Savant (4 page)

“There are no headsets on these two racks,” said the Operator. “Get me a bloody headset.”

Seconds were passing, and the Operator could be penalised if he took too long; he could be demoted, or even removed from Service altogether. No Operator ever left his station without his replacement on hand, and no Operator of Strazinsky’s grade would ever turn his gaze away from the screen for even a moment. When the Operator thought he could feel Strazinsky’s eyes boring into the back of his head, after another 45 seconds had passed, and he still didn’t have a headset in his hand, he was mistaken, possibly deluded.

After two minutes, Strazinsky was finally inserting the earpiece on the headset and adjusting the mic before saying, “Receive audio.”

He listened in.

“Anomalies?” asked a woman’s voice, apparently calmly.

“Minor and monitoring,” said Service.

Strazinsky pulled the headset’s view-screen down in front of his left eye, and said, “Receive visual.”

The three-inch screen filled with drifting snow. Strazinsky waited.

“Receive visual,” he said, again. The screen in front of his left eye blinked into life.

It had taken thirty-four minutes from the Operator’s alert to Strazinsky getting full audio and visual: thirty-four minutes. There was nothing to see, now, or hear.

“Void visual,” he said, lifting the screen away from his face. He examined the swirling, pulsing green strings of light in front of him for another sixty seconds, and then said, “Void audio.”

Strazinsky took off the headset, and handed it back to the Operator, who still wore the neoprene gloves, even though his hands were becoming uncomfortably warm inside them.

“Rack 2,” said Strazinsky, “and stand down.”

The Operator turned his back on Strazinsky, and began to peel off the gloves. He walked over to rack 2, and placed the headset on the hook provided. He breathed once, long and slow, and left the Service Floor. The debrief on a stand-down would take a minimum of an hour, and could take much longer if he didn’t remain calm.

Chapter Four

T
OBE DIDN’T SEE
his Students for their tutorials the day after he had taken up his interest in probability. The day after that was a rest day, and no tutorials were Scheduled. It was not difficult for Metoo to switch the Schedule out so that rest days were irregular, and Tobe would not lose any work-time. The Students’ hours would be made up in short order, and everything would return to normal.

P
ITU
3
WOKE
up, hit his button, and checked his Schedule. Metoo had cancelled tutorials. Pitu had hoped to finish his sock project, and deliver the results with aplomb during his tutorial, which had been Scheduled for the afternoon session: plenty of time. He had just been given an extra day.

Pitu stood on the hard, cracked linopro of his room, his feet naked, his hands wrapped around a very mediocre bowl of oatpro; the grittiness had been swapped for a watery texture and a faintly soapy taste. He didn’t notice either after the first couple of spoonfuls. The spoon sat in the half-empty bowl, untouched for several minutes as the contents cooled quickly, and began to congeal.

Pitu stared at the wipe-wall. Not only had he intended getting the maths and physics of the sock problem down, he had actually managed to do it quickly and without apparent errors. It never crossed his mind to wonder why.

He hit the compress button on the wall, and several neat pages of mathematical workings emerged from the mini-print slot. The work was both immaculate and correct. He hoped that the solution was elegant, but could not be sure.

Pitu 3 had accomplished his task, and had twenty-four hours to catch up with the other Students, and get a little further forward with the theoretical problems that tended to stretch his thinking past its natural elastic limit. He put the bowl of cold oatpro on the chair, the spoon sticking out of it at an unlikely angle created by the congealed breakfast food, and took the rag off its hook on the wipe-wall. It would take him an hour to reinstate the hard-learned formulae on the left of the wall before he could even begin to add to his learning, or at least make the attempt.

M
ETOO PLACED THE
dish of perfectly cooked eggpro in front of Tobe, and excused herself. She turned her back on him, and walked the short distance to the only closed door in the flat. Tobe liked to be able to see the space around him when he was not working. When he was in his office, he was content with his four walls and all the ideas they contained; at home, he liked to know what was beyond every threshold. He never entered Metoo’s room, and her door was never much more than barely ajar, but he didn’t like the door to be closed, and, beyond the door, he didn’t like the room to be in darkness. It was as though it might contain something predatory.

As it was, he was a little afraid of other people. He disliked their private domains: the places that he had no reference for, and didn’t understand, with their odd smells and strange, unnecessary objects, arranged without purpose, or thought to symmetry. When Metoo knew she would be spending time with Tobe, she left all the doors wide open, and Tobe’s door was kept permanently open with a little wooden wedge, carved with a stylised owl. Neither Metoo nor Tobe could remember the door in any other position, nor did either of them know where the wedge had come from; it had certainly been in situ when Metoo had joined the household.

Metoo kept the door closed on the Companion’s room. It was a superior space to the Assistant’s room, with better climate control, a bigger floor-plan and better light. It had, originally, been intended for the Master, but he preferred the small, Spartan room at the end of the corridor, which had been designed for the lowliest member of the household: the room that Pitu 3 still believed he could earn.

