Solomon's Keepers (19 page)

Seventeen

John Shaw wakes from fitful sleep as his plane rushes east to meet the dawn. From this height, the world is appreciable in its curving volume beneath him and its surface, where the shallow itch of human activity takes place, is paradoxically more detailed for being distant. Far below, innumerable tiny fields form a complex tattoo; the boundaries that must be hedges and ditches are lividly etched. The last time he had woken it was over the gunmetal of the Baltic. Now the landscape is greening and he senses the start of a descent. This must be Germany or Poland already. For a moment he lets memories of fairytales carry him away before more immediate recollections overrule and bring the details of the Solomon files back into his mind. He has read and reread the files twenty times in the previous few days. He has become an expert in the language of digital transmission, of brain signals, access codes and downloads. He has studied the names and the histories of each person admitted to the programme. He has watched them progress through the reports written by their trainers, their medical notes and a sheaf of psychological assessments. There are patterns he recognises which parallel his own background: the intensity of the training, the competition, the relentless aspiration that creates the elite. He wonders if he might have accepted the opportunity had technology offered the route to advancement in his own field. One day it will. He’d used Modafinil on more than one occasion to keep going. What was to say he wouldn’t take a bigger challenge and a bigger risk? He was just glad he didn’t have the choice to make. Only days ago such a development would have seemed remote, suddenly it seems uncomfortably close.

Kieskut Szczymany is a village which owes its continued existence in modern times to an airfield that has serviced foreign powers, first the Luftwaffe and now the Americans. The one grand house, perhaps once the feudal manor, with its formal grounds, rambling outbuildings and appetite for servants is now faded. There seems no modern need for the cluster of old buildings that forms the centre of the village and no major road and no railway leads away through the vast plain to the East or divides the forest that creeps to within a mile or two to the west and runs up the slopes of the mountains beyond. The strip itself stands apart in what clearly was once a larger airfield. A long runway of fresh tarmac and two shorter crosswind runways of older concrete look from the air like a huge brooch or symbolic cross dropped from the air. The greater part of the old field is scrubby and overgrown but at one end of the main runway where it meets the edge of the grand estate there is a geometric pattern of modern buildings with bright white walls, dark flat roofs and a tall wire perimeter fence. The airplane banks steeply over this as it turns to lose height. Suddenly the complex seems much larger. Amongst the buildings there are patterns of carefully tended lawns and clean young trees. The sun picks out chrome and glass of new cars parked in spines on a fresh black forecourt. The inoculation of dollars. The plane takes one more long pass down the strip and a final turn to approach.

The Lear taxis and stops. The pilot has been here before and points across to the new buildings, but a young man has come out to greet them and busies himself at the bottom of the steps.

They walk together across the strip. The young man is in military fatigues but has a casual air. He introduces himself as Chen, smiles and asks about the trip in poor English.

Klimt, the formal head of the base is on a retirement posting. He’s a big Ranger Major and superior to Shaw. He hasn’t had any practice in hosting visitors for a while. But he’s got the coffee pot ready on the big table in his corner office where Chen delivers Shaw. They sit at one end and Shaw takes in the golf posters and a bent nine iron in a frame on the wall and then looks out at the airfield and the sun climbing above the distant tree line. The whole point of being out here is not to be noticed and visitors from outside the immediate chain of command are by definition trouble. Shaw talks golf for a while to ease in. Klimt says there’s a nine hole course around the field perimeter, some young trees and even water introduced in his time. They keep going into October but November onwards it’s changeable and too cold, even for a guy from Cleveland, Ohio. Then they shoot the woods instead.

‘You’ll know this is a dual purpose installation’ Klimt says early on. ‘I’m a logistics man. Storage, forward supply and transportation. We handle about eighteen flights a day on a routine basis and act as a secure transit point. We handle all transportation, maintenance operations and personnel for the scientific facility also. Scientific and military staff are all on secondment and we bring in everything they need. We have local staff for maintenance but pretty much everything and everybody here is flown in. My job is to keep it all running. So, whatever you need, you come to me.’

