Diamond Eyes (8 page)

‘Mira, I couldn’t care less about your hallucinations. What’s in the past, is in the past, and with your eyes stitched shut as well, there’s no chance they won’t stay there. I’m talking about the big bad horrible wolf that’s lurking somewhere in your head and keeps biting anyone who tries to get close enough to help you.’

‘Liar! You’re just trying to confuse me. You still want me to go back there with you.’

‘I am
not
lying. I would be, though, if I said I didn’t care about what happens to you. Stay or go: neither solves anything unless something big changes — inside you or out there in society. Otherwise, you may think freedom is on the mainland, but how will you ever manage to sleep nights never knowing when someone’s coming to get you? But if we go back up the hilltogether now, as your first reward, I’ll apply for a day pass.’

‘Are you kidding?
Today?’

‘Why not? If I don’t earn your trust honestly, I’ll never keep it.’

‘This isn’t a trick? You mean a day trip to
my
home, right?’

‘Of course. If I started taking girls to my home, my mother would freak out. Hey, maybe that’s not such a bad idea?’ He chuckled, but she got the impression it was humour for himself.

Her mouth fell open. ‘You still live with your mother?’

‘She lives with me actually; moved in to house-sit while I was in jail and we both work such long hours we haven’t really talked about when she might move out again.’

‘I never imagined you people having families.’

‘I’ve got a dog too. Big old goofy bugger who hogs my bed every night. So what do you say?’ He coughed, and it made him sound weaker. ‘Do you want to start a new life today? Or run away from the chance now, and perhaps forever?’

Mira shivered at the thought of going back inside, of being dragged back by force or returning willingly. One did appeal more than the other, but not by much.

‘I never had a dog,’ she said to distract herself. Her family had always preferred to adopt orphaned wildlife.

Standing up, she shuffled to the edge of the shelter where the soft drizzle kissed her face again. A branch rustled nearby and she tensed. Listening to the sounds of the island, though, she couldn’t hear anyone preparing to tackle her. Perhaps they would if she made the wrong decision? She sniffed the breeze. If they were hiding, it wasn’t downwind.

‘Today?’ she persisted. ‘I can go home today?’

‘Today? Well, er. I can ask for approval for a day pass today like I said, but it takes about a day to get approved, so the trip will more likely be tomorrow — which is even better, because it gives us the advantage of an early start and a whole day out. Just for a visit, you have to understand. If you want to earn self-sufficiency, you’ll have to learn it, step by step, and that’s going to take even more time, Mira. Time and sizeable doses of persistence until you can convince Matron Sanchez and a panel of other psychologists that you’re safe to live by yourself out there, around other people.’

‘Oh, I get it now. Time, as in a whole lifetime.’

‘I didn’t say that. Be fair. It’s hard to say how much time you’ll need because you haven’t opened the door properly yet to my help. Sure,’ he said, his voice draining steadily of its energy, ‘you’ve cracked a window, and from the glowing potential I can see in your heart, I dare say it will take you far less time to progress than anyone else here; perhaps only a few weeks or months until you can sleep at home overnight. Isn’t that soon enough, considering your alternatives?’

‘So what’s the catch?’

‘No catch. Unless you count the fact that Matron Sanchez will still be expecting us to make our doctors’ appointments this morning.’

‘Specialists,’ she corrected.

‘Specialists,’ he agreed. ‘So, is that a yes? You want to go back with me?’

Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. Her feet wouldn’t move either.

‘Mira?’ he prompted, sounding more and more tired. ‘Is it time to get the wheelchair?’

‘No! If I’m going, nobody’s going to push me. Not ever again!’

‘I meant for me, actually.’ He grunted, his feet shuffling as if he was struggling to stand. He failed and his weight slumped onto the seat again. ‘I’m sorry to say this, but you’ll have to push me.’

‘No!’ Her heart fell as she imagined the humiliation of returning not only beaten but also broken. ‘How can you preach about trust, then try to make me your servant?’

‘It’s not what you think,’ he said, sounding even weaker. ‘I ran. through broken glass and I’m. bleeding. Feel stupid, but I. Sorry, I. think I’m going to.’

‘Ben?’

Mira touched his shoulder but got no response.

‘Ben, talk to me!’

She fumbled to find his cheek and slapped it.

‘No! You can’t faint!’

Panicking, she slapped him twice more.

‘They’ll blame me!’

The reward of suffering
is experience

Aeschylus

M
atron Sanchez left with a smile on her face, leading the twig-haired old woman by the hand and promising to ensure a constant flow of volunteers to follow.

‘It’s too warm in here,’ Zhou complained as soon as she was out of earshot. He bruised his thumb on the window latch, discovering it was rusted shut. ‘The ambient temperature has to be noticeably cooler or else the sensors might start misinterpreting minor variations in body heat as the day grows warmer.’

‘Over here,’ called Private Lockman. He stood in the doorway, still keeping watch on the hall, but had found an air-conditioning control near the light switch. ‘The scale has worn off, but I’ve turned it as low as it can go — I think.’

‘We’ll know soon enough,’ replied Van Danik. He chewed off the head from his third jelly snake, peeled off his leather jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, revealing his black short-sleeved muscle-shirt, which had already grown wet with sweat from his armpits.

Zhou also noticed the red flush still apparent on Van Danik’s face, but knew him well enough to guessit had nothing to do with the stuffiness in the room. In four years of collaboration, he’d never seen anyone unsettle Mitch as well as the podgy little matron had. He wondered how long it would last. Swiftly, he set to the task of recalibrating elements of their equipment. At the neighbouring table, Van Danik tapped notes onto his holographic keyboard — a smart-light projection from a pocket-sized hard-drive unit that was much lighter than a laptop and sturdier for travelling. Nevertheless, the software often failed to load the first time after passing through airport security.
‘Tu scronium es!’
Mitch swore, shaking his fist at it until the glitch stabilised and he could finally add captions to the first two sets of fingerprints they’d taken.

