Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

It was the last night of his life. Nothing had happened to him since. There was only the mechanics of the body, eating, going to the toilet, sleeping. That was all he had done since then, slept and answered questions. He was allowed to mix with the other students, but they never expected him to say anything anyway. They had moaned about the accommodation, about not being allowed out, the food, the bathroom.

The one person he wanted to talk to, Isabel, was further away from him now than she had ever been at Launde. She would sit in one corner of the rest room they had been assigned, her legs tucked up against her chest, peering vacantly out of the window; and he would sit in the corner opposite, just gazing at her. He was too afraid even to say good morning, because if they did talk he would have to hear about her and Kitchener and Rosette. What happened in that bedroom, how many times it happened. Even why it had happened. He couldn’t possibly stand that.

Kitchener had been the architect of his mind. For the first time in his life he had really begun to think straight. Kitchener, with his own love of knowledge, had been the one who nurtured his talent, who made him realize his ability was nothing to be ashamed of, wasn’t freakish like people said. Kitchener was the one who encouraged him to join in the Abbey’s camaraderie.

Kitchener had taken Isabel from him.

Kitchener was dead.

The world, which had been so close to becoming accessible, had eluded him once again. Which was why he said he didn’t mind the psychic asking questions; after all, Kitchener had used neurohormones. They couldn’t be bad.

Except, now he was faced with the prospect of actually going through with the interview, it didn’t seem quite so easy.

There was a very unforgiving quality about Greg Mandel as he sat patiently behind the desk, some weary tolerance which even Nicholas, with all his social inadequacy, could recognize. The man had the appearance of having been everywhere, witnessed every human state. Excuses would not work, not on him. Yet at the same time, he could see how receptive Greg was. It was confusing, the two almost contrasting aspects of character existing side by side.

Nicholas dropped into the chair, not in the least reassured by the formality of the proceedings as Vernon Langley and Lisa Collier made their stiff lead-in statements for the AV recorder. There was something unnaturally creepy about someone rooting round in his mind; for a start there were so many pathetic secrets about himself, all those hundreds of failings and disasters littering his life.

“I can’t plug into your memories,” Greg said in a palliative tone. “So you can stop worrying about the time you pinched your little brother’s chocolate bar.”

“I haven’t got a brother,” Nicholas blurted. “Only a sister. And I’ve never stolen anything from her.”

“There you are then, I can’t tell.”

“Oh, right.” He felt such a fool. “How did you know I was worried about you reading my memories?”

“Because everybody does that when they meet me. Vernon and Jon here are worried about the cash they lifted from the station’s Christmas party box, Mrs Collier is extremely worried about her dark past. But the only thing I can sense inside a brain is the emotional content. So the sooner you relax and all that worry vanishes, the sooner I can ask the questions, and the sooner you can be out of here. OK?”

Nicholas nodded vigorously, secretly cheered by the way Lisa Collier’s disapprobation had darkened still further at the gibe. “Yes. Of course. I do want to help.”

“Yeah, I can see that. You really liked Kitchener, didn’t you?”

Lisa Collier had warned him never to lie to the psychic; no matter how painful any admission, he would see it, and it would be entered against him. “I did. I do. But…”

“Isabel,” Greg said sympathetically.

“I didn’t know about her and Kitchener. Not before that night.”

“What time did you see her and Rosette going into Kitchener’s room?”

“About a quarter past one.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Went to bed.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Suppose so. I was thinking a lot at first. But I was asleep when I heard Rosette screaming.”

“Before you went to sleep, did you hear anything?”

“No!” Nicholas said hotly.

“I meant, Nicholas, anybody walking about in the Abbey?”

He knew he would be blushing again. Why couldn’t he ever understand what people meant straight off? Why did they always have to use baby talk to get through to him? “Oh. Sorry. No, nobody was moving round.”

“So you didn’t hear Isabel and Rosette leaving Kitchener’s room?”

“No.”

“What were you doing in the time between leaving Uri’s room and seeing Rosette and Isabel?”

“Running the Antomine 12 data through a detection program. I was looking for dark-mass concentrations.”

“Dark mass?” Greg sounded privately amused.

“Yes. In space. Kitchener was interested in them. He thought they might act as wormhole termini. You see, if you move a wormhole in a specific fashion it may be possible to generate a CTC directly. A non-paradoxical temporal loop would…” Nicholas forced himself to stop, chastened. He’d done it again. There was that dreadfully familiar expression of polite incomprehension on Greg’s face. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Don’t be ashamed of a gift, Nicholas.”

He looked up, startled. But Greg was serious.

“I go on, sometimes,” he said limply. “I don’t realize. Cosmology is interesting, Mr Mandel.”

“I know what it’s like. My wife tells me I talk about Turkey too much.”

“Turkey?”

“The war.”

It took a moment before Nicholas remembered the Jihad Legion. He had been eight or nine at the time the Islamic forces had invaded Turkey, so it was classed alongside all the other terrible incidents which childhood jumbled together. “Oh, yes.”

“About the detection program,” Greg prompted. “Were you running it on the Abbey’s Bendix?”

“Yes.”

“Until when?”

“When I saw Isabel and Rosette, quarter-past one. I couldn’t work after that.”

“Did you use the English Telecom datanet that night?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I had to, the Antomine data comes direct from its mission control in Toulouse. There’s no other way of accessing it.”

“So you only used the one datalink?”

“Yes.”

“OK.” Greg typed something into his cybofax. “Did you know Rosette was mildly insomniac?”

Funny question. He couldn’t think why Greg should want to know. “No. But she was never tired at the end of an evening, when we were in a room, or if we went to the Old Plough. And she was usually first up. So I suppose, thinking about it, I knew she didn’t sleep much.”

“Have you ever taken syntho, Nicholas?”

“No,” he said, because it was true, so he could say it without any guilt showing. But he dropped his gaze in shame. There was an achingly long moment of silence.

When he risked looking up, Greg was giving him a calculating stare. All his doubts about the psychic searching freely through his memories returned in a flood.

“Let’s see,” Greg said. “You took another kind of narcotic?”

“No,” Nicholas said miserably.

“Somebody offered you syntho?”

“Yes.”

“Rosette?”

“Yes.”

“And you refused?”

“Yes. I know Kitchener says there’s nothing wrong with it. But I didn’t want to.”

“I can see the incident has a lot of connotations for you, what else happened?”

Nicholas decided the best thing to do was just say it fast. Greg might move on to another subject. He stared unblinkuigly at his Nike trainers. The lace on the left foot was fraying. “She wanted me to go to bed with her.”