The Curve of The Earth

11

They were over Nebraska, doing five hundred k and climbing to get over the Rockies.

Petrovitch had been sitting quietly, hands folded in his lap, seemingly asleep. Newcomen was next to him, watching the clock and growing increasingly fretful.

“There’s plenty of time,” said Petrovitch, his voice barely louder than the hum of the air scrubbers.

“I thought you were…”

“You were wrong. Again. I’m working.” Only his lips moved.

“On what?”

“Who might have taken Lucy. Working my way through all her contacts, cross-referencing phone calls, debit payments, key uses, CCTV captures, computer logins, canteen swipe cards. It’s a complicated four-dimensional map, but it’s the easiest way to spot patterns.”

Newcomen looked around the cabin, at the stewards and stewardesses moving quietly among the passengers. Different to the flight across the Atlantic: not one had called on them, even once.

There was a different pair of NSA agents with them, too, sitting apart from each other and at least making an attempt to blend in. Petrovitch had pointed them out as soon as they’d taken their seats. He’d identified the account used to pay for their seats as being the same as for the flight from Heathrow.

“Found anything?”

“Yeah.” He opened his eyes and pushed himself up slightly using the arms of the chair. He reached out and pulled the screen from Newcomen’s pocket. “This man: recognise him?”

Newcomen put his palm behind the screen and waited for the image to brighten. “No. Should I?” A tousle-haired, ruddyfaced youth with a lopsided grin stared out at him.

“Jason Fyfe. Canadian citizen, twenty-three years old, degree in meteorology, studying for a doctorate in ionospheric interactions at McGill. Should be at Fairbanks, whereabouts currently unknown. Last seen a week last Saturday.”

“Last seen, as in, he’s disappeared too?”

“No one’s reported him missing, if that’s what you mean. He hired an all-terrain vehicle and headed off into the wilderness. No communications with him since.”

“But you can track the RV through its locator, right?”

“I would if I could. He’s gone off the radar completely. I don’t know what that means yet.” Petrovitch looked down at the geometric patchwork of fields swept with blown snow, thousands of metres below. “The university has ATVs of its own, and he’s not doing field work. The timing of this unscheduled trip is making my spidey senses tingle.”

“Anyone else?” Newcomen rolled the screen back up.

“I can, with varying degrees of accuracy, place everyone in the physics faculty. I’m widening the search across the whole of the university, and eventually, everyone in Fairbanks. But let’s start with Fyfe.”

“I’ll talk to the Assistant Director. We’ve two agents in Fairbanks: they can interview his friends, see if he and Lucy were…” he paused. “Close.”

“Don’t be so yebani coy, Newcomen.” Petrovitch turned and focused on him. “That’d be a really good idea, except Buchannan’s withdrawn those agents. There’s now no FBI presence in the whole of northern Alaska. Fancy that.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Presumably because he’s been ordered to do so by someone well above an Assistant Director’s pay grade. Doesn’t this sound at all suspicious to you yet? Ignore the fact that it’s me — I’m never going to be invited to the White House for a kaffeeklatsch — and concentrate on Lucy. A foreign national with diplomatic credentials goes missing in a remote area of Alaska in what turns out to be less-than-straightforward circumstances, and the FBI pull the only two agents they have on the ground? If you can make sense of that scenario, you’re smarter than you look.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Seriously. Is this standard Bureau operating procedure?”

“I’m sure the AD has his reasons.”

“Yeah, he’s being leant on by someone further up the food chain.” Petrovitch clenched his teeth. “When we finally see him, I’ve a mind to tell him that if my presence here is standing between him and being able to deploy the people he needs to, then I’ll take the first plane out of here.”

“But you don’t think it is.”

“No. No, I don’t. I have to be certain, though. I don’t think you appreciate just how much your security services hate me. I tricked the National Security Council into giving me your nuclear launch codes and forced the resignation of President Mackensie. They’re never going to forgive me, and they’re certainly never going to forget.”

“I’m sorry,” said Newcomen. “You did what?”

“That’s the subject of chapter eighteen in Samuil Petrovitch: an unlife. I don’t think you’ve got to it yet, and what’s there is pretty much all wrong. What actually happened was that I faked an attack and stole the gold codes. Mackensie didn’t really have anywhere to go after that.”

“That’s not what I remember.”

“Of course it’s not: your news is little more than wholly transparent propaganda, and has been for over three decades — but you swallow up every last lie because the guy in the suit tells you to.”

Newcomen was breathing hard. “That is not true.”

