Mindstar Rising

CHAPTER FIVE

Wilholm's library was a long, airy room on the ground floor, its arched ceiling painted with quasi-religious murals in rich, dark reds, greens, blues, and browns. Below this unchristian pantheon, glass-fronted shelves ran the length of the walls, illuminated from within by tiny biolum strips; there were matching marble fireplaces at each end of the room, an oriel window giving a view out across the rear lawns. Three tables spaced down the centre had genuine nineteenth-century reading-lamps at each seat. The air-conditioning was set to keep it degrees cooler than the rest of the manor. It was the room Julia preferred to work in: bringing Event Horizon data into her bedroom always seemed intrusive somehow. There had to be some distinction between private and working life, especially as she had so little of the former.

She sat in a plain admiral's chair behind a polished rosewood table, wearing a hyacinth cardigan over a peach chambray button-through dress, watching interviews on a big wall-mounted flatscreen. The image was coming over the company datanet from Stanstead.

Morgan Walshaw had commandeered a whole floor in the company's airport administration block, using it to keep the furnace operators in isolation while they were processed.

He and Greg were doing the interviews in a modern office with a window wall overlooking the giant new freight hangar which Event Horizon used. Both of them sitting behind a chrome-and-glass desk, Morgan Walshaw in his usual suit; Greg in a red-and-white-striped shirt with braiding down the placket, a black-and-white mosaic tie.

It was a tedious way to spend the day, but she persevered. A penance for her earlier misdemeanour, that and a refuge, occupying her mind so that memories of Adrian couldn't encroach in that sneakily persistent way they did whenever she had a spare moment. He'd left this morning, together with Kats, the pair of them driving off on his Vickers bike, holographic flame transfers sparkling along the chrome gearmounting. Julia had watched them go, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel as they zoomed off down the drive, hard rock blaring from the speakers. It looked like a lot of fun.

Now monotony and responsibility had closed in on her again. Alone in a room with a thousand leather-bound books, not one of which she would ever read. Neither would Grandpa, come to that. They were just part of the ritual of being rich. Put into warehouse storage abroad while the PSP ruled, and brought back here for glass-shelf storage. The tangibility of money. Stupid.

Greg and Morgan Walshaw were stretching in their swivel chairs as they waited for the next furnace operator to come in. Julia poured herself another cup of tea from the silver service on the table, and munched a Cadbury's orange cream from the plate of biscuits. She'd never really paid much attention to Event Horizon's security division before, it was an alien subculture with its own language and etiquette and violence. Too much like an elaborate lethal game, freelance tekmercs and company operatives playing against each other at the expense of their employers. One of her bodyguards, Steven, had told her that once you were in security you never came out.

She'd secretly hoped to see a bit of action, a few sparks fly, in addition to learning more about the investigation procedures Morgan Walshaw used. But the interviews Greg had been running seemed to be fairly straightforward — Name—Sorry to interrupt your furlough, but it is urgent—We're reviewing the contamination losses of memox crystals—Do you have any idea why it should be so high? — Have you ever been approached by anyone who wanted you to act against the company? Seven or eight questions then he'd say OK and Morgan Walshaw would dismiss them. So far they hadn't uncovered anyone involved with the spoiler operation.

The impression Julia got from the screen was remoteness. Greg never smiled, never frowned, his tone was scrupulously impartial, he hardly appeared to be aware of the interviewees. She wondered what she'd feel if she was sitting there in the office with him. A tingling in her head as his espersense teased apart her emotions for examination? Her grandfather had said he couldn't read individual thoughts. Julia wasn't sure, he seemed so judgemental.

Julia sipped her tea as the next furnace operator came in. The woman was the fifteenth to be interviewed, a forty-three-year-old called Angie Kirkpatrick, wearing a khaki sports shirt and Cambridge-blue tracksuit trousers; medium height, fit-looking, self-assured—but then all of them were.

Angie Kirkpatrick sat on the other side of the desk from Greg and Morgan Walshaw, her expression of polite expectation carefully composed. Julia knew something was wrong straight away. Kirkpatrick probably wasn't aware of it, she had nothing to compare her interview to. But Julia could see Greg was sitting straighter, more attentive. Morgan Walshaw had picked up on Greg's state, too. Julia studied Kirkpatrick closely, still unable to see any evidence of culpability.

"We're investigating the high contamination level of memox crystals coming out of Zanthus," Greg said. "But then you guessed that, didn't you?"

"The contamination has been quite high," Angie said.

"Wrong answer," said Greg. "How long have you been working the spoiler?"

"What?"

"The whole eight months?"

"I don't know—"

"Seven months?"

"Listen!"

"Six?"

"Hey, you can't just—"

"Five?"

"Start accusing me—"

Greg leaned back in his chair and smiled. Julia was very glad she wasn't receiving that smile, it was predatory.

"Five months," said Greg, a simple statement of fact.