Hawthorn glanced at him, giving a kick to the empty bags that he’d shoved aside to ensure a fast-exit route to the door. ‘What language is that, Doc? It sounds nasty.’

‘Latin,’ Zhou replied for his colleague, recognising the mood that always went with it. ‘He just called his laptop a whore. Beware, a bear always bites if you poke it. Back away quietly.’

Hawthorn chuckled but didn’t take the hint. ‘You should channel your aggression, Doc. You’re already built like a line backer. Why not hook up with Lockman and me when we get back to Sandy Creek? We’d make a formidable team on the field.’

‘Pallas meas lambe,’
Van Danik muttered without looking up.

Hawthorn glanced at Zhou.

‘Meas lambe
means “lick my", so you can guess the rest.’

‘Maybe not,’ Van Danik said, ‘if he needs everything spelled out for him. Let’s try body language.’ He pointed at the door.

‘No can do yet, Doc. I gotta make sure you’re settled in and safe here, right?’

Van Danik frowned and went back to his work. As he leaned across the tangle of wires to shake a loose connection to a video tripod, his long neck-chain swung out, triggering the delete key with the Christian cross and Jewish Star of David hanging from it; two of an assortment of steel charms from every religion. He muttered in Latin as he tucked them back inside his T-shirt, then made the correction.

‘So what’s with all that?’ Hawthorn said as he bumped past Zhou to check the view from the window.

‘Polygraph,’ Zhou said. ‘Careful. This isn’t a football field.’

Hawthorn chuckled and pointed at Van Danik. ‘I meant all that.’

‘In layman’s terms,’ Van Danik snapped, ‘it’s a lie detector. But our modifications make it far more reliable than any of the barbaric and unreliable interrogation methods you would have learned at boot camp. We deal in precision — retinal scans, blood pressure, body temperature and fluctuations in the electromagnetic fields around the subject’s hands, head and chest — so between the localised EEGs of brain activity and the ECGs of the heart, we can tell if someone’s lying before they know it themselves.’

‘That’s nice, Doc, but I already knew all that from our briefing with Colonel Kitching. I was talking about your neck-chain. I’ve never met a scientist who worshipped one god let alone so many. I thought the two concepts were incompatible?’

‘On the contrary. Science shows the way the heavens go, while religions show the way to go to heaven. That’s a premise as old as Galileo, by the way; basic high-school science or history, if you made it that far?’

‘I made it far enough to know that science is supposed to provide verifiable answers for everything. But you’ve got so many symbols there — surely you don’t mean to suggest that all religions are equally valid?’

‘Einstein believed in God.’

Hawthorn laughed. ‘That’s hardly an answer. More likely, he believed in hedging his bets.’

‘It’s not hedging bets! It’s accommodation for all possible outcomes; a valid mathematical concept.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

Van Danik’s frown darkened. ‘That depends on how you equate ideology and probability analysis with quantum mechanics and string theory, and whether or not you agree that the core strength of mathematics is precision, that of science is the freedom to speculate, and that of language is metaphoric ambiguity — all things that defined the universe long before humans intruded on the scene.’

‘Language? Are you serious? How can language exist without anyone to speak it?’

Van Danik sighed heavily, keeping his eyes on his task of joining fine extension wires between the desk tripod and the mutated polygraph. ‘Arrogant meathead. Every bird, tree and mammal — hell, the planet itself — has a language. Translation and understanding are both human hang-ups, which should also explain the mess of confusion and self-righteousness in the world. But by all means, use the blackboard if you’d like to share your own theories?’

Hawthorn chuckled again. ‘You first, Doc. I’m a born-again Christian — almost. Prove to me that God exists in a precise equation and I might begin to believe that life and language might also exist out there, on a planetary scale.’

Van Danik slammed down the wires. ‘You supercilious son of a bitch! You’d dare to limit God’s creativity to only one world, one universe?’ He spun around to the blackboard and used the thick white chalk there to scribble a formula in large letters across the wall: (A + B
ⁿ
)/n = x

‘Hence God exists,’ he declared, drawing a box around it for emphasis. ‘One God; infinite permutations, multiple interpretations, now, then and forever within the full sphere of the timeline. Google it for yourself if you’ve evolved that far, but it’s remained unchallenged since 1766 when the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler proposed the same equation to the atheist Diderot in the court of Catherine the Great. Now it’s your turn, genius — exemplify your own theories.’

He offered the chalk to Hawthorn, but the sergeant declined to take it.

‘Perhaps you’d prefer to discuss the probability of God through quantum mechanics then? Or the formulae by which the improbable becomes probable via universal unification theory?’ He scratched another formula in chalk: Rμν — 1/2gμνR = 8μνGTμν

‘Also known as string theory, which, as I’m sure you’re aware, also cross-checks and predicts that all things become possible as time stretches towards infinity — even the miracle of you and me getting along in this universe or the next.’ The chalk snapped as he underlined the equation.

‘There’s no need to get so sweat-up about it, Doc.’ Hawthorn grinned and wandered to the window. ‘I’ve never met a research scientist who wasn’t a dancing bear for somebody, so I was just poking to see if you were a grizzly or koala.’

‘You do realise that a koala isn’t a bear; it’s a marsupial?’

‘The point I’m making is that despite your current leash to the military, everything you do seemsconspicuously intent on drawing attention to yourself. Your bike and driving technique, for example, and your attitude, not to mention your clothes and now also your irreverent jewellery. You’re a security risk, Doc. You might as well hang flashing lights around your neck and shout for a sniper.’