‘Pick it up, Marina,’ Carlinhos says a third time and together they move through the press of bodies and familiars to the head of the pack of runners. There is nothing in front of Marina. The tunnel curves away forever before her. Air eddies cool on her skin. She could run like this forever. Body and mind, soul and senses are one thing, greater and more perceptive than any of its elements.
‘Marina.’ The voice has been calling her name for some time. ‘Drop back.’ They peel from the lead position and drop down the side of the pack. ‘Take this right.’
It’s physical pain to leave the runners for the cross tunnel, but the emotional hurt is crushing. Marina comes to a halt, hands on thighs, head bowed, and howls with loss. She hears the voices and drums and chimes of the runners disappearing into the distance and it is like she has been cast out of elf-land. Beat by beat she remembers who she is. Who he is.
‘I’m sorry. Oh God.’
‘Better to keep moving or you will lock up.’
She coaxes her body into a painful jog. The cross tunnel opens on to Third Santa Barbra Quadra. The skyline is dark, the quadra glows with low pools of street light and ten thousand windows. Marina is cold now.
‘How long was I …’
‘Two complete circuits. Sixteen kilometres.’
‘I didn’t notice …’
‘You don’t. That’s the idea.’
‘How long …’
‘No one really knows, but it’s been going on all my life. The idea is that it never stops. Runners drop in, runners drop out. We cycle through the saints. It’s my church. It’s where I heal, where I disappear for a time. Where I stop being Carlinhos Corta.’
Now the weight of those sixteen kilometres descends on Marina’s thighs and calves. She had only ever been a reluctant runner in pre-launch training. This is different. Part of her will always be out there, running in that ever-circling wheel of praise. She can’t wait to go back.
‘Thank you,’ she says. Anything more would tarnish the moment. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we shower.’
Analiese Mackenzie descends the spiral staircase from the bedroom into the entrails of a fly; exploded, expanded, enhanced and annotated. Wings unfold into vanes, eyes disintegrate into their component lens, legs and pulps and proboscis, nanochips and protein processors whirl around her head. At the centre sits Wagner, back turned, naked as he likes to be when he is concentrating, summoning and dismissing, enlarging and superimposing images in their shared sight. It’s dazzling, it’s dizzying, it’s four thirty in the morning.
‘Ana.’
She made no sound she’s aware of but Wagner has picked her out of the apartment’s background of hisses and hums and creaks. It starts with heightened sensitivities, restlessness, a boundless energy. This insomnia is something new.
‘Wagner, it’s …’
‘Take a look at this.’
Wagner leans back his chair, slips an arm around Analiese’s ass. His other hand spins dismembered fly around the room.
‘What is this?’ Analiese asks.
‘This is the fly that tried to kill my brother.’
‘Before you jump to any conclusions, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any of us.’
‘Oh I’m sure of that.’ Wagner reaches out, pulls a knot of protein circuit out of the exploded fly and dismisses everything else. ‘See?’ He twists his hand, enlarges it until it fills the small room; a brain of folded proteins.
‘You know I’ve got no eye for this kind of thing.’ Analiese works in custom meta logics and plays sitar in a classical Persian ensemble.
‘Heitor Pereira wouldn’t have known what to look for. Not even the R&D guys. It took me a while to find it but the moment I saw it, I thought, that has to be it, and I blew it up and it was, I mean, it’s written all over the molecules, it’s like she scrawled her tag all over it but you have to know what you’re looking for, you have to know how to see.’
‘Wagner.’
‘Am I talking really fast?’
‘Yes you are. I think it’s starting.’
‘It can’t. It’s too early.’
‘It’s been getting earlier and earlier.’
‘It can’t!’ Wagner snaps. ‘It’s a clock. Sun rises, sun sets. You can’t change that. That’s astronomy.’
‘Wagner …’
‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He kisses the hollow of her belly and he feels the muscles tighten beneath the honey skin, a thing he loves so hard, because it’s not tech or code or math; it’s physical and chemical. But he can feel the change, like the sun beneath the horizon. He had thought it was the fascination, the dedication that drove his mood, but he realises it’s the change driving his fascination. When the Earth is full, he can work for days on end, burning. ‘I have to go to Meridian.’
He feels Analiese pull away from him.
‘You know I hate it when you go there.’
‘It’s where the woman who made this processor is.’
‘You never had to make excuses before.’
He kisses her strong belly again and she slips a hand behind his head, lacing her fingers through his hair. Analiese smells of vanilla and fabric-conditioned sheets. Wagner breathes deep and pulls away.
‘I got some more work to do.’
‘Go to bed, Analiese,’ Analiese says.
‘I’ll be up later.’
‘You won’t. Promise me, you will be here in the morning.’
‘I will.’
‘You didn’t promise.’
When Analiese has gone Wagner opens his arms and pulls his hands together in a slow clap, summoning the exploded elements of assassin-fly. He set them in slow orbit around him, looking for other clues to its builders but his concentration is broken. On the edge of his hearing, on the edge of every sense, he can hear his pack calling across the Sea of Tranquillity.
For the Pavilion of the White Hare, Ariel Corta wears a reprint 1955 Dior in chocolate with a Chantilly cap-sleeve blouse, deep plunging, ruched. A pillbox hat with a brown silk rose, gloves to mid forearm, complementing bag and shoes. Co-ordinating, not odiously matchy-matchy. Professional but not starchy.
A receptionist takes Ariel up to the conference suite. The hotel is tasteful, the service discreet, but it is far from the most expensive or opulent Meridian offers. In the elevator Ariel switches off Beijaflor as instructed. There is a level of political and social life where constant connectivity is a liability. Nagai Rieko greets Ariel in the lobby where the counsellors socialise in the lobby drinking tea, taking sweet-bean baozi from trays. Fourteen, including the outgoing members. So many exquisite dresses, so many bare shoulders. Ariel feels as if she has been admitted to a secret louche sex party: improper, a little scandalous.
Rieko makes the introductions. Jaiyue Sun, head of development at Taiyang; Stephany Mayor Robles the educationalist from Queen of the South. Professor Monique Dujardin from the Faculty of Astrophysics at the University of Farside. Daw Suu Hla, her family allies of the Asamoahs by blood and business, Ataa Afua Asamoah of the Kotoko trying to keep an over-lively pet meerkat under control. Fashionable chef Marin Olmstead: Ariel blinks at his presence: Everyone does that, he says. He’s been in the White Hare for four years. Pyotr Vorontsov from VTO. Marlena Lesnik from Sanafil Health, the major medical insurers. Sheikh Mohammed el-Tayyeb, Grand Mufti of the Queen of the South Central Mosque, scholar and legalist, famous for his fatwa excusing the necessity of the Haj on the lunar acclimated. Outgoing Niles Hanrahan, and V. P. Singh the poet, his replacement. Six women, five men, one neutro: all successful, professional, moneyed.