‘Quite an operation. And the scientific side?’

‘That’s a whole other ball game. My remit is to fly them in, feed them and give them power. That’s why we’re here. One, an airfield, two, hydro-electric power ten miles over there. The tall building you would have seen as you came in – over by the perimeter? That’s all generators in case we lose power. They use most of it. Cooling, heat, light – those guys use as much power as my home town on a Saturday night. And, Lieutenant Shaw, I have no idea what they need all those computers for. I leave that to Dr Brodzky.

He looks around as he’s talking and they both hear the sound of footsteps outside.

‘Right on cue. Lieutenant Shaw, this is Dr Brodzky.’

Shaw shakes the newcomer’s hand. It’s a big hand and a firm grasp. Brodzky returns his gaze, blue eyes searching and cautious. His blond hair has recently been arranged into a boy’s approximate parting. Klimt excuses himself and invites them to use his office. He leaves quickly. Brodzky seats himself in the vacated chair and puts his hands on the table top in the manner of someone expecting to rise to his feet.

‘So, do you want to talk or would you like me to show you around?’

Shaw looks at his watch deliberately. ‘You know, that coffee’s still hot if you want some. I’d like to begin by explaining what I’m here for…’

Brodzky watches him intently, impatiently. ‘I know what you’re here for. I read the meeting request. You are assisting the move process and require a briefing.’ He says it in a matter of fact tone, not bothering with too much conviction

‘I understand you’re a prime mover in the whole development of Solomon; the programme wouldn’t be where it is today without your work, and the work of your team.’ Brodzky is impassive; this isn’t even a question. Shaw keeps going:

‘Of course I had no idea that we were so advanced in this field. It must be frustrating sometimes to have to…’ He thinks the better of this. ‘What you’ve been able to achieve is remarkable.’

Brodzky appears to warm up a little. He sits back and loses the hands in his pockets again. ‘This facility lets me get on without distractions. There are none here, as you can imagine. When I was at the university everyone wanted me to publish things, I had to teach classes, the press wanted to know everything. Now it’s simpler. They pay me to do what I am interested in and I get on without…with less intrusions.’ He gives a shrug. ‘Have you a medical or scientific training, Lieutenant?’

‘I’m afraid not; I’m a lawyer by training.’

‘Ah, a lawyer. I see. Well I’ll do my best to explain anything you need to know in layman’s terms. It is a complex area.’

‘I have read that your work before you were here goes back many years. You were the first to implant monkeys. You had been working on human subjects for – what? – two years before Solomon? I know that when our guys first came across your work they realised that…I think it was a shock to them how far you’d taken the ball. And to have them build this place from scratch out here is really impressive. This must rank as a first class facility in anyone’s terms, right?’

Brodzky lets all this flow past him without comment. He seems to be gradually inhaling, expanding as this commentary progresses, as though storing every word for correction, embellishment or perhaps rebuttal later on.

‘You know, I’ve read the papers but nothing beats hearing it from the horse’s mouth. I’d appreciate hearing your perspective?’

Brodzky considers for a moment. ‘Well, after a career that was mainly in neuro and micro-surgery I was specializing in research on various primate species, concentrating on the physical side of the interface and neuronal grafting problems. I had been a student of Hedren’s at Cambridge many years before and I had the opportunity to work with him in Warsaw. My parents are Polish as you probably know, even though I was brought up in England, so it was easy for me. I had only intended it to be a year or two but I stayed for five years there. The focus was less therapeutics than the, I suppose you would say, modelling and reconstruction of neural activity captured in situ. We were able to define a framework for connecting silicon resources and to practice the surgical techniques in a quite unhampered way. It is not an easy subject in which to make practical progress in squeamish times, and by that you can read peacetime. There were certain dispensations available there, as there are here for us now. And then I returned to work in the UK and some work with private concerns and military contracts and it was there I was approached to participate in setting up a laboratory. Some of my early work was well known in academic circles but much of the later work was obviously not. But there was a certain intuition that what I had been doing could take the programme a lot further quite quickly. Your military research, for example, was heavily into simulation but lacked the pragmatic experience, the surgical technique.’

