Blonde Bombshell (5 page)

Next, it would need a personal history. Dirters attached considerable significance to that sort of thing. It was something to do with their ridiculously short lifespans and their ambivalent attitude towards time. They believed in such things as status, progress, ambition. All a bit pointless, like wars between rival shoals of plankton, but presumably it took their minds off the fact that their lives moved from birth to death in the amount of time young Ostar were allotted for revising for mid-year exams.

I am Mark Twain, it decided; offspring of Radislav and Irina Twain; born in Trondheim, Norway, but now resident in Archangel; age twenty-nine; IT consultant and freelance technical journalist; favoured Siberian Rules football side the Minsk Marauders, who are going to go all the way this year; preferred food tofu and squid rings; marital status single; musical affiliations Angsty Pangsty, Decaying Orbit and the Lizard-Headed Women. That, apparently, would be enough to define Mark Twain sufficiently precisely to satisfy the curiosity of any of his fellow-Dirters; all they needed to know, in a few conventionalised gobbets.

It — he — fabricated suitable clothing from synthesised mashed-up plant fibres, and looked at it. The database was silent on the subject of installation procedures, and there were, of course, no instructions. The upper garment, or shirt, proved to be operated by the manipulation of plastic discs into reciprocal slots cut into the edge of the fabric. The lower garment, trousers, was frankly baffling. For a bipedal species to design a leg covering that required the user to take one foot off the ground, thereby abandoning all possibility of keeping his balance, seemed extraordinary, while the idea of fastening the garment with the metallic interlinking-track device was, given the position and vulnerability of the Dirter male sexual organ, frankly terrifying. He managed it eventually, and hoped it was one of those things that got easier with practice.

A set of identity and financial documents, and an animal-skin holder to keep them in. A communications device, like the one worn by the female in the wood. That was all. He was ready.

He set the co-ordinates and interfaced with the gravitic scoop: Take me down. Gently, he added, just in time. The scoop grabbed him, and for the briefest possible fraction of a second he was everywhere, everywhen, everything. Then infinity was crammed through a tiny hole in space, and a planet hit him.

7

Novosibirsk

The two men who’d shot George Stetchkin waited till it was dark, then took a cab to the edge of town nearest the PaySoft Industries site. They followed the perimeter fence, walking very carefully so as not to set off any of the state-of-the-art security devices (which nobody knew about apart from Lucy Pavlov, her security chief and half a dozen of his people; but the two men seemed to know exactly where they were, either through amazing intuition or because the little box one of them was holding bleeped whenever they came within sensor range of one of them) until they reached the point where the campus grounds met the forest. There they paused, studied the little box and prodded some of its buttons, and took off all their clothes, which they folded neatly and hid behind a bush. It was a cold night. One of the men shivered.

“Ready?”

The other man grinned. “Oh yes.”

There was a moment when both of them were unmistakably human, and another moment, a split second later, when both of them were something else.

The young security guard who was manning the CCTV monitors woke up with a start and stared at the screen. Purely by chance, that was also the moment when the moon chose to break through the clouds, flooding the perimeter with pearl-grey light. It showed up two medium-sized quadrupeds, grey-furred, long-muzzled, yellow-eyed; dogs, Jim, but not as we know them. One of them lifted its head and howled. A fraction of a second later, the other followed suit. The guard rubbed his eyes; his mouth was dry and he didn’t seem to be able to do anything with it for a while except let it droop open.

The bigger of the two (go on, say it) wolves crouched, looked up at the five-metre-high fence and the razor-wire entanglement that topped it off like froth on a cappuccino, and sprang. The lining of the guard’s throat puckered; he really didn’t want to see a living creature, even a wolf, disembowelling itself on razor wire. But he needn’t have worried, at least on that score. The wolf sailed over, clearing the wire with ease. Then the other one did the same thing.

