The same restless impulse sees him whipping up and down between Versoie and London. He enrols at the Architectural Association, then gets it into his head that he should study engineering instead; visiting Imperial College to sign up for this, he changes his mind and decides to follow in his sister’s footsteps and join the natural science department; but, realising after a week that he has no aptitude for this discipline, he cools on the idea of being at Imperial at all and re-enrols at the AA. The restlessness, he comes to realise, is in truth an attempt to achieve its opposite: stasis. It’s as though if he moves about enough, the world will fall into place around him. He experiences this most viscerally when driving across Salisbury Plain. Summoning up with his right foot a roar of snarling teeth and whirring cylinders, feeling beneath his hips the force of however many horses surging forwards, he watches the hedgerows run together till they blur into a tunnel of green speed. As this streaks by and the horizon accelerates towards him, it seems that he himself has become still-and, in these moments, he feels the same sense of satisfaction that he used to in the nacelle of the Rumpitee or the cabin of the RE8: the sense of being a fixed point in a world of motion. Holding this point against the landscape with the wheel, he pushes back into the air that screeches along his cheeks the word fassen, although this modulates amidst the noise sometimes to become fast or faster. The air carries a smell of lime-not the fruit but quicklime: the plain’s been used as a giant burial ground for victims of the recent flu pandemic. The calcium oxide penetrates his nostrils and sinks deep into his lungs, making him feel alive and good.
It’s not just Masedown’s humans who’ve been struck down by disease: the mulberry trees at Versoie have caught an infection-something called Dieback. It takes the form of a fuzzy white mould, like the mould you get on stale bread, growing around the leaves and branches and extending out from these in wispy strands from tree to tree-as though the vegetation had, as Clair’s heroes advocated, taken control of the means of production and, cutting out the parasites both insectoid and human who exploited its resources, started weaving for itself. The effects of this insurrection are quite tangible: most of the silk-making staff have been laid off; the spinning sheds are empty. Only Bodner can be seen from day to day: a small, lone figure trudging around the Mulberry Lawn with a bucket into which he dips a brush, painting the trees with disinfectant.
Serge’s father has a theory about the cause of the disease: electric blighting.
“Under times of great stress or excitation,” he explains to Serge over a glass of port one afternoon in Sophie’s former lab, “the body emits an increased static charge. Police forces in America and France-” his finger points vaguely left to indicate the former place; his thumb jerks back over his shoulder for the latter-“are already making use of this phenomenon, measuring electric levels on the skin to ascertain when a suspect is lying.”
“How does that blight our trees?” Serge asks.
“Blight-what?” his father barks. “Ah! Well, these electrical disturbances, once created, outlive the moment of their generation. If they remain behind indefinitely, they’re detectable indefinitely, n’est-ce pas?”
“By what?”
“By what?” repeats his father. “Why, by detecting devices, of course. You of all people should know that!” He switches on one of the many radio sets lying on the shelves behind him. As it warms up, and familiar tweets and crackles start spilling from it, he turns the dial. The static gives over to music, then to static again, then to a voice reading what seem to be sports results. This is new, hearing voices over the receiver: started this year, first of the new decade. Nowadays when you trawl the ether you get loads of little stations sending fully formed, audible words out to who-knows-where: songs, personal messages, phrases whose nature and purpose Serge can’t work out but has spent hours listening to nonetheless, charmed by the sequences’ sounds, the images that they evoke, their modulating repetitions. The string of names and numbers gives over to old-fashioned Morse beeps, then once again to static. His father, still turning the dial clockwise, turns to Serge and asks: “What do you think most of that stuff is?”
“What do you mean?” asks Serge.
“What is it?” his father repeats.
“It’s messages,” Serge answers.
“From when?” his father shoots back at him.
“From all over.”
“I didn’t ask from where: I asked from when.”
“When? From now…”
“Aha!” guffaws his father. “That’s where you’re wrong-or, at least, not entirely right.” He leans towards Serge and, his tone changing, tells him: “Wireless waves don’t die away after the ether disturbance is produced: they linger, clogging up the air and causing interference. Half the static we’ve just waded through is formed by residues of old transmissions. They build up, and up, and up, the more we pump them out.”
“And that’s what’s blighting our trees?” Serge asks him, incredulous.
His father downs his port and, reaching behind his work table, pulls out a device in which a needle sits behind glass within a hand-sized box.
“What’s that?” asks Serge.
“An ammeter,” his father answers. “Come with me.”
Serge knocks his glass back hurriedly and follows his father out into the Mosaic Garden, where he holds the device out in front of him and, pointing to its face, announces:
“Low levels of static here. Just standard background discharge.”
Serge peers at the needle, resting between zero and five micro-amperes. His father strides on into the Maze Garden and, holding the ammeter in front of him again, declares:
“Increasing. Five to ten.”
He’s right: the needle’s started stirring. He strides on, through the Maze Garden ’s wall, across the gravel path and on towards the Mulberry Lawn, his upturned palm holding the instrument before his portly stomach all the while. Marching past Bodner, who ignores them as he daubs low-lying branches, he booms out triumphantly:
“Twenty to twenty-five!”
Serge peers around his forearm, and sees that the needle is, indeed, straining round to the dial’s right-hand side.
“That’s… I mean, how do you…?” he stutters.
His father beams a satisfied smile back at him.
“Pretty conclusive, isn’t it, my boy?”
“But… why here?” Serge asks. “My old mast was in the Mosaic Garden.”
“Oh, you’re being too literal,” his father scolds. “Things move around, accumulate in ways we can’t anticipate. Besides,” he continues, eyes still on the needle as he takes two paces forwards, “I’m not even claiming that it’s radio per se that we’re detecting here.”