It gave Gavriela and Ingrid something other than the fall of the Berlin Wall to talk about. ‘Es ist nicht möglich,’ Ingrid would mutter, ‘dass die Mauer zerstört ist,’ while Gavriela would declare it the death of Communism: ‘Das Kommunismus ist ja kaput.’ Brody’s first term of A-level physics had been too easy, he said, which worried Gavriela a little, because everyone needs a challenge.
He and Amy had joined an astronomy club, which was perhaps an excuse for being together late at night, but seemed also to have sparked a genuine interest in cosmology.
‘I’ll give Geoffrey a ring,’ she told Brody, wanting to encourage him. ‘Perhaps he can get one of his students to show you the particle accelerators.’
It was a well-established principle of labour and autocracy: pharaohs had slaves, academics had grad students. But when she rang him, Geoffrey surprised her. ‘I’ll show you around myself,’ he said, taking it for granted that she intended to accompany Brody.
‘Um, I’ll need to use the goods ramp,’ she told him. ‘Because of the wheelchair.’
‘For you, anything. You can have a dozen chaps bearing you aloft on their shoulders, if you prefer.’
‘Grad students, of course.’
‘Well, yes. Nice to get some use out of the buggers.’
His touch of East London coarseness had the same effect as Ingrid’s formality when speaking German: both caused Gavriela to smile, both made her feel at home.
‘I’ll spare them the effort,’ she said. ‘But I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Next morning, they disembarked carefully from the taxi – Ingrid and Brody helping Gavriela in the wheelchair – and went inside with the college porter’s assistance. They rode up in a lift with Geoffrey, and as a group of four they poked around inside one of the labs, chatting to a researcher who seemed glad to share his enthusiasm for the work. Brody looked fascinated.
Gavriela drifted away, having a ‘senior moment’, before realising she needed the bathroom. Remembering the way, she steered her wheelchair out into the corridor, accompanied by Ingrid.
‘When you die,’ Gavriela told Ingrid for the twentieth or the hundredth time, ‘they’ll make you a saint. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Let’s put off the moment for both of us,’ Ingrid replied. ‘This door here?’
‘That’s the one.’
*
Afterwards, they found Brody in a different lab, left temporarily by himself (which he seemed proud of) after a departmental secretary had dragged Geoffrey away to deal with something.
Brody grinned, showing Gavriela several large colour monitors atop a lab bench.
‘They’re running pattern recognition over your work,’ he told her. ‘And they’ve found a rare astronomical event of some sort. See?’
To prevent people from switching off the processors in mid-run, someone had put a felt-tip-written label beneath one of the monitors.
Property of Project HEIMDALL. Please leave running.
But this was bad. Someone had found her old data of interest. No one was supposed to know what Gavriela had spotted amid the cosmic-ray data. Or did it not matter at this time?
‘Tell me.’ Her voice came out as a whisper.
‘Sure, Gran. See here?’ He pointed at the leftmost monitor, where among scattered white dots, three scarlet points glowed brightly, forming the vertices of an equilateral triangle. ‘There’s the event.’
‘Finally,’ whispered Gavriela.
To see them rendered like this . . . It meant she had not deluded herself about the pattern in the data; and if that were true, then perhaps the strangest of her thoughts and actions were founded in reality also.
‘What do you mean, finally?’ Brody looked puzzled.
‘Never mind,’ she told him, her voice a little stronger.
Then a hard woman’s voice sounded from behind her wheelchair: ‘No, I’d like to know. What did you mean by that, Dr Wolf?’
Gavriela used the joystick, rotating her chair. The woman was a stranger, with twists and shards of darkness encircling her head
And death in her eyes.
‘I’ve led a long life,’ Gavriela told her.
But Brody must live.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to the screen?’
The image was randomised, just electronic noise.
‘Not the device.’ The stranger smiled in a way that made Gavriela shiver. ‘The data’s corrupt, including the backups.’
Gavriela had wrinkled hardcopy pages of numeric data in her study at home, but this bitch could not be allowed to learn of it.
‘Too bad,’ the woman continued, ‘that you didn’t—’
But the door creaked as Ingrid stepped inside, and Ingrid’s knuckles cracked as she formed fists, something Gavriela had thought was Hollywood invention. Then Brody was at Ingrid’s side, chest swelling as he inhaled, and his newfound muscular strength was obvious.
My guardians.
The woman looked at them, then made a wide semicircle around Ingrid, avoiding her, and left through the doorway Ingrid had entered by.
‘Scheisse,’ said Ingrid.
‘What was that about?’ asked Brody.
Gavriela told him she had no idea.
When Geoffrey returned, he frowned at their description of the woman, having no idea who she might be.
‘She gave me the creeps,’ said Ingrid.
‘Because you’re a saint,’ Gavriela told her. ‘And she was the devil.’
But the informal tour ended without disaster, and at the end, when Geoffrey asked Brody what his plans were, Brody answered: ‘To do research just like you,’ and everybody smiled.
Good enough.
Whatever else spun off from today, her grandson – her first grandson, the only one she would ever know – was on the right path. She could wish for no more.
*
That night she woke to see a silhouetted figure standing by her bed.
‘I have your papers,’ the woman whispered. ‘The meson data.’
‘It does not matter,’ Gavriela said, her old-woman voice devoid of fear.
‘You know this is the end, don’t you, Dr Wolf?’
The stranger raised her hand, a shadow in the darkness.
‘Everyone dies,’ said Gavriela. ‘A hundred per cent. The question is, how much do you live?’
A pinprick accompanied the hand’s pressing against Gavriela’s neck.
Poison.
Perhaps the woman was KGB – this was their kind of technique – or perhaps she was something else. No matter.
It felt like stone inside Gavriela’s heart.
No . . .
The colour of nothingness was black . . .
FIFTY
LUNA, 697006 AD
. . . until she woke again, this time in an airless hall with shining walls, with Kenna’s crystal form bending over her.
—Greetings, brave Gavriela.
—Kenna! Am I here for good?
The answering smile was like diamond, beautiful and shining.
—You are.
—Finally!
Gavriela stretched her own living-crystal arms.
Time for real life to begin.
FIFTY-ONE
MU-SPACE, 2607-3427 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
It lasted minutes. It lasted centuries.
And it was awful.
In a metallic fastness, a Siganthian hive, this was what happened to Kian as he writhed in the suspension field where spacetime at the smallest scales could twist, distort and rip reality. First, the flaying, as his skin peeled back into nothingness. Revealed, the red glistening strips of muscle and sleek grey fat were removed and vanished in turn, leaving the disembodied web of capillaries; and then, when the blood vessels too were gone, the fine black tracery of nerves, along with the unprotected eyeballs and the suffering brain containing the mystery seed of entanglement whose nature confounded Kian’s Siganthian captors.