The guard hesitated, then scrabbled for the playback switch and the zoom controls. First he played back the jump; then he went back a bit further, until he could see two men, with no clothes on. Fine. He’d seen naked men before. Also, since he was a farm boy from the Ukraine, he’d seen wolves jumping a fence before, too. It was the bit in between…

His grandmother, of course, had always sworn blind that they existed. When the moon was full, she’d assured him many times, they ran free in the dark forest, and woe betide anybody unfortunate enough to cross their path, unless he’d had the presence of mind to bring along a gun loaded with silver bullets. But that was just a story, wasn’t it?

He wound back a second time. He could make the two men out quite clearly; also the wolves, a few heartbeats later. In between— He froze the picture and stared hard at it. In the interval between the men and the wolves, there was nothing, just a view of the wire and some out-of-focus trees in the background.

There were other explanations, he told himself. Like: two men decide to walk into a restricted area, somehow getting past all the sensors, trip-wires and other Stupid Security Tricks, and take all their clothes off. Well, indeed. And why not? But then, out of nowhere, two very large wolves appear. Naturally, the two men run off as fast as they can. The wolves, startled by the movement, escape by jumping the fence.

He thought for a moment. In his mind, he played out two different versions of the future. In one version, he went to the supervisor and said,
Chief, the compound’s been invaded by werewolves.
In the other, he stayed exactly where he was until the end of his shift, keeping his eyes firmly anchored on a space precisely two centimetres above the top edge of the screen. In the first version, a whole lot of tiresome and unpleasant things happened to him, including unemployment, ridicule, depression and many long years in the clinic playing chess with an opponent who tended to eat the pawns when he was losing. In the other, he finished his shift and went home. Not much of a choice, really.

In the end he sort of compromised: he made a log entry to the effect that two unauthorised personnel had approached the perimeter and gone away again, and that there had been wildlife activity. He also carefully didn’t erase the relevant footage, even though he wanted to very much. Then he fixed his eyes on a spot on the wall and kept them there until he was relieved. After that, he put the whole thing out of his mind, went home, had his evening meal, switched on the TV and watched a fascinating documentary on the Discovery channel about the Soviet-era munitions factory in Siberia that mass-produced ammunition for the AK-47 with solid silver bullet-heads, an eccentricity for which the programme makers could offer no convincing explanation.

The two definitely-not-werewolves-because-werewolves-don’t-exist, meanwhile, were running through the trees.
Really
running; it wasn’t something you could do while you were wearing the monkey-suit, because it only had two legs, and the musculature and cardiovascular set-up were rubbish. Really running was something else: a bit like flying, a bit like sex, a bit like having a race against your own body and
winning.
It had been weeks since they’d had a chance to run properly, and they made the most of it.

“Better?” panted one to the other, when they paused for breath.

“A bit,” the other replied. “Last one to the other end of the forest’s a human.”

They ran again. There was a complex technical reason why they could only do this at certain times. It had to do with where they’d left their ship. In order to hide it from the planet’s rudimentary sensors — telescopes, for crying out loud, and radio signals — they’d parked up in the lee of the absurdly large moon, and that was fine. Even though the moon was more or less in the way most of the time, the ship could still beam them enough power from its capacitor array to enable them to maintain human form. But there came a time, one or two lunar rotations in every thirty or so, when the moon blocked off the planet completely, blanking out the signal. During the daylight hours, it didn’t matter; they’d adapted their transceivers to scrounge enough energy from the sunlight to supplement their reserves of battery power and keep them monkey-shaped. But at night, when the sun went down and the great white moon rose fully round and bright, there simply wasn’t enough juice in the system; once the batteries ran down, their humanoid shapes lost structural integrity and, like it or not, they reverted to being Ostar. Which meant they had to be careful, yes, and they had to think ahead and make sure they weren’t caught with their genomes down; but it meant that, until the sun came up and recharged their power reserves, they could find an open space somewhere and run …

They reached the wire at the far end of the forest, stopped and sank down in the brush under a tall, fat oak tree, their sides heaving. “Clears the head,” one of them growled.