"This… What is this?" Angie demanded. She was looking straight at Morgan Walshaw.

"It's word association," Greg said. "I say a word, and I watch to see how your mind reacts. Is there stress and guilt, or is there merely innocent confusion? It doesn't matter what your verbal answer is, your thoughts don't lie."

Julia almost felt a pang of sympathy for the woman. Betrayed by her own soul. Greg's ability was eerie, silent, unfelt, and devastatingly accurate. A whole heritage of fear was built around people who could divine thoughts. Quite rightly, surely everyone was entitled to some core of privacy. She pulled her cardigan tighter over her shoulders.

"Stress and guilt, that's what peaked at five months," Greg said.

"You've got a gland," Angie said. Her defiance had gone.

"That's right."

She flushed hard. "I… I hadn't got any choice. They knew. Things. About me. Christ, I don't know how they found out."

"Just give us the details," said Walshaw, sounding bored, or perhaps weary.

"What'll happen?" Angie asked.

"To you? We probably won't prosecute, if you're being truthful about them blackmailing you. But you won't ever work in orbit again, not for anyone, we'll make quite sure of that."

"I didn't have any choice!"

"You could've come to us, we could've set a counter trap."

"I don't know. There's no difference between you, any of you. People like me, well, it's not fair."

"Never is," Walshaw muttered.

Watching Angie hunching in on herself, Julia realised the woman had already submitted, the fight had gone out of her. She was going to do exactly what Walshaw told her to. What an awesome reputation psychics had, that even their presence could sap the will like that. No wonder the PSP had been so troubled about the animosity of the Mindstar Brigade veterans.

"How did they turn you?" Greg asked.

Angie flinched when he spoke. "Are you still looking into my mind?"

"Yes."

She nodded reluctantly. "OK. I was doing some uppers. Zanthus, it gets to you, you know? Four months in a dormitory can, everyone crammed together at night, recycled piss to wash with, can't taste your food. It just gets to you. It's no High Frontier dream, only sounds that way from down here. Anyway, it gets to the stage where you've really got to force yourself to turn up at Stanstead at the end of your furlough. I've got two daughters, see, they're beautiful kids, really—smart, happy. I take care of them when I'm on furlough, my ex has them when I'm up there. I hate the idea of him having them at all, but some choice, right? So seven years of this shit is too much; my eldest, she's fifteen, she's got a boyfriend, she's got exams this year. I should be there. Saying goodbye, it hurts like hell. So six months ago I've got to take something to ease the pain."

"What about your pre-flight medical?" Walshaw asked. "You must've known the drugs would show up."

"Maybe I wanted it to," Angie said. "Deep down. You know how strict Event Horizon is about narcotics abuse. Give Philip Evans that, he wants us healthy. Others have been caught, they got transferred, they were given therapy, kept their pay grade. We get a good medical cover deal, you know? But they found me before the furlough ended."

"Names?" Greg asked.

"Kurt Schimel. But he didn't talk with a German accent."

"That's all?"

"No, there were a couple more with him, a man and a woman. No names." She began to describe them.

Access Company Personnel File: Kirkpatrick, Angie. Zanthus Microgee Furnace Operator.

Julia stopped listening: Angie's file was unfolding in her mind. A data profile of names, dates, figures, promotions, training grades, personal biography, medical reports, biannual Security reviews, her ex-husband. Her daughters were called Jennifer and Diana, there were even pictures. Ordinary, she was so ordinary. That was what struck Julia most. It was a big disappointment, she'd wanted to understand the woman, her motivations. Knowing the enemy. But now she didn't know whether to hate the she-demon who'd tried to wreck everything her grandfather had built, or pity the pathetic woman who'd screwed her own life beyond redemption.

"They offered to flush my blood system clean," she was saying. "There'd be no trace of the drugs left when I went for the medical. They also smoothed out my bank account so the balance wouldn't show all those cash purchases when security ran its six-month review. And I'd only have to fox the crystal furnace 'ware for a year; their money would've been enough to let me get out afterwards. Just me and the girls, go and live quietly somewhere. God, you don't know what kind of deal that was to me."

"I do," Greg said.

Angie shuddered, hugging her arms across her chest.

Greg was staring into space above her head. "You said fox the furnace 'ware. I get some interesting implications from that. Would you elaborate on that for me, please."

Julia returned her attention to the interview. She would never have picked up on that detail. What kind of an impression had Greg seen? She wanted to ask him: What do minds look like? Didn't think she'd ever have the courage.

"Nothing much to it," Angie said. "Schimel gave me a program to load into the furnace's 'ware, it adjusts the quality inspection sensor records."

"The memox crystals weren't actually contaminated, then," Greg said thoughtfully.

