Solstice

Lieberman had eaten a solitary dinner, sinking a couple of beers until his head felt dull, and trying to stop from wondering where the next infusion of money would come from after this little enterprise ran its course. Academic tenure was something he'd learned to despise (particularly since he no longer had it). But there were times, when the bills came through the door of his small rented apartment in San Francisco like confetti, that it had its attractions. At least he and Sara never had kids in the three jumbled years they'd been married. That was one consolation, he thought, then cursed himself for his dumbness. If there had been kids the marriage never would have gone sour in the first place. The tough and delightful business of raising a family would have swallowed them up. But you couldn't control your genes, couldn't order up kids like a pizza from Domino's.

He wasted time in the dining room counting off the long minutes to the eight am meeting Bennett had promised. Finally, with almost half an hour to go, the door opened and a woman walked in, hand in hand with a child who looked about nine years old. Lieberman smiled at them and got back a nice grin from the kid, something a little less warm from the woman. The mother was thin to the point of angularity, with a pretty, narrow face and long chestnut hair flowing down her back. She wore a loose cotton flowered shift, and her face and exposed arms were the colour of walnut, that overtanned look that was so unfashionable these days, when the dread phrase 'skin cancer' seemed to be on everyone's lips, all the more so now that the climate seemed to have turned so hot and wild. She looked like a hippie, he thought, one of the kids who populated Berkeley when he'd matriculated there at the end of the seventies. Like them, she looked a little lost.

But not the daughter, who, in snatched glances, grinned curiously at him, full of life, bright blue eyes shining, fair hair, long like her mother's, dressed in jeans with a cheap cheesecloth top. Not much money there, he thought, and maybe that got to the mother, but it certainly didn't bother the kid.

The girl went over to the buffet and picked up a huge circular pastry, like a snail shell, and started to unravel the end, tearing off chunks, stuffing it into her mouth, staring at him all the time.

'They pay you to eat that stuff?' Lieberman asked finally.

She gazed at him and Lieberman was aware of being judged, in that swift merciless way that he recognized as a particular childhood trait. Then the kid looked at her mother, saw the gap in her concentration, picked up another pastry off the table, put it on a plate, and brought it over to him.

'You should try it, they're great,' she said. Lieberman heard the mother sigh — she didn't need this, or want it, he thought — and took a big bite. The kid was right. It was delicious.

'These things have a name?' he said, staring at the girl, aware of the mother hovering behind him.

'Ensaimadas. You only get them on Mallorca. They're made of flour and lard. That's pork fat. Do you say "lard" in America? I can't remember.'

Lieberman put the ensaimada back on the plate and said, 'Lard will do, lard will do just fine. Sit down if you like. My name's Michael Lieberman.'

The girl smiled, and her mother just looked, but with the kid in the lead they joined him.

'Annie Sinclair,' she said. 'This is my mom. Mo.'

Lieberman bent down, hooded his eyes, and whispered, 'Does she speak?'

'When I get half the chance,' Mo Sinclair replied coldly, a trace of something that sounded faintly Scottish in her voice, then drew up a chair. 'Annie can talk the hind leg off a donkey. It sometimes makes me superfluous.'

'Ah,' he said, and let his hands flutter in a small wave of surrender. No man in sight, except this failed one who'd picked them up at breakfast. It was so obvious. They had a compact closeness between them that didn't let much light through, even on a shining, golden day like this.

'You work here?'

Mo Sinclair smiled wanly, and he was aware of being examined for a second time, evaluated in a more clinical, icy way. 'I am tech support for the network. When your PC goes haywire, call for Mo. Most times I can fix it. It's a small talent but it gets me work.'

'You two been here long?'

'A few months. We were just travelling on the island and I saw an ad. It's just a temporary thing.'

'And school?' he asked, looking at Annie, whose eyes went straight to the floor.

'Like I said,' Mo Sinclair added quickly, a note of nervousness in her voice, 'we're just here temporarily. There's time for school later.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Sure.'

And couldn't miss the way Annie darted a sly glance at him.

'I wish I travelled more when I was a kid,' he said, nodding.

'You do?'

'Yeah. When I was your age an outing to Woolworth's was a big thing. You don't know how lucky you are, Annie.'

The mother was looking at him frankly and he felt vaguely offended. He was just trying to claw back a little of the situation, nothing more.

'What do you do?' Annie asked.

'Oh,' Lieberman replied in a flash, 'I'm a professor. Don't take that wrong — I mean, I'm not the pompous type. Some people paint. Some people fix computers. I professor. Professoring is a full-time thing with me.'

Her eyebrows were halfway up her head.

'But what kind of-'

'Oh, I get it. Just being a professor isn't enough, huh? You want the grim details? Okay. Well, I used to design the things that turned sunlight into energy out in space. But that sort of fell out of fashion. Now I'm the sunspot guy. You know, those freckles on the face of the sun that everyone seems so excited about just now? If you want to know something about them — how big they are, what they're planning to do next — I'm the person to ask.'

'Oh,' she said, looking a little disappointed.

'I also launch my own personal space rockets and communicate with aliens in other galaxies. I'd love to tell you more about it, but then I'd have to kill you.'

Annie Sinclair giggled and stuffed half a pastry in her mouth.

'Bullshi-'

'Annie!' Mo Sinclair interrupted quickly, stifling a laugh. 'Mind your manners.'

Lieberman just grinned. Then looked at his watch. 'Well, it was cool meeting you but I have to transport out of this particular dimension. A meeting. Maybe someone's going to tell me why I'm here.'

'You don't know?' Mo asked.

'Nope. They send the contract, I do the job. Got any ideas?'

She shrugged, in a half-hearted way that made him think there just had to be a little more to it than this.

'Don't tell me,' he said. 'You just fix computers.'

'That's right. I don't think it's a big secret, but there's no reason to clue us in.'

'Right.'

'But you can tell us later.'

'I can?'

'We can buy you lunch!' Annie broke in.

'Oh, your mom's probably got things to do,' Lieberman said, offering Mo an out.

'No… I'd — we'd like that,' the mother said. 'We'll show you around. Go into town. Pollensa's beautiful.'

'I bet. But I have to run now. You know where this briefing room is?'

'Outside. In the old stable block. That's where the offices are.'

Lieberman smiled, felt a little uncomfortable with the weight of their stares, made his excuses, and went out the door.

It was bright, the heat already building in the air. The layout of the site was pretty easy to grasp. The big mansion was used for accommodation. The work took place in a vast single-storey barn sprouting antennae on its roof, set a hundred yards from the house out toward the clifftop. It wasn't much of a walk but it stole the air from inside him, even this early in the morning. The weather was on some strange, vicious bent, a searing cycle of heat that seemed to be tightening on itself. The grass crackled underfoot, dead, dry, and yellow. The heat bore down from the cloudless sky. The only sound came from the waves roaring against rock below the cliffline just a couple of hundred yards ahead. He walked to the edge and leaned on the perimeter wall. A couple of helicopters were parked, silent, sleeping fifty yards away. Behind the mansion, a massive four-square shape of gleaming stone the colour of the dead grass, stood a line of bare mountains that stretched beyond his line of vision, harsh and inhospitable. At their foot was the bright blue Mediterranean running to a white line of foam where it met the impassable rock. When they said Mallorca, he thought he was coming to some holiday island. This felt more like being stranded in some reclusive millionaire's hideout in the Galapagos. It was hard to think of anywhere quite so isolated for a research facility. There was no sign of another house in any direction, nothing but the outline of a ruined castle on a headland a good mile away. Astronomy made its home in some odd, distant locations, he thought, but he'd never met one quite as strange as this.