“You bet,” the other one replied.

The forest had gone quiet. Not ordinary night-time silence, which isn’t silent at all, but the nervous dead stillness of a large community of small, nocturnal edible things painfully aware that two super-predators are on the loose somewhere in the darkness. What the hell was that? the silence asked, and devoutly hoped it’d never find out.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What are we going to do now?”

The other one thought for a moment, savouring the endorphin-induced clarity he could never achieve while dressed up as a tree-swinger. “We tell him?”

“Fine. ‘What?”

Good point. There was a limit to what the primate would be able to take in; too much, and its brain would simply unhinge. “About aposiderium, for a start.”

“All
about aposiderium?”

“No, of course not, don’t be stupid. Just about the little bits.” The not-a-werewolf thought for a moment, then added, “I think he’s already figured out some of it for himself.”

“Surely not.”

“Don’t underestimate them,” the other one replied. “They’re definitely smarter than the ones back home.”

“Yes, but—”

“If
he wasn’t part of the way there, why did he have those scans done?”

His colleague nodded slowly. “That’s true,” he said. “Amazing, really, what they’re capable of, considering. When we get home, I’d really like to do a comprehensive study.”

“Whatever.” A cloud scudded across the moon. They both shivered. “Meanwhile, we’re agreed, we tell him about the money. All right?”

The other one yawned. “Sure,” he said. “We’ll do it tomorrow, first thing.”

“That ought to be enough to point him in the right direction.” He sounded a bit doubtful. “I mean, it’s so obvious, even a banana botherer ought to be able to see it.”

“You reckon?”

His colleague reckoned. “‘We’ll keep the situation under review,” he said. “See how he makes out. After all, he’s supposed to be the smartest human on the planet.”

The other one made a noise. There’s no human equivalent.

“Yes, fine, that’s not saying much,
I
know. But what do you want us to do, tattoo it on his forehead?”

“Let’s run some more,” his colleague suggested.

“OK.”

They ran. At one point they passed one of Dieter’s foresters, who’d been posted in a high seat halfway up a very tall tree to watch for unicorns. As soon as he saw the two shapes racing towards him, clearly visible in the bright moonlight, he raised his rifle. As luck would have it, he was a farm boy from the Ukraine too.

“Hey, there’s a human up a tree.”

“Ignore him.”

The forester was trembling like a leaf, but not so much that he couldn’t sight a rifle and squeeze the trigger. ‘Worth noting at this point that the supply clerk at Forestry Management had got a really good deal on surplus military ammunition from some guy he’d met in a bar. The bullet-heads in the magazine of the forester’s rifle were solid silver. Not that it mattered, because he missed.

8

Novosibirsk

“And that,” said the marketing director wretchedly, “is where the whole thing falls crashing to the ground, and why we can’t possibly launch on Tuesday. I’m sorry,” he added, close to tears, “but I just can’t see a way round this. Unless,” he added in a hoarse whisper, “you could maybe think of something?”

Lucy Pavlov blinked twice. The four men on the other side of the desk were watching her like gazelles watching a lion. She smiled at them. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “The product’s fine, OK?”

“Oh yes,” one of the men said. “Absolutely nothing wrong with the
product.
The
product
is the least of our problems.”

Lucy tried not to stare at him. She’d spent three months on the new XDB900 browser interface, during which time she’d had to rip out the very foundations of modern information technology and sow salt on them, reinvent the wheel as not so much a circle, more a sort of uniformly stretched ellipse, bend the fundamental principles of mathematics into a Mobius loop and, when she’d done all that, make sure the result would be compatible with all preceding systems as far back as the abacus. And the product was the least of their problems. Fine.

She tried again. “We’ve done deals with all the manufacturers, and we’ve got round all the anti-trust legislation?”

“Piece of cake,” said one of the men.

