Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

‘The godhead,’ the boy repeated. And then: ‘I must go. Find out stuff. Do things. Mojo never sleeps.’ But perhaps the boy might, the Sergeant thought: the effervescent eyes were strained and red. Even this prodigious child was not endless.

As if in answer to this thought, the boy turned and very deliberately went into the guest room which was set aside for his occasional use and put his bag on the bed. ‘I will come back here,’ he said.

The Sergeant called Africa, but she was engaged elsewhere. The secretary promised he would have her ring back. It sounded very much as if he wouldn’t.

Kathy Hasp caught up with him in the main hall.

‘Fucker stole my motorbike,’ she said. ‘That is fucking cheeky, is what that is. But it’s also a great story, right?’

‘I suppose.’

‘So come on, Consul. What’s the word from on high?’

‘Oh, nothing. Carry on as usual. And it’s Brevet-Consul. I’m not a diplomat.’

She shrugged. You’re in the chair. ‘Well, okay, what do you think? You were pretty brave yourself, Lester. You were ready to have a real old siege here, face down the barbarians, hey?’

He realised she was interviewing him. ‘I’m afraid I can’t talk about it.’

‘But it was a pretty big deal. And what happened down there, that woman in the jeep, what was that about?’

‘I can’t talk about the kidnapping, either.’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose. But was it really a kidnapping if there’s no law?’

He growled. ‘Yes, it bloody was, and whoever did it should be in prison. That woman has a family.’ He shook his head. ‘Personal opinion, that is. Not official. All right?’

‘Personal opinion,’ she agreed, and wandered away again, humming. He stared after her for a moment, knowing he’d gone wrong and not knowing how, by what arcane rule of journalism she had won and he had put his foot in it.

Bugger .

The less seriously injured refugees drifted away to assist in the clean-up, and to see the sights. Tigerman’s Run had become an instant local pilgrimage. The more sorely hurt remained where they were, though the Witch was able to recruit some assistants to tend them and get some rest herself. White Raoul sat over her, watched her with his hand on her head, and she pressed against it as if plugging in. The scrivener eyed the Sergeant for a long moment, and then slowly nodded. The look on his face was not exactly approval. It was more that inevitability had arrived without as much pain as there could have been. You’re doing okay, Honest. But it’s still a terrible idea .

Except that the Sergeant wasn’t sure about that any more – and even if he had agreed, there was more work for him under the mask because Lester Ferris couldn’t retrieve Sandrine, and he had to try. He had made himself the sheriff in this town, and the bad men had come and done a bad thing right in front of him, and that was unacceptable. The more so, because Sandrine’s vanishing was convenient to himself, in his quest to make the boy his child, and he would always wonder if he did not go after her whether he had let her slip away last night so that he could steal her son. And the boy would wonder too, or might, and that would be appalling.

So he must have her back from them. From ‘them’. There was so much ‘them’ in all this, so many factions and shadows. Mancreu looked peaceful but was not. The quiet was war in deadlock all the time. A cold war, painted on a grain of rice.

Someone had taken the boy’s mother. Someone with resources, most particularly of information, and there were only so many someones of that description around here.

Who profits? The Who or the Why would tell me the Where.

Well, then: what was she that someone should take her away? A mother, a pretty woman, a civilian. She could not be political because she was barely human in her thinking. She was a poor and a dangerous hostage unless one proposed to threaten a child with his mother’s execution – again, to what profit? – and they had not released her in favour of someone else when they realised, as they must have, how public their action had become. Sandrine was important because she was Sandrine.

Because she was a victim of the Cloud? Was she special for that? A cure or a commodity? Or a guinea pig? And if the last: a subject to be healed, or a specimen to be dissected?

He considered very carefully how to ask the question, and then went to the comms room.

‘Kaiko, it’s Lester,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I have a professional query, so I am calling you on a secure line. Do you have an encrypt button?’ He did not say, ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch.’ She would understand why not, and to imply otherwise would be rude.

‘Lester,’ she responded gravely, ‘this is a Japanese science station. I have more flavours of encryption here than you can possibly imagine. I have a button I can push to delete the entire conversation from your mind after we have had it.’ It took him a moment to realise she was joking, and then he found he wanted very much to ask what she would say if she knew he would forget.

He said: ‘Oh. Erm.’ Very slick. Brings all the girls to the yard, that does.

Inoue gave a low snigger. ‘Now you are wondering if I really have such a button. Perhaps I do and I use it on you all the time. Maybe we have had many, many extraordinary conversations you do not remember.’

‘But you ’d remember them, right?’

‘In every detail, Lester. I have a very good memory.’

He had not really had time to regret the interruption of their rooftop dinner by a missile, but it had niggled at him between waking and sleeping, in rare moments of calm. Now he smiled. It seemed there might, after all, be other rooftops – though when and where? His smile faded.

She took pity on him. ‘Push your secure button, Lester. We will see if our wires are compatible.’

He did. He heard a click. Inoue spoke again, and for a moment she was some sort of duck or a coin falling down inside a metal pipe. Then: ‘Okay. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can hear you. Go ahead and ask your question.’

‘What could you learn from a Discharge Cloud victim?’

‘What sort of victim? Like burns?’

He shook his head, realised she couldn’t see him. ‘No. Brain stuff. Language problems.’

‘But not a child from the Broca Cloud?’

‘No. An adult.’

‘Well, maybe a lot. If they were directly affected by the bacteria rather than just the Cloud, a great deal.’

He thought some more. ‘What would you need to do?’

‘Many examinations. MRI, for sure, lots of blood testing, EEG, maybe interviews.’

‘She can’t talk.’

Inoue stopped again. ‘This is not hypothetical. You have such a person.’ Her interest was sharp.

‘She’s gone now.’ He hoped she would not follow that thought. He hoped Arno wouldn’t happen to ask her about it.

‘How gone?’ Again the sharpness.

‘I don’t know exactly.’ He made a leap. ‘You said there was a tame team studying the Clouds. A political team. Would they want to see her?’

‘We all would. I know who this is. What she is. There was a rumour, but I could not find her. The woman who runs in the fields, dances in the waterfalls. They say she is always joyful, that everything is a mystery to her.’

Yes. Even her son. Even killing a man. He shook the thought away. ‘Would they, is there anything they could learn from,’ he didn’t want to say cutting her up, ‘her body?’

‘Of course,’ Inoue said immediately. Then, ‘Oh! You do not mean from a standard physical examination. You mean from vivisection and autopsy. Obduction.’

‘It is Mancreu,’ he said simply.