‘Perhaps,’ said Ludmila Arturovna, ‘you should call me Luda. And I call you Luke and Jacqui, OK? If we are family.’
No one had ever addressed Lucas as Luke.
‘OK,’ he said.
Before coming, they had chatted online about the possible family connection, and a bit about their respective jobs. Now they went over the same ground in person, as a form of reassurance, growing used to each other.
‘Have you finished tea?’ asked Luda finally. ‘I show you laboratories.’
They poked around offices and cluttered labs with wire tangles everywhere, including the industrial-looking cryogenics area devoted to solid state research.
‘I was with Professor Zbruev’ – Luda dropped her voice as they neared one of the cryo chambers – ‘when gamma-ray burster event occurred. Interesting to see if you—Ah, there he is.’
Zbruev was an ordinary shaven-headed man in rumpled clothes – but Jacqui clutched Lucas’s arm and muttered: ‘Let’s go past.’
‘So,’ said Luda.
They ignored the remaining labs, and used a fire exit to walk outside into the snow.
‘Luke is my cousin,’ Luda went on. ‘But you saw it, Jacqui, no?’
Jacqui reached down, scooped up a little fresh snow, and rubbed her face with it.
‘Lucas had a girlfriend once,’ she told Luda, ‘who was just like Zbruev. Nasty bitch.’
‘Nasty . . .? Ah, I understand.’ Luda looked at Lucas. ‘You did not see lovely darkness?’
‘Lovely?’ said Jacqui.
‘Is . . . strong attractive, you understand?’
‘Alluring,’ said Jacqui. ‘You have to fight it.’
‘Yes.’
Lucas shivered, disoriented and wondering how much the meds had to do with this conversation. On the rare occasion Jacqui had raised the subject of dark auras, she said they repelled her. Luda’s reaction was different.
‘But you do fight it,’ said Jacqui. ‘That’s the main thing.’
Tears sprang out in Luda’s eyes. ‘I am so glad you are here.’
‘Me too.’ Jacqui touched her arm. ‘We know we’re not alone. What we see is real.’
‘Oh, I know is real. Always.’
Something in her voice broke Lucas’s heart.
Darkness fell, and they were still talking, but indoors. From the students’ union – if Lucas understood Luda’s description correctly – they moved to a faculty common room, and stayed until seven p.m. Now, besides night workers like cleaners, there was still a small number of people around, some carrying out research that for one reason or another was best done at night.
But Lucas, Jacqui and Luda were able to move around the corridors in the main physics block without seeing anyone. The room they ended up in was cluttered with SQUID scanners and atomic magnetometers; and to one side stood a glass-fronted cabinet, locked for the night, with shelves of items waiting to be analysed.
‘From archaeology.’ Luda pointed into the cabinet. ‘Found in grandfather’s, um, belongings when he died. FSB gave to Professor Zbruev’s department. Mother knew about crystal, but story was bitter. I don’t know details. Is very old,’ she added. ‘Centuries. Looks new.’
The object was crystalline but shaped like a spearhead.
‘Belongs in a museum,’ said Jacqui.
But Luda was lost in thought.
‘Grandfather told Mother, crystal was best thing to come from London, apart from Mother. Made Mother angry. I do not know why.’ Then she shrugged. ‘Had something else, FSB not know. Stayed in family. Also old, from Siberia. My grandfather found old site, kept piece no one knew about.’
Luda dug inside her pocket, and pulled out a metal shard. Then she held it close to the glass.
‘Holy crap,’ said Lucas.
Red fluorescence brightened inside the spearhead: sharp lines forming what looked a symboclass="underline"
Then Luda tugged at his arm, pulling him 90 degrees to one side. The upper ‘branch’ was hidden by the change in angle, while orthogonal lower ‘branches’ were revealed:
‘That’s not natural,’ said Lucas. ‘Really not natural.’
‘Pattern in crystal. Like two futharks superimposed.’ Luda gestured with the metal shard, and the red lines grew brighter. ‘Runes, you understand?’
Jacqui pulled out her qPad and searched.
‘Alternate runic alphabets,’ she said. ‘They sort of coexisted, and mingled.’
‘Coincidence.’ Lucas could not believe how far they were pushing this. ‘Fracture lines of some kind.’
‘Energy comes from where?’ Luda stepped back, taking the metal shard with her, and the red fluorescence dimmed to almost nothing. ‘See?’
She pushed the metal inside her pocket.
‘One hour, we meet my friend,’ she added. ‘Important. All of us, OK?’
Lucas looked at Jacqui. On one level, they were here on holiday, long-lost family members a side issue, and never mind dark auras. But this . . .
It seemed like fantasy, but last year’s cyberattack that took out the gamma-ray burster data around the globe, that had been real and had originated from somewhere. Perhaps from the country that pioneered clandestine cyberwarfare, while allowing everyone else to think China went first.
He wondered how many of the academics here were sponsored by the FSB.
They trudged along paths in the snow to a tram platform, and rode the thing into the city. There they changed twice and ended up in a wide dark street, where a blank door led downwards into a cellar-level nightclub with primary-colour spotlights whirling and music throbbing. They found seats in a darkened booth. Lucas fetched four vodkas from the bar, because of the friend they were due to meet, and when he returned to the table, the guy was already there.
He was overweight and heavily bearded, and placing a small wrapped package on the tabletop.
What the hell are we mixed up in?
Conspiracies abroad. FSB. Dark auras and museum trinkets. Anti-jetlag meds that messed with your head.
Some holiday.
Unwrapped, the package contained a crystal spearhead, its dimensions the same as the sample back at the university. The nameless friend rewrapped it and slid it to Luda, who tapped her qPad – she had already logged in to her bank account – and thanked him.
They exchanged farewells in Russian, and the guy left.
‘We leave something behind,’ said Luda, raising her vodka, ‘when we steal original. Is duplicate, right? Ordinary quartz.’
‘When we—?’
‘And you smuggle out of country, dear cousin.’
‘That’s insane,’ said Lucas.
‘You can count on us,’ said Jacqui.
Truly insane, except that he had known, from the moment he saw the red fluorescence, that he was meant to safeguard the crystal, for some purpose he might never know, besides keeping the woman he loved happy, not to mention his new-found cousin and their shared synaesthetic . . . experiences. Whatever. Right now, he planned to keep on drinking vodka until things made sense or he stopped caring; but when it came to paranoid-schizophrenic conspiracies, one thing was already clear.
He would have to stop blaming the meds.
*
They flew back next to a couple called Gerald and Virginia (call me Ginny) Hawke, two aerospace engineers in the process of moving from Seattle to Los Angeles, Gerald to take up a teaching position at UCLA and Ginny – ‘for the time being’ – to be a mother: the swelling of her abdomen was scarcely visible.
The meds or forgetfulness must have affected birth-control measures as well as rational thought, because the following autumn, Jacqui would produce a daughter just two months after the Hawkes produced their son. They would become friends, and their children would go to school together; and there would often be joint celebrations at Brody and Amy’s place, Thanksgiving included.
From time to time across the years, Lucas would experience an unfocused feeling, a notion that he was obliged to send the crystal spearhead into the future, just as he had the graphene flake. It was not until the birth of his and Jacqui’s first grand-child, when he decided it was time finally to write a will and work out who should own the crystal when he was gone, that he realised he was carrying the thing forward, at the same rate that everyone else in the world was engaged in time travel.