"No. That wouldn't have worked. The security monitors would trip if more than thirty-seven per cent came out bad, see? No way could we ever be allowed to go over the magic figure, that'd blow the whole gaff, right. Reconfiguring the injector mechanism each time you wanted to ruin a batch wasn't on, you'd never get a fine enough control over the output. It's not like flicking on a switch, you know. It takes time to make the blend perfect again, and the time varies. Some of those furnaces are a bitch to run. Then you've got the genuine duff batches to consider. What Schimel's program did was start with the genuine percentage of failures then forge the rest."

Julia sat bolt upright, her tea forgotten. Frustration manifested as a surge of hot blood. She wanted to take Angie by the throat and shake the stupid tart till she rattled. Forty-eight million Eurofrancs' worth of perfectly good memox crystals deliberately dumped into the atmosphere to burn up. It was an appalling thought. Event Horizon's cash reserve reduced to incendiary molecules in the ionosphere.

Walshaw was giving her an entomologist's stare, deciding exactly how worthless she was. And it took a lot to get the coldly civil security chief riled.

Greg was shaking his head in bemusement. "You mean you just chuck away good crystals?"

"Yes," she whispered dully.

Walshaw opened his cybofax. "I want the names of all the other furnace operators you know that are involved."

"Do I have to?" she asked. "I mean you'll find them anyway, won't you?"

"Don't piss me off any further," Walshaw said in a tired voice. "Names."

Julia heard a metallic scrape behind her, and turned in the chair. The manor staff were supposed to leave her alone when she was in here. But it was her father, Dillan, who was opening the library door.

She watched the wrecked man move dazedly into the room, hating herself for the pain she felt at the sight of him. He was wearing jeans and a bright yellow sweatshirt, with elasticated plimsolls on his feet. At least he'd remembered to shave, or someone had reminded him. There were a couple of male nurses on permanent call at the manor, for when he got difficult, and when he had nightmares. He wasn't much trouble, not physically, spending most of his days in a small brick-walled garden that backed on to the kitchen wing. There was a bench by the fishpond for him when the weather was fine, and a Victorian summerhouse for when it rained. He would read poetry for hours, or tend to the densely packed flower borders, throw crumbs to the goldfish.

And that was it, she thought, holding her face into that well-practised expressionless mask. All he was capable of, reading and weeding. The nurses gave him three shots of syntho a day.

If we were poor, she thought, they'd lock us all away as crazy, the whole Evans family, all three of us, three generations. A dying man with grandiose aspirations for the future, a syntho addict, and a girl with an extra brain who can't make friends with anybody. We probably deserve it.

Dillan Evans smiled as he caught sight of his daughter. "Julie, there you are."

She rose smoothly from the admiral's chair, switching off the flatscreen and its images of treachery. Her father walked towards her, taking his time over each step. He was trying to hide a bunch of flowers behind his back.

She couldn't despise him, all she ever felt was a kind of bewilderment mingling with heartbreaking shame. For all his total syntho dependency, she was his one focal point on the outside world, his last grip on reality. He'd come with her to Europe, not caring about the location, not even caring about having to live in the same house as his father again, just so long as he was with her. Even the First Salvation Church had been glad to get him off their hands, and they recruited new bodies with the fervour of medieval navies.

"For you," Dillan Evans said, and produced the flowers. They were fist-sized carnations—mauve, scarlet, and salmon-pink.

Julia smelt them carefully, enjoying the fresh scent. Then she kissed him gently on the cheek. "Thank you, Daddy. I'll put them in a vase on the table, here look, so I can see them while I'm working."

"Oh, Julie, you shouldn't be working, not you, not when it's a bright sunny day. Don't get yourself tangled up in the old bastard's schemes. They'll leach the life out of you. Dry dusty creatures, they are. There's no life in what he pursues, Julie. Only suffering."

"Hush," she said, and took his hand. "Have you had lunch yet?"

Dillan Evans blinked, concentrating hard. "I don't remember. Oh, God, Julie, I don't remember." His eyes began to water.

"It's all right," she said quickly. "It's all right, Daddy, really it is. I'm going to have my lunch in a little while. You can sit with me."

"I can?" His smile returned.

"Yah, I'd like you to." She held the flowers up. "Did you grow these?"

"Yes. Yes I did, up from tiny seeds. Like you, Julie, I grew you, too. My very own snowflower. The one stem of beauty in the frozen wilderness of my life."

She put her arm in his, and steered him towards the library door.

"I was looking for your friend," Dillan Evans said. "The pretty one. I had some flowers for her as well." He began to look around, his face tragic.

"Katerina?"

"Was that her name? She had hair that shone so bright in the sun. I showed her round my garden. And we talked and talked. There's so few do that. Did you know she can charm butterflies on to her finger?"

Julia winced at the thought of Kats talking to her father. Had Adrian been there as well?

She closed the library door behind her, blocking out the worries of the present. But only so she could suffer in a different way, she thought bleakly. Typical.

"Like an angel," her father said in a wistful tone. "Radiant and golden."