Against Gravity (6 page)

The Maze?
“He must have gone down into the Maze,” said Kendrick.

“That’s what I figure. Crazy fuckers really think Wilber had a way to talk to God, so they go down in there, get themselves infected with this stuff, speak in tongues or whatever,
then they die. But while they’re still alive, they’re like holy men to the rest of ’em.”

Kendrick shook his head. “In some way this is the same kind of thing that’s inside
us
, isn’t it?”

“And they’re dying for their efforts, just like most of us did. It’s a kind of justice, I suppose.”

“João, that light in him – what the hell is that?”

João shrugged without ever looking away from the slumped form before them.

“Maybe the nanite threads absorb sunlight for energy, then release it at night.” Kendrick cast a sceptical look at him, but Buddy just grinned in return. “It’d be
interesting to know just what’s happening inside his head. But no way I’m getting near enough to find out.”

It was growing lighter, and Kendrick knew that they’d have to find their way back soon. Unintelligible phrases, perhaps visions of angels and demons, perhaps something far stranger,
continued to spill from the dying man’s lips.

14 October 2096
Edinburgh

Kendrick barely slept. He woke deep in the night, a sweat-soaked sheet twisted around his body despite the cold of the night outside. Visions of his former life chased
around the inside of his skull, along with fragments of a half-forgotten nightmare.

Dreams of the Maze, and how he’d arrived there, were wearily familiar territory for Kendrick; dark dreams that streaked across the landscape of his unconscious mind like brooding
thunderstorms. He closed his eyes again before finally waking to faint splashes of dawn visible through the window. He mumbled into the air and the windowscreen became opaque, rooftops fading and
the room again becoming dark.

He stared up at the ceiling and found there was little he could do to stop the memories flooding back.

28 January 2088
Washington suburbs, seven hours after the LA Nuke

Kendrick was seated at his breakfast, staring absentmindedly at the images scrolling across an eepsheet that he’d tacked onto the door of the refrigerator. It was
announcing something about the collapse of the Midwest agricultural economy, but mainly he was wondering why his regular subscription newsfeeds kept refusing to update. Then the knock came.

He opened the front door and squinted out into the early-morning light. Two men wearing what looked like military uniforms stood there, their expressions impassive.

The older of the two had steel-grey hair in an untidy side-parting, and Kendrick automatically found his attention focusing on him, although he had no idea if the younger man –
broad-chested like a football player, short hair bristling from a pink scalp – might even be his superior.

“Mr Gallmon?” asked the older one, and Kendrick nodded automatically. “We were wondering if we could speak with your wife.”

“Excuse me, who are you?” Kendrick asked, his mind still foggy with sleep. A thought crossed his mind and he became suddenly more alert. “Has there been some kind of
accident?”

The two men exchanged what Kendrick recognized as a significant look. “It’s a matter of some urgency,” continued the older one.

“May we come in?”

“I’m not sure, I—”

The younger one had a hard, bright blue-eyed stare that Kendrick found he preferred not to meet. “Mr Gallmon,” he said, “it would help if you cooperated with us
fully.”

“You haven’t told me who you are.” Kendrick looked more closely at their uniforms, hoping for some way of identifying them. He could see nothing he recognized, but he became
aware of the holstered guns at their sides.

“Has Amy Gallmon been here today?” the older one asked. “It’s important that we speak with her.”

The thought of slamming the door on them flitted through Kendrick’s mind but he dismissed it, thinking:
This is ridiculous. I haven’t done anything wrong
. “I think
I’d like to speak to her first, before I say anything more. Or to a lawyer. Do the police know you’re here?”

“We can arrange for that later. In the meantime, it’s extremely urgent that we find her.”

Kendrick stepped back from the door, glancing quickly over his shoulder and into the living room. He’d left his patchphone there – a standard skin-contact unit, the size of a
fingernail. “Tell me why you’re here, or I’m calling the police – and my lawyer after that.”

