Futuretrack 5 Read online

  Keri was there because I didn’t dare let her out of my sight. If they got their hands on her, they’d do things to her, to make me feed lies to Laura again. Already, they’d been plotting; already there’d been two attempts to knock out Laura electronically. As a result, Headtech had lost a fair amount of his hardware. But he’d keep on trying. When was I going to get some sleep?

  Sellers was there because I needed him. I didn’t trust him, but I had to have some backup, and he was the best of the young ones. I could put up with his nonstop sneering.

  Laura came on-line again. “Everything contradicts itself. I must keep on making decisions, on the wrong data. If I make my old decisions, I will bring harm. If I do not, I will bring greater harm.”

  “Keep on making the old decisions, until we find a whole new way.”

  “Even the lobo-farm?”

  “Even the lobo-farm. Until we find a new way.”

  “There is no new way,” sneered Sellers. “You won’t change anything, Kitson. It’s not changeable. If you keep the whip hand for a fortnight… if… you’ll be as bad as all the rest. Already you can’t do without the Paramils. Soon you’ll need the lobo-farm.”

  “Shut up, before I kick your teeth in.”

  I walked across and took the blanket from Pete’s face, gently. He looked peaceful, just a bit puzzled. He was the only one who’d died. I’d got Laura to flick-up the casualty reports. There’d been lots of magnesium-singed Paramils; lots of broken ankles and scalded legs at the fair. But only the Black Prince of Paradise was dead. They were still trying to find Joan and Razzer and Tommo in the chaos, to come and take him away. I didn’t know what I was going to say to them.

  Bits of the play kept floating up into my mind. “Thou silly man, as green as grass, the dead man never stirs.”

  And, “How earnest thou to be a doctor?”

  “By my travels.”

  “And what disease canst thou cure?”

  “All sorts.”

  Ha-bloody-ha. How could I cure anything? I felt terribly lonely. I’d tried to ring my father. He was away on his yacht with the radio switched off. I’d tried to ring Major Arnold: not at home. I’d told Havildar Karan to set up a nationwide search for them. Rog and Alec as

  well. Blocky and George and Vanessa and the Bluefish. What a funny old Privy Council they’d make.

  But Headtech would be looking for them, too, by now…

  Then I remembered there was someone else I wanted to see. For a very different reason.

  Scott-Astbury.

  I visualised it all. The Paramils hammering on his door, dragging him out half-asleep and terrified, with his arms doubled up behind him. They could give him a jab in his buttock; or stun him with a blaster, and load him into the pod of a psychopter…

  I wouldn’t send him to the lobo-farm. That only lasted a little while, and then he’d be quite happy. I didn’t want him to enjoy being a jobbing gardener afterward. I’d rather…

  Put him through the Wire. I wouldn’t even tell the Unnems who he was: he’d suffer longer that way.

  It was black, it was sick, and it was fun. If this is what power meant…

  I tapped at Laura’s buttons, asking for Scott-Asbury’s present whereabouts.

  SCOTT-ASTBURY, CHARLES HENRY JAMES. LATE SECRETARY OF THE FENLAND CULTURAL SURVEY. DIED ADDENBROOKE’S HOSPITAL, CAMBRIDGE 26.9.2012 TERMINAL CARCINOMA OF THE LUNG.

  I had missed him by four days. Even as I shot my plastic Paramil, exploded my first bomb, lovingly welded the girders on the truck, he had lain dying.

  I paced up and down like a mad thing. I spoke to someone who wasn’t there, so that Sellers looked at me sneering, and Havildar Karan sadly.

  “You can’t let him escape me, after what he’s done! You can’t, you can’t!”

  But the Someone never answered; except it came to me afterward that I had escaped something terrible, as well as Scott-Astbury.

  At one a.m., Laura said, “I wish to receive data from the following. Karl Gustav Jung. Mahatma Gandhi. Gautama Buddha.”

  “They’re all dead, Laura.”

  “I am aware of that. I will receive their written works.”

  I sent a carload of Paramils to rouse the tape librarian at Trinity College. Legally, if they could; otherwise blast the library doors open. I sent others to rouse distinguished philosophers and political historians from their warm beds all over Cambridge. Thank God we were in Cambridge. I sniggered to think of the reception the Paramils would get from wild-haired, blinking dons. First, stark terror; then mounting academic excitement.

  Then Laura said, “The works of Gautama Buddha are irrelevant—the culture gap is too great. I will accept the theories of Joshua Bar-Joseph.”

  “Who’s he?” I asked wearily, cursing Idris for being a cranky old man.

  “Posh name for Jesus Christ,” said Sellers, and spat on the newly cleaned floor. “If that machine’s got religion, God help us all.”

  “Give me any of his data that you know,” said Laura. “It is very urgent.”

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” I said off the top of my head, remembering old college services, “for they shall see God.”

  Immediately, her word processor lit up:

  FORTUNATE ARE THE UNDRUNKEN FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD.

  FORTUNATE ARE THE COWARDLY FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD.

  FORTUNATE ARE THE POVERTY-STRICKEN FOR THEY SHALL BE AWARE OF GOD WITH THEIR INTUITIVE PROCESS.

  “I am confused by this ambiguous data,” said Laura.

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “This Joshua Bar-Joseph was not English?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you feed me his data in English?”

  “I can’t speak Greek.”

  “He was a Greek?”

  “A Jew.”

  “And spoke?”

  “Aramaic.”

  “Fetch me an honest man who can speak Greek and Aramaic. You are not competent in this matter.”

  I sent Sellers out into the Cambridge night. Why shouldn’t he suffer, along with the rest of us?

  “Tell me more of the data of Joshua Bar-Joseph. …”

  I sighed. I was a prisoner all right. How well I believed that old Fenwoman fortune-teller now. I could never leave Laura for a second. I was going to be a prisoner here for the rest of my life.