Outside I can hear the wind picking up and I imagine a blizzard, something like the LUCA numbers gone viral, even though Adam said the snow had stopped. I eat three bananas, each wrapped in a slice of brown bread. I sip lemonade. I browse files. I learn that Burlem's CV is out of date, even though he seemed to go through a phase of applying for jobs in the States about three years ago. I learn that he was halfway through a novel when he disappeared (and, I wonder, did he take the file with him? Did he ever finish it?). The first chapter is quite good, but obviously doesn't have anything in it that will help me find him. I can't help reading the rough plan as well before I move on. It's only a page long. The novel is about a young academic who has an affair with a colleague who then gets pregnant by him. His wife finds out about the affair (but not the child) and divorces him, but the colleague's husband believes the child to be his. When he dies, the child is told the truth about her parentage and begins a tentative relationship with her biological father. The narrator lives alone with only books for company, and wishes he could see more of his daughter. After I close that document, I keep searching through the files. I find all the parts of the application process Burlem had to go through to get his professorship. I find letters to his bank manager. But there's nothing at all that suggests that he planned disappearing, that he planned to leave the university and never come back. There are more letters. There's one to a Sunday newspaper, complaining about a cartoon that mocked Derrida the weekend after his death. I smile at that, remembering seeing the cartoon and hoping someone would write in. There's a letter to someone I don't recognize. Molly. There's no surname. It's written in a strange style, the kind of style you'd use to talk to a child. Then I realize it is to a child. It's written to a child—or perhaps a teenager—at a boarding school. Burlem's promising to go and see her soon, and to give her money. What would Burlem be doing with a schoolgirl? My mind fills with unpleasant thoughts.
Then I open the file of the novel again. The kid in the book is called Polly.
I read the letter again. This is Burlem's daughter; of course it is. Shit. He never mentioned this to me. I just thought he was an unmarried—or, I guess, possibly divorced—guy in his fifties. I didn't know that he had a troubled past, although I should have realized. He certainly always looked like a man with a troubled past.
There's no address on the letter apart from Burlem's. But now I find other letters—a whole list of them below the ones to the bank manager—that make sense. They are all to a Dr. Mitchell and are on subjects such as fees, bullying, and extra tuition. Then I look at the bank manager letters and find instructions to set up a direct debit to a school in Hertfordshire. The reference is Molly Davies. Now I get it. Burlem's paying for his daughter to go to boarding school. There's an address on these letters. The address of the school.
My mind's buzzing. Could I get to Burlem through her?
Now I need to go back into the Troposphere. I need to find Apollo Smintheus.
When I get there I realize that the town square has more than four corners. The same castles are standing around with the same neon pink signs, still looking like impossibilities. The owl hoots again.
"Apollo Smintheus?" I say.
Nothing.
I call up the console.
You have no choices, it says.
"Can I still use the Apollo Smintheus card?" I ask it.
The Apollo Smintheus card has expired.
Fuck. I thought he said I'd have it for a couple of days.
I wander around the square but everything really is shut. There's a road leading out of the square and I take it. With each step I think of Apollo Smintheus's "rough calculation," that each unit of distance/ time in the Troposphere is worth 1.6 in the "real" world. So what is a footstep? How much time does this take me? If I take a hundred steps, and it takes me, say, two minutes, when will I wake up in the priory? How far would I have to go to miss breakfast? How far would I have to go to be pronounced dead? I walk on, past a couple of car parks and a jazz club. On the other side of the road there's a run-down strip club with black oily streaks down its white façade, as if it recently caught fire. Neither of these places has a name, but the strip club has silhouettes of girls on poles, and the jazz club has a picture of a saxophone. The jazz club is on a corner, and there are concrete steps leading down towards an alleyway, at the end of which is a cinema and another car park. None of these buildings seems to be closed. There are no pink neon signs here. Without really thinking about it, I enter the jazz club. But there's no music and no smoke.
You now have one choice.
You ... I'm cold and I need to take a shit. But it looks like we're going to sit here all night. Ed's got the heat on full but my feet are still like blocks. There's snow on the ground outside and the wind's picked up, too. The sign on the church across the street rattles back and forth. Who is Our Lady of Carmel? The word makes me think of caramel; a lady made out of caramel or something. The car smells of coffee and junk food. There are sandwich wrappers all over the floor. I kick one of them and it makes a thin, plastic, broken noise.
"What's that?" says Ed.
"Sandwich wrapper," I say. "Sorry."
Ed says nothing. His eyes are pure pupil.
"Maybe she isn't in there," I say.
"Look, the priest knows about the churches and she's screwing him, right?"
"Yeah, but..."
"And he 'comes here when things go wrong.' Why wouldn't he ask her to come, too? They'll know that as long as they stay in there we can't do anything. Maybe she knows, anyway. Who knows how long she's had the book? She could have been surfing MindSpace for years."
"I say the book's on its way to Leeds."
"Where is Leeds, anyway?"
I shrug. "Northwest? It's not close to here."
"Shit."
"We'll get the book."
"We didn't get it last time."
"We'll get it."
I'm ... Oh fuck. I'm in the mind of one of the blond men. Martin. Martin Rose. OK, Ariel. Don't let him know you're here. But how do you tiptoe around in someone's mind. Shhh. Do I stay or do I go? Console? The thing appears like a slide transparency and now, as I/Martin look over at Ed, his face is busy with an overlay of images. Someone's baking something. Someone else is driving on a freeway. Another person is looking up at a blue sky. What are these images? I remember Apollo Smintheus's document:
You achieve Pedesis via proximity in
Geography (in the world)
Tropography (in the Troposphere)
Ancestry (in the mind)
OK. So if you get close to someone in the world you can get into their mind (but surely only via the Troposphere?) This kind of makes sense. These guys are right outside the priory, and I had to walk down a street to find them. I don't understand what Tropography might be. But Ancestry. Is that what I'm seeing now? Are these images something to do with Martin's parents and grandparents? There are only three of them. That's not much ancestry. In the mouse's mind there were hundreds of images. Come on, Ariel. Think ... But I don't want to think too loudly in case I alert Martin to the fact that I'm here. I am almost intrigued enough to try one of the images in the console to see what will happen, but something tells me that this would be a big mistake. When I last did this, with the mice, I managed to jump from the cupboard under my sink to the backyard. Who knows where I'd end up if I jumped here. Maybe somewhere in America. How would that translate in the Troposphere?