Edge (30 page)

    "I'll ask," said Suzanne. "But when the moment is right."

    "OK."

    "So what are you going to do next?"

    "I thought I'd take a drive to Surrey."

    "To Richard's father?" She glanced at the closed door.

    "Yeah, but maybe I should do it after you've talked with Richard some more."

    "That would be wise."

    "Why don't I go fetch my car from the hotel, and bring it back here?"

    "To take Richard home?"

    "Only if he's ready."

    "All right. I may not have anything for you. Uncovering memories is delicate, because it's too easy to implant false ones, vivid hallucinations of things that never happened."

    "I have vivid memories of last night. Something I must have imagined."

    She leaned over, and their kiss was fire.

    "A shared hallucination," she said.

"Relax now, in trance everything is fine, and my voice will go with you as you go deeper still into the tranceinside-the-trance, and go back in time to a moment when…"

    Richard felt himself floating in a vast, star-filled cavern, totally calm; and when the memory rose up, he held still instead of screaming, knowing he was strong enough to watch.

It is a world of giants, the adults, and they do not seem to realise how confusing it all is. The plane travel is wonderful, then boring, seeming to last for days. He plays games on his pad, sleeps, eats food he does not like, knowing Father will shout if he leaves any behind.

    "Twenty-one countries," says the lady in uniform, "in twenty-five days. Even I don't do that."

    He has no idea how to reply, or quite what the words mean, but at least she is friendly. Then there is–

A ripple moved through him, a tightening of his stomach, but then her hand was on his shoulder and he relaxed, calm again.

    "Tell me. Go back to just before the time you were afraid."

 

    There is the clinic and the grinning dog on the wall, the cartoon dog called Timmy he has seen before. Big hands press his shoulder blades, urging him forward, and he feels the grown-ups might trample him like the elephants they saw yesterday or the day before, those legs longer than he had expected for such round, heavy creatures with amazing trunks that Father said were prehistoric or something like that, and if only Father would hold his hand while the smiling men and women showed them round all these places but there was grown-up work to do, Father said so, which was why everything was a jumble of adults who–

The hand on his shoulder.

    "Closer to that time, Richard. To just before the fear started, and you can tell me about it now."

–do not notice when he slips away by sort-of accident, staying behind when they turn, continuing into the shining white place they had partly explored. Somewhere a toy had squeaked, so perhaps there are other children here, boys and girls he can talk to and maybe play with. He goes through the big doors that slide back with a whoosh, the air feeling very cold as he steps further inside.

    There is a chair beside the raised – thing – that looks like a metal bed with a curved glass casing over it. Climbing up, he is able to stare inside.

    She is very pretty, the sleeping girl beneath the glass.

    For a long time he wonders whether he should try to waken her, but if she's tired or maybe sick then that would be a bad thing. So he climbs down, and moves to the next one in the row, wondering if it's a boy or girl inside and whether they'll be awake. He is just about to climb up when voices sound and he crouches down, shaking, wondering what will happen if they catch him, and how much Father will shout when he finds out.

There are six of them, two of them sort-of white–

Her fingertip made him pause. Then her question came.

    "Tell me more about sort-of white."

    His voice seemed to speak by itself: "Like Chinese, but I was young."

    "And the others were white?"

    "No, the other doctors were black."

    "Like me?"

    "No. They were dark. So were the others."

    "What others, Richard?"

    "In the big rooms. Offices. Wearing suits."

    "So… Tell me about the doctors. What happened next?"

    He returned to the star cave, then the dream. –and the glass raises up, one of the bed-things, and he can see the boy inside has no clothes, which seems funny, and he's lying there while the doctors get things ready, a trolley with metal stuff on it, and those tubes from the ceiling dangling over the boy, and something is not right which is why he is frozen and his mouth opens wide in a scream as the first doctor raises his hand and it's shining when he, when he, when he–

Hand on his shoulder.

    "Just breathe, and breathe, and step outside yourself as if you're watching a movie of what you did, watching yourself in the scene, that's right, and tell me what happened next."

I am watching crouched down, trying to hide, screaming without sound when the shining metal descends and the skin splits open, everything inside so liquid with globs of stuff and twisted things like pipes inside his body. I stumble away, knocking against a bed or something but the monsters, the doctors, are too busy to notice as I run, too scared to say anything, swearing I will say nothing if only I can get back to Father because otherwise they will cut him as well as me chop him up slice us up cutting and slicing and cutting and–

Hand, the dream fading, only the star-filled cave and a feeling of soft ease.

    "Sleep now."

    Drifting.

 

Josh travelled by Tube, smiling at fellow passengers. Back in his hotel room, he exercised and showered, got changed, packed a few clothes and toiletries in his gym bag – but leaving the rest, making no assumptions about Suzanne wanting him to stay the night again – and carried the bag out to his car. Then he drove into the heavy traffic, feeling relaxed: he was in a travelling armchair, when you thought about it, and the speed he moved at was irrelevant. The slow stop-start progress made him calmer by the minute.

    
Wow. Suzanne.

    Some forty minutes later, he pulled up in front of her place, used the keychip she had lent him to get through the ground floor entrance, then jogged upstairs to her flat. There, the door opened, and she smiled at him.

    "Hey."

    She hugged him. There was a tremble inside her, different from before.

    "What is it?"

    "I'll tell you in the bedroom."

    Not a lover's promise.

    "All right."

    Richard was sitting in the lounge, watching a straightplay movie, interactive decisions set to default paths. He looked up.