Lucy nodded. “We’ve run the most successful pre-launch hype campaign in the history of the industry,” she went on, “so successful that we’ve convinced six billion potential customers that they actually
want
a whole new operating system only eighteen months after they bought the last one—”

“Pretty straightforward,” muttered the man on the end.

“And now you’re telling me we can’t proceed and it’s all ground to a shuddering halt because you can’t make your minds up whether the cardboard box it’ll be packaged in should be red or green. Correct?”

The men nodded miserably. “We’re sorry,” one of them said. “We failed you.”

“But why—?”

“It’s hopeless,” one of them burst out. “We’ve run two entirely valid market-evaluation simulations in ScanCrunch Pro 4 using the best demographic-adjusted moderators, and one of them says it’s got to be red and the other one says it just has to be green.” He shook his head sadly. “We’ve been over and over the results looking for a blip and there isn’t one. The data just contradicts itself. We’re screwed. We’re going to have to go right back to the beginning and start again.”

Lucy looked at them; the five top men, five
geniuses:
combined salaries slightly more than the gross national product of Chile. There were times when she wondered if she belonged to a different species. “Tell you what,” she said. “Let’s do the box in yellow.”

There was a silence so deep, so heavy, that if it had carried on much longer it’d have bent the walls of the room. Then one of them said, “Yellow?”

Lucy nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Nice cheerful colour. I like yellow. I expect a lot of other people do, too.”

“Yellow?”

“Well?”

This time, the silence was so pressurised there was a real danger of blowing out the windows.

“What shade of yellow?”

“Buttercup,” Lucy said firmly. “So, guys? What d’you think?”

“Yellow,” said one of them.

“With blue lettering,” Lucy added.

“Yellow?”

“Yellow.

“So that’s settled then,” Lucy said briskly. “Moving on—”

She got rid of them eventually, but the strain had taken its toll, and she decided on an early lunch, possibly followed by a quick stroll in the— No, probably not. If you go down to the woods today, there’s a small but significant risk of a big surprise, in spite of the best efforts of Dieter and his happy band of musketeers. She stayed in her office with a sandwich and a coffee, and made a few calls.

The first was to a big name at Harvard Medical School. She knew him because he’d been in charge of fawning and grovelling when she went there to open the Lucy Pavlov Research Institute in December of last year. No, he admitted, he wasn’t actually a doctor himself,
per se,
but if she wanted a doctor he had heaps and heaps of them, if she wouldn’t mind holding for just a few seconds…

The next voice belonged to a woman who sounded like she was talking with her mouth full. Memory loss? Could be one of any number of things. The woman went through them all, and it was like trying on clothes in the sales: they’ve got every conceivable size except the one you want. Sorry, the woman said, when they’d been through all the possibilities, you can’t possibly have memory loss, because you aren’t showing any of the right symptoms, so you must be imagining it.

“I don’t think I am,” Lucy said, nicely but firmly.

“Yes, but …” The woman paused. “Well, there’s one other thing. But it’s so incredibly unlikely.”

Lucy waited. Then she said, “Yes?”

“There’s this stuff,” the woman said. “You may have heard of it, aposiderium.”

“No.” Lucy frowned. “Hold on,” she said, “isn’t that the—?”

“That’s right,” the woman said, “it’s the stuff they use for the security strips in banknotes. The only known source is the core of a meteorite that landed in the Yukon in November 2011. It yielded just over two metric tonnes. It’s a metal, but it’s kind of weird…” The woman paused, giving the distinct impression that even thinking about it was the sort of thing that gives you nightmares, even with your eyes open. “Anyway, they keep it in this incredibly secure facility somewhere on the ocean bed — even I don’t know where it is — and I remember seeing something in one of the journals …”

Apparently, the woman went on, the staff at the incredibly secure facility had started forgetting things. Not where they’d left their keys or their partners’ birthdays or whose turn it was to scrub out the waste-disposal outlets, but distant things, early memories, the names of ancient aunts and long-dead pet rabbits. Initial studies suggested the possibility of a link to close contact with the aposiderium, though it should be stressed that there was absolutely no question whatsoever of any danger to the public at large from handling banknotes, even in quantity. Contamination, if there was any, would only happen if you spent months on end handling the raw metal with your bare hands. The amount of aposiderium in a banknote was absolutely tiny. Even so, it had been thought sensible not to publicise the findings, just in case the public got scared and started refusing to have anything to do with money. Yes, the woman agreed, it was a pretty small risk, but you couldn’t be too careful.

