Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

A 70cl bottle of Glenmorangie, the lid’s seal unbroken. A battered cardboard box a few centimetres square. And a large metallic-looking automatic pistol.

She almost dropped the box. Hands shaking a little, she laid it down on the seat of the chair and stared at its contents. She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. When she opened her eyes, the gun was still there. She’d never been this close to a gun. Apart from on the hips of police and other officials, and in the hands of soldiers, she’d never seen a firearm in real life at all. She picked up the small cardboard box and prised open its furred and ragged flip-lid. Inside were lots of small lead pellets, rounded at one end, flared at the other. Air-pistol ammo. That was a small relief. Technically the pistol wasn’t a firearm, but by legal definition it was. Its relative lack of lethality didn’t make it any less illegal, or any less of a shock to find in her house.

Hugh had never shown the smallest interest in guns, other than the odd passing mention of how common shotguns and rifles were on the long island, where – for anyone other than a licensed game warden – they were just as illegal as here. But it must have been Hugh who’d hidden away the box. For a moment Hope considered another explanation: that it had been left by the flat’s previous owner. But – quite apart from the likelihood of its being discovered in the process of moving out and moving in – whoever had left the gun had also left the whisky, and that didn’t ring true at all. The single malt had probably cost a hundred pounds. Nobody would willingly abandon, or easily forget, something like that. And Glenmorangie was Hugh’s favourite whisky, though he could seldom afford the indulgence. It had taken him about a year to get through one bottle, before Hope had become pregnant with Nick. She wasn’t bothered that he had another bottle stashed away. He might even be keeping it to wet the baby’s head.

But what the hell did Hugh think he was doing stashing an illegal weapon in the house? Hope found herself looking over her shoulder. From where she stood, just inside the cupboard, she couldn’t see any cameras. She leaned backwards and looked up and down the hallway. She could see one lens above the front door and one at the opposite end, above the doorway to the kitchen. None at the sides.

She replaced the ammunition box and picked up the pistol. It was heavier than she’d expected. Though she knew rationally that it couldn’t explode, she handled it as if it were a ticking bomb. Angling it so that she could see the muzzle without pointing it at herself – she knew that much – she saw that the actual small air-pistol muzzle was set a centimetre or so back inside the barrel, presumably to make the replica more convincing. She placed the pistol back in the box, took the whisky bottle out and placed it on the floor, then climbed up and put the box back where she’d found it.

She took the whisky bottle through to the kitchen and set it on the table beside her glasses. After gazing at it for some time, she picked it up, shoved it to the back of a kitchen cupboard, put on her glasses and got back to work. It was only when she took her apron off at 3.20 to go and pick Nick up that she noticed again the yellow-and-white carton in the pocket, and realised that she’d put it completely out of her mind. She couldn’t understand quite why, but this made her feel happy. She stuck it in her jeans pocket and went out.

About nine that evening, after Nick had finally fallen asleep, Hope sat beside Hugh on the sofa in the living room and turned over the pages of one of her art books. Hugh was watching the television – like her, he preferred the implied sharing of the screen to glasses, even if they weren’t both watching, and even if, as now, the sound was going to the ears of only one of them. A BBC Horizon programme: the latest pictures of the latest Earth-like extrasolar planet to be imaged, the fourth with visible signs of life. For Hope the fascination of this had worn off since the global excitement over the first, though every so often she’d find herself pulled up short by the thought of life lit by the rays of another star. The strangeness of it, the sense of plurality, of possibility, of decentring… she imagined that this was how it must have felt for the first generation after Copernicus. Of course by now the clamour was for signs of intelligent life. There was even, in the tones of some of the regular news anchors and commentators and columnists, and for that matter people in the queue at Tesco, a feeling that the astronomers had somehow let everyone down by not having spotted the lights of cities and the jets of starships: they promised us little green men, and all they have to show us is little green patches!

Hope had no longing to meet aliens. She had a dark suspicion that it would not be a welcome encounter. But now and then, when the thought drifted through her mind like the clouds did in scenes from the space telescopes, she found an odd consolation in the now-certain knowledge that, altogether elsewhere, life, of whatever kind, went on.

She closed the book and walked quietly into the kitchen. She returned bearing a tray with the bottle of Glenmorangie, a small jug of tap water, and two heavy glasses. She set the tray down on the long low table in front of the sofa, and sat back, looking at the screen. White whorls swirled above jigsaw-piece shapes, some blue and some of other colours, pixels of vermilion and verdigris. A Chinese woman in a white coat talked. An American man with white hair gesticulated. A classroom full of black-haired students nodded and made a note. Back to the planet, this time a view of the night side, sharper in focus but more enigmatic in interpretation. The saccade of Hugh’s gaze suddenly snagged on the bottle. He sat upright and flicked at his ears, turning the sound off.

‘What’s that for?’ he said.

‘That’s what I was going to ask you,’ Hope said.

She reached for the whisky bottle and picked with her thumbnail at the notch in the dotted double line of the seal. Slowly she peeled the strip of soft heavy metal away, and then pulled off the entire seal.

‘Nasty stuff,’ she said, looking at the shard of painted alloy. ‘You could cut yourself. Surely it’s not made of lead?’ She folded it into a tiny parcel and dropped it on the tray. ‘You know, like bullets? Or airgun pellets?’

Hugh’s face reddened.

‘Speaking of bullets,’ Hope went on, ‘I’ve always thought this looked like one.’

She set the bottle back on the tray and tugged from her side pocket the carton containing the fix, opened it and tapped out the plastic and foil bubble. She turned it this way and that, letting the dull glint catch Hugh’s eye. ‘The fix. A magic bullet.’

She tossed it and the flowery-lettered carton on to the tray, then wiggled her monitor ring off her finger and dropped it there too. It bounced and rang to a stop. She picked up the bottle again and twisted the cork, easing it out.

‘Something to wash it down,’ she said. She placed the open bottle and the cork on the table.

‘Now wait a minute,’ said Hugh.

Hope sat back. ‘I’m waiting,’ she said. ‘You know where I found that bottle, and what I found it with. I’m waiting for an explanation.’

‘Oh fuck,’ said Hugh. He shifted on the sofa, leaning back into the corner. ‘I didn’t mean for you to find that.’

‘I appreciate that,’ said Hope. ‘In both senses of the word, you know?’

Hugh gave her an aw-shucks grin and open-handed shrug. ‘I feel very protective towards you and Nick,’ he said.

‘That’s not why,’ she said. ‘Or it would be in a more convenient place. Like under the bed.’

‘It has to be somewhere the boy can’t reach.’