‘Was it a tough decision to join this team, to come here?’

‘Not at all. The work fitted well. There was urgency and that urgency was matched by funds. It was important new work. This whole facility created from a field. Inside a year we had a world class team here. And of course the emphasis was on deployment. That’s not a word you hear much in research circles. I am able to divide my time between here and London – and now of course the United States. It has been successful, I think.’

‘And now with the move to the US, you’ll continue to play a role?’

‘Officially, we’ll handle some continuing subsidiary programmes such as the interfaces with the medical technology: Medipac Six and now Medipac Seven.

‘What about unofficially?’

‘I…do some special research work. There isn’t really anyone else who can peer review Chou’s work. And I continue to do physical interventions. I also review a lot of the programme work, it’s not supposed to be a lot of my time any more but…’

‘But it could be if you let it.’

‘I have other duties.’

‘So, what? You hand more over to the new US team?

‘People know what I know. They know that I’m cleared.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that sometimes I can help people with problems, ideas.’

‘You get used as a sounding board?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And that still goes on, does it? You’re sufficiently…up to date even though you’re officially not on the core design team any more.’

‘There is a process for officially informing people and including them. The architecture hasn’t changed. The implementation changes have been trivial. I’m not aware of any official process for forgetting. Solomon has one, the rest of us don’t. Perhaps your team will invent one.’

‘But presumably you get taken off lists, you get out of date. Doesn’t that mean that the problems stop coming your way, the ideas dry up?’

A look of quiet satisfaction crosses Brodzky’s face.

‘Perhaps that will be the way it goes. I don’t know. Would you like to take that look around now.’

There is little that can prepare someone who has not seen experiments on the brains of live creatures at close quarters before. No Army personnel believe themselves squeamish but Shaw feels a stab of revulsion almost as soon as they enter the building. The smell of institutional cleanliness hits first, then the stifling warmth and the harshly squeaking surfaces. This minor unpleasantness is compounded by the sensations it is intended to mask: the smells of captive animals, of bedding and feed, faeces and desperation, a silence heavy with trapped echoes and imagined cries. As they walk the corridors Shaw can see monkeys constrained in cages, a pair of sheep with their heads held motionless in jigs, their bodies withered irrelevancies under a new fleece of electronics. A bench of computer monitors catches the eye and draws it up from a row of crouching brown monkeys whose heads are lost in silver boxes and braids of multicoloured wire. The monitors show cross sections of brains in lurid colours like Warhol walnuts. Inside each image a hard edged black square sprouts fine black lies into the surrounding glare. They reach a pair of doors with a large sign that reads ‘G5 Secure.’ Brodzky hesitates before swiping his badge. He pushes the door ahead of Shaw and the young man walks past the outstretched arm. ‘Just bear in mind,’ Brodzky whispers as he passes, ‘that without this there would be no Solomon.’

Shaw counts five bodies in a row. His eyes hold on a white body of Christ; a tent of ribs that rises and falls to the beat of a repeated mechanical sneeze at the bedside, a white plastic pod like a fist-sized leech at his hip; the tilted-back head just a jointed piping of throat, a sharp bridge of jaw and a blur of Technicolor dreadlocks. Then he catches movement across the corridor that he first takes as the incongruous entry by someone on a bicycle but quickly realises is a figure suspended inside a steel cage, harnessed into a seat and feeling with blind hands for banks of controls arrayed in the arc of his reach like a drum kit. A bespectacled man in the adjacent glass booth appears to anticipate these movements with exaggerated movements of his own.