    "Hi," said Josh. "You feeling better?"

    "I think so."

    "OK… Er, I need to put my bag away."

    "Come on." Suzanne tugged him.

    In her bedroom, he put down the bag.

    "The kid looks calmer."

    "He doesn't consciously remember what he talked about in trance. I'm inclined to leave it that way. But if it surfaces by itself, then that's all right too. So long as the emotion isn't overwhelming."

    "Emotion?"

    "He was younger, so there are missing details, things he didn't understand. As near as I can make out, he accompanied his father on a trip to Africa. I'm not sure whether his mother was still alive at that time. I am certain she wasn't with them."

    "Africa."

    "He was in a lab. There were local and Chinese doctors. What he saw them do to children… it's been buried deep by fright, fear for himself and for his father, because of what he saw. All his anxieties… it was never really a fear of weapons."

    "It wasn't?"

    "Call it a generalised fear of scalpels."

    "But scalpels aren't…. Oh."

    "He saw them slice open living kids."

    "Virapharm labs?" His fists trembled, forearms becoming bands of tension. "Broomhall's running virapharm labs?"

    "There was a bulldog symbol on the wall. It comes from Tyndall Industries Medicales. Hence Timmy, for the children's wards and drugs."

    "Tyndall? But virapharm… Outright criminality isn't their style. The kid's confused."

    "Not about what he saw," said Suzanne, "however little he understood. One country's illegality is another's
modus operandi.
Did I mention there were Chinese doctors among the Africans?"

    "Chinese influence… That does sound like Africa. You're not sure which country?"

    "No. Poor Richard was flying all over the place with his father. It was a confusing time, even before he… saw what he saw."

    "Shit."

    He was shaking, unable to help it.
Soft flesh splitting
open and the boy's head exploding into mist because he was
swinging the rifle up and Josh had to shoot
and he hated himself for the way he–

    "Tell me, Josh."

    "It was the kid," he said. "Same age as Richard is now, and the bastards had armed him with a rifle. I was first into the house and he turned towards me and I – fired."

    "That's right."

    "But–" Tears were in his eyes as he turned away. "I enjoyed it. That was… that was the thing. The boy's head blew apart and inside I was laughing. Triumph, because I was alive and he was dead and he was fourteen years old, Suzanne, fourteen and they put him where I had to, had to–"

    "Yes, you had to, and euphoria is part of the reaction when you save yourself from death. It's the way we're programmed, nothing more."

    Josh remembered soldiers laughing hysterically after tragedy, surrounded by the bodies of their comrades as well as the enemy.

    "Maybe, but he was only a–"

    "Stop." Suzanne touched his face. "Tell me. What do we do next about Richard?"

    "I… Sorry. Give me a moment."

    He turned away, rubbing his face, knowing she must hate him now.

    "All right," he went on, forcing himself. "I'll go talk to Broomhall senior. This Tyndall thing… They're the ones trying to take his corporation down."

    "If you're taking Richard, I need to come with you. Whether I go inside the house is a different question."

    "It's better for me to go alone."

    "Josh, I care about Richard, but I'm thinking about you. Holding Richard here without telling anyone–"

    "You want to back out?"

    "No. But I don't want to cause you trouble that we can avoid. Richard might do better if he stays here, but he might not."

    "That's not the way to play it."

    "He needs to–"

    "I'm thinking tactically, not like a therapist, Dr Duchesne."

    "Oh."

    "The first thing I want to talk to Broomhall about is virapharm. How he answers that will determine what I do. You're OK looking after Richard?"

    Virapharm. Nanoviral engineering. There were rumours that Chinese state orphanages were oddly clustered around car manufacturing plants, that there were uses for organic substrates in engine control production that Western countries had not explored. Those rumours were not substantiated; but the use of poor Africans for virapharm research, children's bodies used to evolve and incubate new drugs? That was almost a tradition.

    "Yes. Let me go through the Africa trip, as I put it together. And his current situation at school, because there's a boy called Zajac…"

    She related all she had learned.

    "Now go see Broomhall." Her hand on Josh's arm made everything bearable. "I'll be here when you get back."

    "And I'll be wherever you want me to be."

    "You'd better kiss me, Josh Cumberland."

    "Come here."

    No drug on Earth could compare to the sensation of holding her, kissing her lips. He carried the sensation out with him, scarcely seeing young Richard, floating out of Suzanne's flat and down to the car, which he put in drive.

    Time to see the father.

The big gates rolled back, and he drove forward a car's length before stopping again, this time at foot-high metal barriers. They had not been here on his previous visit. Only when the main gates were shut did the inner barriers descend into the ground. It was a good way of controlling the entry of one vehicle at a time. Josh put the car back in drive and continued up to the house. The man who opened the front door was new, his stance erect and solid.

    Once inside, another man took over, and then another, leading him through the clean, polished house. All was wood and glass, rich and impersonal. Their destination was an office at the centre of the house. Inside, Broomhall was sitting behind his desk in what should have been a comfortable chair, but his posture was a web of mismatched tension, his face blotched.

    This was a different room than before. Leather hardcopy books, African masks on shelves.
Interesting
. Small bronze sculptures, all of them ugly.

    Even before the door closed on them, Broomhall said, "I'm not paying you indefinitely, I hope you realise. Time and materials are a fine basis to work on if you deliver results."

    "Yes, I know."

    "Well, I was half hoping you'd turn up with Richard in your car. I guess that was stupid of me."