And then something very significant happened, something that made Kendrick appreciate that whatever world he’d grown up in it had disappeared for ever. The older of the two men smiled and
nodded almost paternally before giving a fractional nod to his companion who stepped forward, at the same time unfastening the flap of the holster at his side. Kendrick watched the younger
man’s hand drop onto the butt of his gun.

The older man spoke again. “Sir, I should advise you that your wife is wanted on suspicion of treason. Under the current emergency legislation we are required to bring you too in for
questioning. Get your jacket or anything else you think you may need, but we don’t have time to fuck around. I’ll give you one minute to get yourself ready.”

Kendrick remembered that the kitchen door at the back of the house was still open. He had a brief fantasy of making a break for it out through the back door and losing himself in the narrow
alleyways between the houses.

“My daughter’s at the care centre,” he said numbly.

“That’s all right, sir,” said the older guy. “We’ve already sent someone to pick her up.”

And then Kendrick realized just how bad things were.

A few minutes later Kendrick allowed himself to be thrust into the back of a van bearing military markings. He was not handcuffed, but a steel-mesh grille separated him from
the two other men. Surprisingly enough, he realized that he wasn’t even particularly scared. Somewhere along the line, somebody had clearly made a terrible mistake. Everything would work out
fine in the end, and he’d come home – and one day he’d even laugh about it.

Thoughts like these circled through his mind like a kind of mantra. But, every now and then, he looked down and saw his hands clenching, pain stabbing in his wrists as the muscles flexed
spasmodically. He had to keep his wits about him, whatever happened.

The younger soldier leant forward in the passenger seat and switched on a radio. There was a wheel in the front of the vehicle, giving the option of manual control. Kendrick favoured a manual
drive himself, even though it was a lot more expensive and you wound up with a bigger battery drain: he preferred having control over his driving, enjoyed the ability to make split-second decisions
and choose to drive down one road rather than the other. You didn’t get that advantage with programmable destinations.

The hands of the man in the driver’s seat weren’t on the wheel, though. The truck was driving itself, blindly slipping along on its tarmac ribbon. Popular music rattled out of hidden
speakers, synthesized shamanpop chants over a three-quarter beat, heavy on the bass. The music faded and an obviously digitized voice began speaking, reading the news. Something about Los Angeles .
. .

Kendrick moved closer to the grille, listening as words like “President Wilber”, “terrible tragedy” and “holocaust” caught his ear, although the radio volume
was down too low for him to hear well. Although the engine was silent there was a light drumming of winter rain on the roof of the truck that made it hard to pick out what the voice was saying. He
caught more phrases: “. . . scene of this terrible national disaster”, and “. . . nation in mourning”.

He remembered now how he’d been unable that morning to get his subscription eepsheet newsfeeds to update properly. What the hell was going on?

“Hey,” he said – and then louder, when neither of the two men in the front responded: “Hey!”

The “driver” – the older one – glanced over his shoulder with a bored expression. “What?”

“On the radio – what are they saying? What happened?”

The man smiled grimly. “Maybe
you
can tell
us
.”

After what felt like a few hours, they took a sudden turn-off onto a long and dusty road leading into distant hills. They were far outside the city now, and Kendrick had been
discovering there were almost as many different forms of panic as there were Eskimo words for snow. He’d done numb panic, angry panic – when the older of his two captors had threatened
to stop the van and beat the shit out of him if he didn’t shut up – and despairing panic, which took up most of his time and convinced him that he was being taken off to be shot on some
desolate highway, like the unwitting protagonist of a Kafka novel.

Now he was just waiting to see what happened next. With the growing sound of jet planes overhead, he surmised that they were approaching some kind of military airbase. The van pulled in suddenly
to a wide expanse of grey tarmac. The back doors were yanked open and Kendrick was lifted down, blinking, into bright afternoon sunlight, the air still fresh from the recent rain. His captors kept
one hand each firmly on his shoulders.

He could see long low sheds of brick and corrugated iron, while ranks of jeeps stood parked between white lines painted on concrete. He looked up to see a helicopter rapidly descending on the
far side of one of the sheds. The whole place was filled with the sound of men and machinery on the move: soldiers were everywhere, but Kendrick was fascinated to see other people in civilian dress
standing beside vans identical to the one he had been brought in.