Delusions? Hallucinations? Well, now she came to mention it— Lucy held her breath. “Yes?”

“Absolutely none at all,” the woman said. “Or at least,” she added, “I guess some of the memory-loss victims could’ve had hallucinations and then forgotten all about them. But there wasn’t anything about it in the paper I read.” She paused, then added, “Just out of interest, why are you asking?”

Lucy hesitated. She didn’t want to come across as yet another rich hypochondriac, one of those people who treat medical dictionaries as though they’re mail order catalogues, and keep the golf courses of the world amply supplied with affluent doctors.
I’m enquiring on behalf of a friend
probably wouldn’t cut it, either. “Just some research I’m doing,” she said airily. “This stuff you mentioned. Apo…?”

“Aposiderium.”

Catchy name. Of course, the boys would want it snappier, Memory-Go, perhaps, or Forget-Me-Lots. “You’re sure there’s no other source for it anywhere, apart from the meteorite strike.”

The woman had the rare knack of being able to imply a shrug by the quality of her short pauses. “I’m not a chemist or an astrophysicist,” she said. “I suppose there could’ve been other meteorites with it in, small ones that never got reported. But it’d be a multi-billion-to-one chance, I’d have thought.”

Lucy thanked her and rang off. Aposiderium, she thought. Stuff from outer space that eats your brain. She’d read about stuff like that, but only when unwrapping things that came heavily packaged in the mail. And a top-secret repository somewhere on the ocean bed. On balance, she decided, she’d prefer hallucinations.

But she made some more calls: to a general she’d met at a party and a brace of US senators (the best that money could buy, her people had assured her, though in the context of politicians, the statement had struck her as self-contradictory) and a nice scientist she’d smiled at once at a reception, causing him to walk through a plate-glass door without noticing. Eventually she got a name and a number, and made the call.

The commandant of the top-secret ocean-bed repository sounded like he’d just been woken up from a thousand-year-long sleep under a mountain somewhere. But he’d heard of her. In fact, he had a picture of her taped to the inside of his locker door, so that was all right, sort of.

“No chance,” he said firmly. “We weigh the deposit every hour, on the hour, and I can promise you, not a milligram’s gone missing, not ever. We’re quite” — short, mildly disturbing laugh —”obsessive about it, you might say. Ha.”

The final syllable was spoken, not laughed; never a good sign. Lucy persevered. What about when the bank people came to collect a batch to make into banknotes? Could any of the stuff get lost or mislaid? Absolutely not, no way. They presented him with a release form, which had to be signed by the bank CEO, the presidents of six of the ten countries who jointly ran the facility, three Nobel laureates and either the chairman of the World Bank or the Dalai Lama. Then, if the release said 0.87442 grams, then 0.87442 grams was what they got;
and
they weighed it again after the required amount had been chipped off and sealed up, and
again
after that, and after that of course there’d be the next scheduled hourly check— That’s very impressive, Lucy said, grateful that there wasn’t a video link and she couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her, but how about once it’s left your hands? Could someone at the printing works, or the bank—? No, I see. Quite. Absolutely. Thank you
so
much for your help.

Resisting the temptation to go and have a bath, preferably in a mild solution of disinfectant, Lucy lifted the phone one more time and told Reception to hold all her calls for an hour. A dead-end, she told herself. It can’t be aposiderium eating my brain, because there was no way in hell anybody could get hold of the stuff; not unless they shredded a huge load of banknotes just to get the security strips, and that’d be— Suddenly the room was very quiet and her eyes were very wide.