She opened the door to the Companion’s room, just far enough for her to squeeze through the gap, and closed it quickly behind her. Most of the flats had three bedrooms for their usual three inhabitants, and when it had been decided that Metoo should serve Tobe in her dual role, the third room had become vacant. She was at liberty to inhabit it, as she was acting Companion, but she requisitioned Service to use it for another purpose. Masters, once housed, were never moved, their households revolving squarely around them. There was no question of them taking up residence in one of the smaller units, so Service had allowed her request.

Metoo’s reasoning was both sound and simple. The flat had to be heated and cooled, and she would not use any extra light, because the sun provided all that she needed through the south-facing window. The room would cost nothing to run, except for her time and hard work.

She had grown the first plants from seeds that she had saved from requisitioned fruit, putting them in saucers filled with scraps of blotting paperpro, or old cotpro socks. She was thrilled when little plants grew, and was soon producing small amounts of fruit. Gradually, over a number of weeks and months, she requisitioned more suitable receptacles and growing mediums, switching them out with her food and clothing rations, and she soon had a very viable indoor garden.

During her second High alone with Tobe, Service had offered Metoo the use of part of the garden area that backed onto the flats. It had been intended for vehicles, when they had been privately owned, but had been returned to a more natural state in the last century. The robust, year-round planting was a natural aid to global cooling, but their seemed no reason why Metoo should not grow some of her own food, especially when it benefitted the rest of the community, both in terms of rations, and the pretty garden she had built.

Metoo ambled around her room, which amounted to a combination potting shed and hothouse, spraying some of the larger plants, and releasing some of the germinating seeds from beneath their swathes of wadding. Not wanting to disturb Tobe, not wanting his company for a few more minutes, Metoo opened the tall window on the south side of the room, sat on its ledge, and swung her legs out, dropping gently down onto the grass on the other side. Her garden was only metres away, and she went to inspect the levels in her precious water-butts, and look at the seedlings she had already planted.

Tobe sat at the kitchen counter in his clean robe. His hair was still a little wet, and it dripped slightly onto his neck, leaving a spreading run of water droplets down the back of his robe. He spooned the last of the eggpro into his mouth, and looked down into the empty dish.

“It is the same,” he said.

M
ETOO LOOKED UP
, suddenly. She gazed across the greensward that separated her from the flat, uncomprehending, and cast a brief glance through the garden-room window.

She caught her breath.

Tobe stood on the other side of the window.

Adrenalin threatened to pump panic through Metoo as she stood among her plants, and her visual acuity was increased to the point where she could see a tiny drop of water fall from a strand of Tobe’s fringe, onto his forehead.

“It is the same,” he said.

Tobe turned from the window, and was gone before Metoo could reach him. She gathered her robe in one hand, and thrust one naked leg in through the window, without ceremony. She closed the garden-room door behind her, took one deep breath, and walked into the kitchen.

Tobe stood on the other side of the counter, facing her, looking down into the empty breakfast dish that sat in the space between them. His hands were flat on the counter, and Metoo watched them for a moment. They were still. He did not seem agitated. She looked at his down-turned face, but could not catch his eye. Metoo reached across the counter and took Tobe’s face gently in her hands. He looked up at her, and she smiled at him. He looked the same.

Tobe picked up the empty breakfast dish and handed it to Metoo. Then he left the kitchen, and Metoo heard the door of the flat close behind him as he went to work in his office.

The bowl still in her hands, Metoo walked around to the other side of the counter, and sat down on Tobe’s stool. She stared into the space where she had just been standing. She sat there for several seconds before she took another breath. Her shoulders slumped slightly as she stared into the space on the other side of the kitchen counter. There was nothing very much to see, certainly nothing new. Everything was the same as it had been since she’d moved into the flat.

She sat on the stool, the dish in her hand, for several minutes. Of course it was the same; that was the point. Tobe didn’t like change. He liked routine. He liked to know what was coming next. He liked the familiar. He obsessed about anything new that came into his life. The garden room had been running for several years, and still he had never entered it, not until today. He had never even opened the door, before. What was going on?

Chapter Five

S
ERVICE DECIDED THAT
, on the third day after Tobe took up his interest in probability, the Schedule would replicate that of the first, fateful day. Anomalies had occurred during the intervening period, and there was an ebb and flow to them that might become a pattern. Strazinsky maintained the Code Green throughout that period, and all the relevant Schedules were re-set.

P
ITU
3
ARRIVED
for his 08:30 tutorial early, and was waiting outside Tobe’s office door when the Master arrived. Tobe did not acknowledge Pitu; he simply opened the door, and allowed his student to follow him into the room.

Pitu stopped on the threshold to the office, watching as Tobe tiptoed across the floor, weaving his way to the centre of the room in tiny increments, as he avoided standing on chalked workings, and ragged pages of script, apparently torn out of books and stuck to the linopro. Pitu looked around the door to the wipe-wall. It was covered in maths, formulae and equations weaving across the wall, and, often, across each other. At least two different pens had been used, one of which had obviously failed halfway through an equation, which petered out before being picked up again in another colour, so that the middle of the thought faded, and then disappeared, leaving a solitary white space on the wall.