Equations of Life

20

They’d gone out onto the campus and hunted down a native Japanese speaker, pinning the startled student against a wall and shouting badly accented words at him until he confessed: the bullet train will run again.

“It could be a rallying cry,” said Pif.

“It’s not a very good one: not up there with Viva la revolucion! or For the motherland! What’s wrong with Banzai?”

“Because the Emperor is dead and Japan has gone forever?”

“Oshicora used these exact same words: the shinkansen will run again. It might have been something he told everyone. So now it’s being used by the Oshicora loyalists as a code word that they can recognize each other by. If that’s true, I can use that.” Petrovitch worried at the piece of paper he’d written on. It was crumpled and creased and dog-eared. “I need to make a call.”

“Is that code too? Code for please leave?”

“Yeah. But more for your benefit than mine.” Petrovitch wheeled his chair around his desk and across the floor. “I’m smart, right? Everyone says so.”

“Smart and wise are two different things, Sam.” She pushed the phone toward him.

“And so are safe and honorable.” He picked up the handset and listened. No Japanese this time. “If it was you, stuck in that tower, your mother long dead, your father freshly murdered, no way out: wouldn’t you want someone to help you?”

“Of course,” said Pif, “although you have to admit you’d want that someone to be… I don’t know.”

“Not me, you mean.”

“Not really.” She pressed her fingers into her forehead. “The only language you speak fluently is mathematics. So what’s the probability of you pulling this off? What’s the probability of you throwing your life away for nothing?”

“That’s why I’m about to swing the odds in my favor.” He closed his eyes, trying to see the number he’d displayed on Chain’s computer while he was supposed to be busy watching Sonja’s messages. “Yeah, that’s it.”

He dialed, and heard ringing.

Then someone picked up and said: “Da?”

“Comrade Marchenkho? It’s Petrovitch. Don’t put the phone down, because we need to talk.”

He lifted the earpiece slightly away from his head as Marchenkho vented his diseased spleen at him down the line.

“Oshicora’s dead,” said Petrovitch when he could get a word in.

“How do you know?”

“His daughter told me. You know of Hijo?”

“Da.”

“Killed his boss. Took control. Occupational hazard for you lot, I suppose. How’s Yuri? Not got an itchy trigger finger yet?”

Marchenkho rumbled. “He says to remind you that his name is Grigori. What is it that you want, Petrovitch?”

“Apart from giving you the glad tidings that your greatest rival has been eliminated? How many men do you have, Marchenkho?”

“Enough,” he said. “Women too.”

“Good, because I want to borrow them. And you too, if you want to come for the ride. We’re going to finish off the Oshicora Corporation once and for all.”

“And when do you propose this happens?”

“That depends. Tomorrow morning good for you?”

Afterward, he started sorting his desk, putting everything into neat piles by subject and looking through his old notebooks, seeing if there was anything else he needed to write.

“Convince me you’re coming back,” said Pif.

“Can’t. Dead man walking now.”

She sighed, and leafed through her own papers, and held up his earlier work. “This is going to be called the Petrovitch Solution, after the man who first discovered it. But I don’t want this to be the only thing the world remembers him for.”

“Most people don’t even manage this: having an equation named after you is immortality.”

“Sam…”

He sat back and stroked his nose. “How long have we known each other, Pif?”

“Two years. Roughly.”

“Those are two years that I stole from someone. I cheated them by living. And for the few years before that. Hang on.” Petrovitch found his bug-detecting wand and made a search of the room. He realized he should have done this before: Chain had had plenty of opportunity to plant one of his bugs earlier.

The lights on the wand flickered into the red as he moved it over his desk.

“Did Chain sit here?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so, while we were waiting for you.”

“Chyort.” He got down on his hands and knees and looked underneath the tabletop. A sticky square of electronics was adhered to the wood toward the back. He got an edge up with a nail, then peeled it off. He emerged with it stuck to his thumb. “What do I have to say to you, Detective Inspector Harry Chain? You collect all this information, you work out what’s going on, you plot and you plan. And yet nothing you do—that you say that you’re allowed to do—makes any difference. You’ve had all the chances you needed and you chose not to take them, any of them, you spineless shriveled little man. You are a pathetic waste of space and, unlike me, the world will forget you because you have never really lived. Goodbye.”

Taking a pair of scissors, he cut the bug in two and flicked the halves into his bin.

“I never knew you were so eloquent.”

“And all without the aid of vodka.” Petrovitch sat down again and threw the now-inert wand into the clear space on his desk. “Now where was I?”

“Cheating and stealing,” she said.

“Yeah. In the life I had before, I stole some money. It’s a little more complicated than that, though. My employer—my patron is a better word—was a man called Boris. He and his gang kidnapped rich people and ransomed them. They used me for technical support and in return I got books and somewhere warm and lit to read them. It was terrifying for the hostages, but it was fine for me. Fine, while the companies and trusts these people worked for paid up. Boris was okay as brutal thugs went: he kept his word. Probably the only good thing he taught me.”

Pif’s eyes were growing larger. “Sam!”

“It was St. Petersburg in the aftermath of Armageddon. I needed to be able to do something where having a weak heart wasn’t going to be a problem. My father died of radiation poisoning early on, and I needed not to be a burden on my mother and sister. I could even help out occasionally. If things went well, Boris was generous. Generous enough to keep the police sweet and ensure that no one ever betrayed him. Then it all started to go wrong. Some companies wouldn’t pay up anymore. Boris killed hostages and threw bodies in the river. Not a good time.”

