapple indentations which will fly off as shrapnel, and in fact looks almost exactly not like a hand grenade, and yet all the same it goes off under Joe Spork and vaporises him entirely.
Joe Spork, the exploded man, cannot understand why everyone is looking so calm, until he realises that none of them, not knowing Mathew and Daniel and their appalling confrontations, can understand the columns of figures for what they are.
Here, squeezed between the secrets of Daniel’s non-jazz collection, is something the old man squirrelled away. Something he couldn’t face? Or something he treasured and understood, which brought him some measure of peace?
If these numbers are to be believed, if Joe correctly interprets the figures in Mathew’s own somewhat careless hand—and he surely does, having struggled himself for a decade against the same rip tide—Daniel Spork’s great, stand-alone, splendid business of clocks, the bulwark he set against the surge of modernity and careless consumerist tat, lost money hand over fist. The shop was not, had never been, profitable. Only the ceaseless intravenous transfusions of money from Mathew, evidenced here on this hastily scribbled account, ever made it possible to balance the books. And these transfusions Mathew had managed as best he could in conditions of total secrecy, above all from his father, so that Daniel could continue to believe in his straight-arrow path and continue to deride his son’s choices.
Mathew the gangster, Mathew the liar, Mathew the thief, had begun his life of crime to save his father’s honest business. Had carried it, all along.
Joe is still staring at this earth-shaker, this profound and alien intrusion into his universe from another where everything is different, when he hears Mercer’s voice calling to him through the fog and the final event changes the game once more.
“Hey, sleepyhead!” Joe turns, and Mercer tosses him the golden bee. “It’s warm!”
Joe extends his hand, but—he has never been any good at catching, kicking was always his thing—fumbles the take. He drops instinctively to catch the bee before it hits the ground, and misses again.
Misses, because it is not falling.
Six inches from his cheek, the multifaceted rose-quartz eyes glint at him, and gold-veined wings hum in the air. It flitters towards him very slowly, and lands on his nose. Joe tries to look at it, winces as he inevitably crosses his eyes. He swears he can hear the whisper of golden legs as it moves onto his cheek. Am I in danger? And if he is, what can he possibly do about it?