The roof of the lift swept up. The doors parted. She stepped inside. As the lift started its descent his calm unhurried face vanished, then his torso, and finally his polished shoes.
Adelaide curled up on the futon. The wall opposite flickered with a continuous projection of black and white films, but the sound was off, and she did not really see the images.
A week after her eviction from her home, Axel turned up at Jannike’s apartment where Adelaide was staying. He was distracted. He asked her to come back but she refused; she was scared of him. Axel could not understand why she wouldn’t come back, and she was too humiliated to tell him. After that, the visits stopped. The rift cut like acid.
The Red Rooms were her home now. So she kept telling herself.
Four in the morning and Osiris was quiet. She knew the night’s fluctuating dynamics, the grace notes that marked a creaking machine from the floor above or the generators shifting to beta mode. By four o’clock, Osiris was always quiet.
She refilled her voqua glass. Clean, clear, uncomplicated.
In less than twelve hours, she was due to meet Vikram. Although she had made the appointment with no intention of keeping it, something about his face, his stillness, lingered with her. He was the angriest and the calmest person she had ever met. It was like stumbling upon a ticking device; the horror of what might happen was only equalled by her desire to see the mess. She imagined him waiting at the restaurant tomorrow. Today, now. Had he drawn up a plan of action? Was he running through the arguments he might use?
He’d lost someone too. Mikkeli. The name burned, as though Mikkeli’s vibrancy in life had passed into a flame that needed no oxygen, only a vessel. Adelaide did not know how tall Mikkeli was, or the colour of her hair, but the girl was present with the ghosts circling the city. She hid behind wave crests. She lay supine in troughs.
Axel is alive, Adelaide told herself. Otherwise I would see him like I see that girl. With salt in his lungs and frozen crystals in his hair.
Occasionally, when she was very drunk, Adelaide wondered if other cities had been like Osiris. If other great metropolises ate away at sanity by hurling people through their gates, more and more people, an overdose of life, until the crowds became drugged with their own gluttony. She studied photographs of lost civilizations and touched the imprints of the people in them and in her head she moved them to Osiris and watched their faces change. And sometimes she moved herself from Osiris to those long gone places and watched a different Adelaide walking on streets. That Adelaide had the same eyes, lips, hair. She had the same indolent walk. But the ground was different. It pressed onto her feet and sometimes it tripped her and sometimes it hurt. But she felt it. She knew it, with the witless intimacy and the trust offered only to a stranger.
Ground-dreams. Everybody had them. Adelaide poured herself another splash of voqua. Osiris was clever. Osiris made you think too much.
She sank back against the cushions, her eyes half-closed. The projection played out its muted scenes. Vehicles with silent wheels and boats that flew. Moving stairways held rivers of people. Their eyes forward. Their eyes all-knowing, knowledge in every part of them, injected into their blood, in the machines that lived in their heads. Now steps lead to a door: a house with four walls. How functional. Trees leaning out of the ground. Wind moving the arms of the trees, the vehicles rushing past them, careless of the ground, of roots or earth.
The whirrs and tics of everyday life in some other world. Worlds, she reminded herself, that had failed.
Out in the ghost-sea, the girl Mikkeli breathed. She had a message for Adelaide. Don’t give up. Keep looking. Follow the silver fish.
/ / /
In the morning, a whim sent Adelaide across the city to see Linus. He was in a meeting when she arrived. She busied herself reading the news headlines on her Surfboard. Home Guard arrest key Juraj gang members in all night fire battle. Council announce budget increase for western perimeter reinforcements…The moving text made her dizzy. She stopped reading.
After ten minutes her brother appeared. He escorted her directly to his office, glancing around the reception area as though she might have inflicted unmentionable damage in the short time she had been waiting. The room was smaller than Feodor’s, but meticulously organized. She supposed this was the impression Linus wanted to create: geometric and clinical. His walls were covered with incomprehensible graphs.
Linus sat behind his desk and indicated the chair opposite.
“To what to I owe the pleasure, Adelaide?”
“Sarcasm already? You know I am still very angry with you, Linus.” But she didn’t want to talk about Tyr, and added quickly, “Any Council gossip?”
“We steer clear of that.”
“Oh.” The chair had wheels. Adelaide used one foot to propel her in circles, aware that he was watching her. “I wonder why you do it,” she mused.
“I’m not going to explain myself for your entertainment. You have no idea what’s going on in Osiris.”
She paused spinning. “Have you and Vikram formed some sort of conspiracy?”
“You’ve met him again, have you?”
“I had a visit.”
“And?”
On the Neptune, a long-finned angelfish swam forward until it filled almost the whole of the oval oceanscreen. Its mouth opened and an envelope floated out.
“You have Reefmail,” said Adelaide.
“So I see.”
The angelfish swam back and forth.
“Seems important,” Adelaide commented.
“It can wait. When did you see Vikram?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to help him.”
Linus propped one arm on a filing cabinet. “He’s right, you know.”
“Of course you think that.”
“Look, you and I have grown up with this divide. But that’s not an excuse to accept it. Our parents’ generation won’t talk about it, they feel too guilty. It’s up to us.”
“They’re the ones that did it, Linus, let them sort it out.”
“They’re tired, Adelaide.” His voice was earnest now. “They can’t imagine a way to reverse that decision without a massive backlash. And they’re right, it won’t be a smooth transition. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.”
“What, you want to integrate now?”
“I think we should demilitarize the border, yes.”
“And get us all killed,” she scoffed.
“I didn’t say it’s not a risk. But we’re sitting on a time bomb. Remember the riots three years ago, all those people killed at the desalination plant. A plant, I might add, which is now functioning at forty per cent.”
Adelaide looked ceiling-ward. There was no dust here, no places for small creatures to hide. “Are you trying to scare me, Linus?”
He sighed. “Maybe I am. But there’s an even bigger issue at stake. Even you must know what it is.”
She fell quiet. The Neptune hummed. The angelfish still swivelled around the flashing envelope. She could not resist a glance at the window, where misty rain sheened the glass.
“You mean this idea that the weather’s changing,” she said finally.
“So you have noticed something.” There was a shift in his voice — surprise? Satisfaction?
“People talk. I’m not convinced. Anyway, grandfather hasn’t said anything and he’s been here longer than anyone. He’d know.”
Linus rapped the wall graph behind him. “Facts, Adelaide. This proves it. We’ve been experimenting — making forecasts. Not far ahead — but it’s often accurate. That’s a sign that the atmosphere is settling.”