Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

Rae scowled. She’d been taking it for granted all these years…

“The way I see it,” Pargeter continued, “there are two possibilities. Either you and I have been changed far more drastically than we imagined, and we’ve somehow been loaded, on a subconscious level, with unimaginably-detailed templates for all the things we create. Or we’re not giving the orders, we’re accessing a database of all possible templates.”

Rae shook her head.

“The world, Ms Peterson, has become a lot stranger than we thought. We have become a lot stranger than we thought.” He reached out and tapped Rae on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “I’d like to show you something.”

Rae stood and followed Pargeter out of the room and up a couple of flights of stairs. At the top of the stairs, Pargeter opened a door and Rae felt a gust of cool air billow past her down the stairwell.

The door opened onto the roof of the building and an extraordinary view over London. Most of the buildings were dark, but the streetlights were on, a higgledy-piggledy gridwork of light that draped itself over the heights of Highgate and Hampstead to the north, out towards Heathrow to the west, to the River in the south and away to the City in the east.

A telescope had been set up near the centre of the roof, and Rae knew what Pargeter wanted to show her. She said, “I don’t need that, Mr Pargeter. And neither do you.” And she looked up at the gloriously star-strewn sky and zoomed her view.

It had been obscurely comforting for Rae to discover that her eyesight had its limitations. Her eyes were simply too small to receive enough light to resolve things like exoplanets or the details of distant galaxies, but if she stood on a tall enough mountain she’d have been able to see people halfway round the world, and all the planets of the Solar System appeared larger than a full Moon. All except one. She looked around for a few moments, and there it was, a glittering shield the shape of a car windscreen hanging motionless in space. She’d looked at it many times in Holland and had never been able to make out much more than its oddly granular structure.

“Do you know what it is?” Pargeter asked, standing beside her with his head tipped back.

“There’s a fogbank off the Dutch coast,” she said. “The Hook Shield, they call it. The fishermen won’t go anywhere near it; it just hangs there, never moving, never changing. It’s the same shape.” Except the Hook Shield was composed of billions of nanoparticles, each one hanging motionless in the air, a condensation nucleus for water droplets. This thing in space, whatever it was, was colossal.

“Have you tried counting the planets?” he asked.

All of a sudden, Rae was tired of Pargeter’s cute little conversational strategies. “I have noticed that Mars is no longer there, Mr Pargeter,” she said. “Thank you.”

Pargeter noticed the tone of her voice and looked at her. “We have some very bright people living here, Ms Peterson,” he told her. “They’re not the brightest people who have ever lived in Britain, but they’re almost certainly the brightest people living here now. And they believe that Mars has been… dismantled. Disassembled. And reassembled to make…” he gestured at the sky. “… that.”

“And that is…?”

Pargeter scratched his head. “Our people are of the opinion that that is where the human race, whatever it is now, is living.”

Rae blinked her vision back to normal and looked at him.

“It’s an enormous solar collector,” he went on. “The concave face is always turned towards the Sun; it’s absorbing an extraordinary amount of energy, and it’s using that energy to power something . Some of it is providing electricity for us, but we don’t know how and it’s only a tiny fraction of what it’s absorbing anyway. My bright people have theorised that the rest of it is being used to power some kind of hive mind composed of every person who disappeared during the Silence. And probably most of the animals, too.”

Rae thought about it. She thought about it for quite a while. Finally, she said, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way anything could build something like that in fifteen years.”

Pargeter nodded. “Well, yes, that’s what I thought, too,” he said. “But we looked at the stars. Have you looked at the stars?”

Rae’s patience snapped. “Mr Pargeter !” she said.

Pargeter raised his hands in apology. “Our people compared the positions of the stars on the day before the Silence to their positions now, and they believe that it’s actually been a little over one thousand seven hundred years since the Event.”

Rae shook her head. “No, no, no.”

“Our people think that none of us survived the Silence,” Pargeter said. “We were all … disassembled while… whatever it is did whatever it needed to do. Then the world was put back exactly the way it was on the day of the Event, and some of us were put back into it.”

Rae thought of clouds of animated smoke surging back and forth across her bedroom, of Pete singing in the kitchen. “No,” she said in a small voice.

“Ever since I got back from the continent, I’ve been collecting every scientist and expert and theorist I can lay my hands on,” Pargeter said. “I’ve sent scouting groups as far as Korea. We have quite a lot of clever people here now. And if you sit a lot of very clever people down for fifteen years and ask them to think about a problem, they come up with all manner of strange ideas. But eventually they boil all those strange ideas down.” He turned from the telescope and started to walk back to the stairway. “I’m told that there aren’t a lot of explanations — even very strange ones — for what seems to have happened to the stars. Earth hasn’t been moved; it’s in just the right place, if seventeen hundred years have passed. The stars haven’t been moved, because, well, that’s just impossible . I’m sorry, but this is the best explanation we can come up with.”

“Your theorists are wrong, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said.

“Possibly. Yes, quite possibly.” He stopped at the doorway to the stairs and turned to look at her. “I think your angel may have been sent by…” he waved a languid hand at the sky, at the great artefact that had replaced Mars. “If it told you to come to Hyde Park, there must be something important here. And I need to know what it is.”

She barked out an astonished laugh. “You want me to spy for you?”

Pargeter looked abashed. “One hates to revert to type,” he said. “But, you know, it was one’s job. For the past fifteen years we’ve been scrabbling about trying to understand what has happened to the world, and why, Ms Peterson. I think you’re about to be given a chance to find out. We might not get another one.”

Unable to sleep, she went downstairs and sat in the bar. No one else was about, but through the window she could see two of Gottlieb’s men on guard outside the front door. He’d told her that they were there to protect the hotel and its guests from other groups of survivors, who sometimes carried out raids into Household Cavalry territory, but right now they looked to her like armed guards.

She got up and went into Reception, where another soldier was standing behind the desk. She walked right past him without saying a word, and opened the door.

The two guards turned when they heard the noise behind them. One was a corporal named McKie; the other, she didn’t know. “I’m going for a walk,” she said to McKie.

“With respect, miss, I wouldn’t advise it,” the corporal said smoothly and professionally. Everyone here was calm and matter-of-fact and professional, she thought.