Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

Julia buried her face in her hands. After a while she felt Greg’s arm round her shoulder. Misery compounded as she found she was quivering silently.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, lowering her hands to wipe at her eyes. Absolutely refusing to cry. Then the implications of what her father had said penetrated. “Oh, God, do you think he was the one?”

“Not deliberately, if that’s what you mean,” said Greg. “Maybe he let something slip. But it wouldn’t do any good asking him. I doubt he’d remember. And I couldn’t tell whether or not he was telling the truth.”

She considered that, if Greg couldn’t make sense of her father with his ability-”His mind has gone, hasn’t it? I mean, really gone, destroyed.”

“Julia.” He held her firmly, a hand on each shoulder. “Isn’t it about time you booked him into a clinic?”

“He’s my father,” she insisted plaintively. “He needs me.”

“He’s hurting you, Julia. Far too much. You can’t hide that from me, remember? A clinic will care for him properly. You can visit. Hell, you can afford to build a clinic. Put it in a house like this one, he won’t even realize the difference.”

She studied something away to the side of his head, swallowing hard. “Maybe,” she whispered.

“You should get out,” he expanded blithely, changing tone, breaking the mood. “A girl like you ought to be beating off the boys with a stick. Stay up till the wee hours at disreputable parties. That sort of thing. Do you the world of good. Wilholm is grand to look at, but it isn’t exactly jumping and jiving, now is it?”

“No,” she smiled meekly. “I’m going away next weekend, actually. A book launch.”

“A what?”

“A book launch. It’s a big PR event, lasts for two days, truly swish. Naturally the Evans heir was invited.”

“Good. It’s a start. Now, what about a boy?”

“I know someone,” she said defensively. And the thought lit that idyllic warming core of delight.

They walked out into the furnace heat of a cloudless day. The sun’s glare yellowed half of the sky.

“Goodbye, Greg, and thanks again.” She stood very close as he blipped the Duo’s lock. Would he kiss her?

He tugged the Duo’s door open and smiled affectionately, like a doting uncle. “Any time.”

Oh well.

She waved at the car until the curve of the drive took it from view.

End GregTime#Three.

She’d have to edit her father out, though.

Scorching April sunlight metamorphosed the A1 into a bubbling ribbon of tar, for once reversing the rampant greenery’s encroachment. Nettles and grass were sucked below the surface by sluggish eddies, consumed and fossilized within the black brimstone.

The Duo moved along the northbound carriageway with one continuous ripping sound. Greg drove automatically, trying to make sense of the case. He hadn’t admitted it to Julia, but Kendric di Girolamo had him badly worried. A paradox, she’d said. And she was right. Intuition convinced him Kendric was involved with the blitz attack somewhere along the line, no faint tickle either. But why had the man allowed her to buy him out? Maybe Gabriel would know.

He drove straight through Edith Weston, on to Manton, and turned right, freewheeling down the hill towards Oakham, saving the batteries. A dense strip of rhododendron bushes planted along the side of the railway line running parallel to the road was in full bloom, tissue-thin scarlet flowers throwing off a pink haze as they basked in the rich sunlight. Greg barely registered them; he was worried by the idea of a high-placed mole hidden somewhere among Event Horizon’s staff. The last thing he needed was an opposition that was being fed his own progress reports. Maybe it would be best not to keep Walshaw a hundred per cent up to date. More subterfuge, more complexity.

Dillan Evans disturbed him, as well. Not so much his state, but the fact that he could piece together his father’s particular bid for immortality from the snippets of conversation he’d picked up around the manor. If Dillan Evans could, anyone could. That definitely meant interviewing all of Wilholm’s staff. Another neurohormone hangover to anticipate. Or had Dillan Evans realized because he knew exactly how avaricious and egotistic his father was? That, given that the bioware’s capability existed, he would inevitably spend a fortune bringing it to fruition and constructing an NN core. Either way, it left Dillan as a real monster of a loose end. No messing.

Greg had been surprised how bravely Julia handled her father. Her mind’s peppy sparkle had dimmed severely in his presence, but her outward composure had been beautifully maintained. He admired that kind of dignity.

He even felt a degree of pity for Dillan. It would’ve been so easy to condemn him, but he couldn’t find the scorn. He deserved compassion more than anything; a lost ruined man, cowering in the double shadow of his parent and child.

His sorry state made Julia all the more remarkable-or perhaps not, the best roses grew out of manure heaps. And despite being the end product of a decidedly screwed-up family, she shone like the sun. Embarrassingly so in his presence.

Sighing resignedly at the memory, he drove into Oakham, reducing speed as the cycle traffic built up around him. When Greg was a teenager it’d been a sleepy rural market town, home to nine thousand people. Then the Warming melted the Antarctic ice, and Oakham received a spate of refugees from the drowned Fens. Its population rose to well over the fifteen thousand mark, and all without a single new house being authorized by the PSP county committee. The town became a microcosm of English life, compressed, confined, and frantically scrabbling to adapt to the environmental and social revolutions of the new century.

Greg slowed to a crawl by the library at the end of the High Street. People were dismounting from their bicycles, wheeling them forward into the dense crowd ahead. The High Street was packed with market stalls, but there was just enough space left for the Duo between them and the waist-high piles of slowly degenerating kelpboard boxes which swamped the pavement. Greg grated into the gap with a broadside of horn blasts, and followed a shepherd driving his small flock of rotund beasts, gene-tailored for meat heaviness. The Duo’s wheels squelched softly on the carpet of grey-brown turds they laid on the pitted tarmac.

The buildings on this side of the street were mostly old estate agents and building societies. They’d all closed down in the Credit Crash, and the PSP had requisitioned the empty premises under the one-home law, converting them into accommodation modules. Even now there was little improvement in the housing pressure; council and government were locked in a squabble over funds for a new estate on the southern edge of the town. Entire families had crammed into the makeshift facilities behind the shops’ broad plate-glass windows, the oldest relatives sitting amongst the bleached displays like flesh-sculpture buddhas watching the world go by.

Not all of the old retail businesses had gone under: there was still a hotel, a couple of butchers, a recently de-nationalized bank, and a century-old family gear business that had survived; but most of the town’s trade had been usurped by the thriving High Street market. The stalls were crude wooden trestle affairs, keeping the sun at bay with awnings of heavy cloth, patterned in brightly coloured stripes or loud checks. Animals bleated mournfully in their pens, birds squawked inside cramped wicker cages. Pyramid mounds of fruit were stacked high, every colour of the rainbow. Ranks of skinned rabbits hung from poles, stall owners languidly flicking leafy switches at them to keep the flies off. There were clothing stalls, cobblers, tinkers, gear repairers, distillers with an astonishing array of liqueurs, carpenters, potters, the whole repertoire of manual crafts clamouring for attention.