“I’m going to make some coffee,” announced Pif. “I’m not sure I want to hear the end of this.”

“For me? Please. I can promise you it gets better.”

She looked at him on her way to the kettle. “Why now, Sam?”

“Because if I die, this story dies with me.”

“Go on.”

“There was this man. An American called Dalton. Rich, didn’t take much care. Boris took him, asked for ten million U.S., I think. Dalton’s company had a no-pay policy, so he was going to die when the money didn’t turn up.” Petrovitch looked up at the ceiling and blew out a thin stream of air. “I saved him.”

“Okay, that’s a good thing.”

“I took all his savings in return for keeping him alive.”

“That’s slightly more morally ambivalent.”

“And of course, I cheated Boris too. Samuil Petrovitch is a construct, the man I wanted to become. He’s three years older than I am, for a start. I don’t have a degree. I don’t have a scholarship. The money I’m using to fund my extravagant lifestyle is the money I stole from Dalton.”

Pif, her back to Petrovitch, poured boiling water on the coffee granules. “So what happened to him? The American?”

“He went home. He got married. He has kids, two of them, both genetically enhanced. He got his new life. And I got mine. I think, under the circumstances, we both got a good deal.”

The spoon went round and round the mug, making little scraping noises as it went. “You’ve never been to university.”

“Not until this one.”

“So how come you’re so brilliant at what you do?”

Petrovitch took it as a compliment. “Raw natural ability. I can’t claim credit for that. But I did a lot of reading—more than a lot. Not just magnetohydrodynamics, but across the field. There are problems that I find solutions for in the strangest places. You can’t know it all, but it helps if you know where to look.”

She brought both coffees over, and put one mug into his grateful hands. “None of this explains why you’re so willing to throw it all away.”

“Doesn’t it go some way to explain why I hold it lightly, though? The last few years have been a gift. I didn’t deserve this, this peace I’ve had, the space to do what I want without having to worry about money or guns. It’s over now. Even if Hijo and his assassins don’t get me, Chain will end up waving a pair of handcuffs and an extradition order at me.”

“It doesn’t have to be over. You can run again.”

“It was over the moment I grabbed Sonja Oshicora’s hand. The moment, I suppose, when I decided to stop running and spit in the face of destiny. This is meant to be, all the crap that’s happening. That I managed to hold it off for so long is a miracle in itself.” Petrovitch leaned over his coffee, strong, hot, bitter: she knew how he liked it. “Now’s the time to make a stand, no matter how suicidal it is.”

Pif sighed. She wasn’t convinced. “Is there no one who’ll miss you? You said you had a sister, a mother.”

“Not contacting them ever again was the price I had to pay for Boris leaving them alone. I never told them what I was doing, and they never asked. I disappeared. They thought I was dead, and I’ve given them no reason to suppose otherwise. Apart from that, no. I’ve made no friends, had no girlfriends, I’ve maybe a handful of acquaintances. No one’s going to miss me.” He took a mouthful of coffee, almost too hot to drink, and thought of his last sight of Sister Madeleine. “No one.”

“Then how are you different from Inspector Chain?” Pif balanced her mug on a rough pile of his lab notes and knelt down in front of the desk. She rested her elbows on the edge and cradled her face in her hands.

“He was given the responsibility and powers of a policeman. What’s he done with them? I got given the single opportunity to save Dalton, and what did I do? That he’s walking around, living and breathing, spawning little Reconstructionists, is down to me. No one else. So yeah. I’m different from that lazy sooksin.”

“Is this what it’s like, then?” she said, eyes closed, dreaming. “People like us, we think differently, don’t we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. We go out to parties and concerts, we go to conferences and drink and talk, we play music and games and we laugh and cry. But when it comes down to it, we don’t actually need anyone else. We’re happy doing what we do and having obligations interferes with that. Does that make us selfish, or something else?”

“I don’t know. To them, I guess it is selfish. Me? I just have such a monstrous sense of self, I don’t need to feel love. I don’t even feel lonely.” He watched Pif’s hair beads swinging slightly in time with her breathing. “Sometimes I wonder what it might be like. To be with someone, well, who isn’t me. And sometimes I think we don’t even need ourselves. What’s most important is to find out whether we’re right or not.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’ve run out of places to go. I can’t go home. I can’t travel on the tube with the guns. I don’t think I can walk to Regent’s Park: it’s madness on the streets today. And I still don’t think any of that was my fault.” Petrovitch swilled his coffee around inside his mug and watched the play of light against the black surface. “It’s against the rules, but I’ll camp down here tonight and meet Marchenkho in the morning.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Pif. “Come back to my room. I’ll cook something. We’ll break open a bottle of something pretending to be wine. We can talk about work and play computer games until it’s stupid late, and you can crash out on the couch. Once I’ve done some tidying up, that is. I’m not used to guests.”

Petrovitch looked up. “That would be… that would be nice. You have remembered that Hijo is trying to kill me?”

“Let him come. There are paycops on the door, and if he bribes them, well, we’re ready.”

“We?”

She got to her feet and pulled the Jericho out of her bag. Then in a few deft moves, she’d stripped it down to its component parts. “You see,” she said, “where I grew up, in the expensive part of Lagos, we had to protect ourselves from people like you.”

She reassembled the gun just as efficiently and, when she was done, she assumed a shooter’s stance; legs apart, arms braced, good eye over the sights.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” said Petrovitch.

“And neither will they.” She flicked the safety catch on and dropped the gun back in her bag. She smiled.