She went out into bright sunshine to Tesco. The New Trees had reached forty feet and their broad, overlapping leaves cast an almost unbroken shade. On East West Road Hope blinked in the glare and hastily put her glasses on, waving a hand to flip them to polarising mode. One or two people in the street gesticulated or waggled their fingers as they walked, but without glasses. Contacts, the very latest thing. The thought niggled, somehow.
In the store she bought a kilo of beef and some root vegetables – it wasn’t the weather for a casserole or anything heavy, but she was the one who was pregnant and if her body or the baby’s said it needed iron or whatever she wasn’t going to argue, and anyway Hugh would eat anything after a day’s work – and as she bagged them under the checkout scan and gazed abstractedly at the floating virtual display of the magazine downloads on offer, the niggle returned to her mind. She paused to focus on the niggle, and it vanished beneath the surface of her mind like a minnow into a deep pool as a shadow falls. Hope frowned, and deliberately turned her mind away. She knew it would come back if she didn’t concentrate; it was like letting a search run in the background, sooner or later up it would come.
Back at the flat, she tied on an old blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron, turned the slow cooker on to high, and got to work, peeling potatoes, slicing garlic and onion, chopping carrots and a turnip, dicing meat, searing and simmering amid increasingly savoury smells. Every so often she wiped her hands on the apron, leaving smears of blood or flour or stock-cube crumbs. Just as she’d turned the cooker down to simmer and put the Pyrex lid on the pot and picked up the big knife to place it in the sink, the missing thought rose to the top of her mind’s stack and pinged for attention.
Rhodopsin, it reminded her, and tachyons.
That was it, that was what had been bugging her ever since Hugh had mentioned the word last night. Rhodopsin was the visual protein for whose gene he and Nick had a mutation, and she knew she’d come across the word before, in another context. Three months ago she’d read in The Economist that scientists at CERN had detected possible tachyon effects in a suspension of rhodopsin derivatives.
Hope put down the knife, wiped her hands again, and scanned the shelf of Hugh’s old reference books. She pulled down an encyclopedic dictionary of physics, searched, and found.
Tachyons. Hypothetical particles that moved faster than light, and, therefore, backward in time. From the future into the past.
She went over to the table and picked up her glasses carefully by the edges, nudging the earpieces open with her wrists. She ran a semantic search on the topic, and found little beyond the initial Nature paper, a small flurry of letters in New Scientist, and the same Economist article. No follow-up, no further research reported. It looked like one of those discoveries that flared for a moment then faded. But still…
It got her thinking. If something derived from rhodopsin detected particles moving backward in time, and Hugh had a mutant version of rhodopsin… was it possible that the visions he saw were caused by tachyons? Not directly, surely – no tachyon flux could behave like light, and she doubted that the particles could be focused on the retina – but stimulating the brain to form an image nonetheless. Hope knew from her art training that the visual field was mostly an internal construction anyway, a vast canvas corrected and updated piecemeal by the pencil torch of the optic nerve’s input, whose bit-rate was far too low for it to produce the whole panorama at once. So some visual reconstruction cued by odd fleeting particles didn’t strike her as impossible.
In which case, the barbarians Hugh saw weren’t from the past. They were from the future.
Which – if you followed through the logic of the wild speculation – raised the awkward question of how they saw him (and indeed, in one instance, her), as Hugh had insisted they did. Because in that case, they would be seeing into the past. Was there such a thing as an anti-tachyon? Not part of the Standard Model, that was for sure! So then, she’d have to fall back on the hypothesis that these interactions were hallucinations, construction of Hugh’s brain, in which case… why even go down the physics route; why not admit the whole thing was a hallucination? And yet, and yet – Hugh had claimed his boyhood pals had seen something real, under the hill above the house… Did these lads have the same mutant gene, or was there a quite different phenomenon involved?
She was still pondering this when, quite unexpectedly, the doorbell rang.
Hope checked on her glasses who was outside, and saw the avatar of Fiona Donnelly, the health visitor. She jumped up, took off her glasses, cast off the grubby apron and, without thinking, hastily wrapped and tied herself into the big ruffle-bordered floral-patterned pinafore. Now why had she done that? she wondered for a moment. She glanced in the mirror, tucked back a stray strand of hair, felt the slick of sweat on her brow, saw the flushed look of busy domesticity – harried, married – realised it was exactly the image she wanted to present to her visitor, then went to open the door.
Fiona Donnelly stood in sunshine amid catkins with bees crawling on them.
‘Hello, Hope. Mind if I drop by?’
‘Come in, come in,’ said Hope. She waved at the outside before she shut the door. ‘Quite a change since the last time you were here!’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Fiona, heading through to the kitchen without further invitation. Hope followed, perplexed.
‘Have a seat,’ she said, but Fiona had already sat down, her back to the window, just as she’d done in March. She looked around and inhaled appreciatively. ‘Mmm, something smells good.’
‘Tonight’s dinner.’
‘Oh, well done.’ Then she just sat there.
‘Cup of tea?’ Hope asked.
‘Yes, thanks, I’m parched.’
Hope busied herself.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked, sitting down.
‘Not really, I’m afraid,’ said Fiona.
‘Oh,’ said Hope. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘You told Dr Garnett last week that you were going to take the fix, and you still haven’t,’ said Fiona.
‘How would you know that?’ Hope demanded.
‘Oh come on, Hope, it would show up on your monitor-ring log.’
‘Have you been checking that?’ Hope asked.
‘Why shouldn’t I? I’m concerned. I’m even more concerned that you drank alcohol last week. You tried to conceal it by taking your ring off, but there were still traces in the morning.’
‘It was only a few sips.’ Hope essayed a smile. ‘Half a dram.’
‘That’s not the point, and you know it. But what’s really concerning me, Hope, and believe me this is for your own good, is how it impacts what’s been happening recently to your personal profile. It’s coming dangerously close to affecting your parental suitability.’
Hope felt a cold clutch of dismay.
‘What?’ she said. She couldn’t think of anything other than that one lapse to make her feel guilty, but feel guilty she did, mentally flailing for anything she might have done wrong.
‘It’s all small things,’ said Fiona, in a reassuring tone, ‘but you know how these small things add up when they’re not taken in isolation but are brought together in the database and begin to form a picture.’
‘What picture?’ Hope’s tone had shifted register, from shock to anger. ‘What database?’