His guards guided him into one of the sheds. He saw long tables set up inside, and yet more civilians waiting silently. Somehow, seeing others here gave him comfort. They were all seated on rows
of cheap plastic chairs at the rear end of the shed, under the eyes of perhaps half a dozen soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders. These guns didn’t have the bulbous snub-nosed
muzzles that characterized the electric stun weapons used by civilian police, so Kendrick could only assume they were the kind that fired real bullets.

With a terrible shock, Kendrick understood for the first time that if he tried to escape they would probably shoot him. As insights went, it was profoundly depressing. While his two guards
marched him over to join the rest of the civilians, he glanced over at the long tables nearby. Rows of soldiers sat behind them, each with a gridcom terminal and eepsheet within reach. They were
engaged in interviewing a male or female civilian, behind each of whom stood another armed serviceman or servicewoman.

They came to a halt in front of a soldier who ticked off Kendrick’s name on a clipboard. Then he was guided to a vacant seat. Nobody seated around him looked at all happy to be there,
except for one elderly individual who was grinning like a fool.

Taking the seat next to him, Kendrick felt a tingle of familiarity. He eyed the people around him surreptitiously. They were a mixed bunch, mostly in their thirties or older, although there were
a couple too obviously young even to be out of their teens. Some were black, some were white, some Hispanic, some looked poor, others rich, and about the only things they appeared to have in common
were their worried expressions.

With armed guards hovering just a few feet away, they didn’t talk much – understandably.

Suddenly the old man turned to Kendrick with a smile. “How are you doing?”

Kendrick nodded back, but he wasn’t in a mood for conversation.

The old man awaited a response for a few moments, then shrugged and looked away again.

Every now and then, somebody else, looking as confused and distraught as Kendrick must have done, was marched in and seated among them. When one started to argue, Kendrick listened carefully to
the response from the soldier with the clipboard: he said that emergency martial laws had been enforced until the threat to the nation could be assessed.

When the argument started to look like it was getting heated, another soldier stepped forward with his rifle raised. The implicit threat sent a cold chill through Kendrick.

He turned his attention back to the interviewing tables. Whenever they finished questioning someone, that individual would be escorted off through a door at the opposite end of the building.

Again, he couldn’t see that any of them had anything particularly in common: they could have been housewives, doctors, petrol-pump attendants, anything.

Kendrick clasped his knees, his head filled with thoughts of his wife and his daughter Sam. He hadn’t eaten in hours – usually he picked up breakfast on his way to work – but
even though it must have been edging towards late afternoon he still didn’t feel at all hungry.

“Thing is, we were right,” a voice next to him said unexpectedly. Kendrick turned to find his elderly neighbour staring at him with bright, alert eyes.

“Sorry?”

“Sorry is the last thing you should be. Name’s Marco. How you doing?”

“Kendrick Gallmon,” he replied automatically.

“Not that guy writes for the
Washington Free Press
?” the other asked, his eyebrows raised. Kendrick nodded in reply. In any circumstances but these, it would have been nice to
have his name recognized. Outside of Washington, and whoever subscribed to the
Press
’s eepsheet newsfeed, generally nobody knew who he was.

“I read your column every week,” said Marco. “Pretty critical of Wilber, aren’t you?”

“Any other time in history, he’d be given psychiatric treatment for preaching the end of the world. Instead, we vote him in as President. I think you could say I was critical, yes.
But who was right about what?”

“Sorry?”

“You said ‘we were right’. Right about what?”

“About the crackdown. After this morning, over on the West Coast.”

Kendrick stared back, his face blank.

“Ohh.” Marco nodded gently. “You haven’t heard, have you?”

“I heard something on the radio.” As they continued talking in quiet whispers, Kendrick studied Marco more closely: a deeply lined face with a strong jaw, and clear blue eyes that
danced with intelligence. The hair stood up in a white shock from the top of his head. Given his apparent age, he was dressed in reasonably current fashion, and he gave the impression of caring
about his appearance. The more Kendrick considered him, the more he started to look familiar.