“Yeah, it is. Your generation knows less about the world than even your parents did, and most of them knew jack. Ignorance offends me, Newcomen. As a nation you’ve bought into a massive consensual hallucination: that you’re the chosen people, that your country has a God-given right to stride the globe like a demented colossus, and anything, anything at all that you do is justifiable because it’s you doing it. When Mackensie was president, he authorised assassinations, drone strikes, blackmail, the wholesale slaughter of a civilian population and the use of a nuclear weapon in the middle of a city — all of that aimed against me and the world’s only artificial intelligence, who just happened to be my friend.” Petrovitch leaned closer and growled. “And he never even apologised. Why would he? He still doesn’t think he did anything wrong.”

He became aware that the rest of the cabin was listening, that they couldn’t help but listen, because he wasn’t exactly trying to keep it down.

He took a deep breath. The NSA men, one to his left, one behind, seemed to be resting their hands on their pistols, ready to fire aircraft-safe plastic rounds if necessary.

“You know what?” Petrovitch said, easing himself back into his seat. “I think I ought to stop there.” He raised his hand to attract the attention of one of the stewards — not difficult since they were all looking at him anyway.

“Sir?”

“Can we have a couple of Jack Daniel’s, please? I think they’ll settle the nerves.”

“Yessir. Coming right up, sir.” The steward almost fell over in his hurry to complete the order.

“Is that okay with you, Newcomen? I know it’s what you drink on the few occasions you do break your wholly unnecessary temperance.”

“I think, in the circumstances, that liquor might be justified.”

“It’s pretty much mandatory where I come from. I am right, though.”

“Are you? I don’t hear many of these good people agreeing with you.”

“I don’t need them to: my rightness is entirely independent of their opinion. Information wants to be free, to be known by as many minds as possible and achieve meaning. It’s a revolution — the emancipation of data.”

The steward brought them their whiskey in two tiny bottles, set on a tray with paper coasters and glasses pre-filled with ice. A bigger bottle of still water sat between the glasses. The man’s hands were shaking.

“Yobany stos.” Petrovitch looked up at the terrified steward. “Just leave it with us. We’re big boys and we can sort ourselves out.”

Newcomen folded his table out and unscrewed the water bottle. When he tried to add some to Petrovitch’s glass, Petrovitch kicked him.

“Ow.”

“That’s not how I drink it.” He grabbed his whiskey to prevent any further attempt at adulteration. “It’s not how any decent human being should drink it, either.”

He twisted the lid off and sucked the contents out in one go. He held it in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed. Then he puffed out his cheeks and blew.

Newcomen blinked. He broke the seal on his own bottle and dribbled a little into the near-frozen water at the bottom of his glass.

“When did you become such a,” Petrovitch searched for the word, came up with several highly inappropriate ones in an online thesaurus, and finally selected, “such a milquetoast?”

“I am not,” said Newcomen, shuddering, “one of those.”

“I think I know. Your accident. I’ve seen it: it was enough to make the strongest man risk-averse. It was the last time you ever took a chance.” Petrovitch played it in his head, the banners, the roar of the crowd, the cheerleaders all so pretty in their black and gold. “The State University coach was on the touchline, and he was ready to hand you a scholarship. All you had to do was shine.”

“I did. I did shine.”

“For an hour and a half, under a hot autumn sun. Calling all those plays, throwing that pigskin. You were good, Newcomen. I can’t say for sure, as it’s always looked like a monumental waste of time and energy, but you were rated by those who cared.”

“Petrovitch. I don’t want you to mock me.”

“I know you don’t. I’m not. I’m trying to understand you: that’s important to me, important to Lucy too. Start of the third quarter, you’re well in the lead, and it’s mainly due to you. Maybe that’s when someone on the Xavier High team decides the only way they’re going to stand a chance is to put you out of the game.” He scratched at his nose. “A tackle like that? I can tell the moment your shoulder dislocates. And still you’re trying to get that loose ball back, still taking a chance.”

Newcomen poured the rest of his whiskey into his glass. His hand was trembling as he held it to his lips, the ice cubes chattering against each other to signal his discomfort.

“Do you know what it’s like to have everything you’ve ever worked for taken away from you in one single second?” the American asked.

Petrovitch nodded slowly. “Yeah. I know. I even know what it’s like to have my arm shattered like crazy paving. This,” and he held up his left arm, “the skin’s real. The blood pumping through it is real. The skeleton underneath? I could punch a hole in the fuselage with it and still have enough watts to rip the wing off.”

“I couldn’t go back. I just couldn’t.” Newcomen shrugged, his big shoulders slumping in defeat. “Even after they’d grown new bone and grafted it in, and I’d been told I’d be as strong as ever. So I took myself away. I went to Pennsylvania and hid.”

“I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all.” He waved the steward back over. “We’re good to go again, right?”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“I have a robotic liver. I can pretty much metabolise alcohol as fast as I pour it into myself.”

The steward recoiled. That cyborg thing again. “All the same, I like the taste of it, and I got put on to rye whiskey by the head of the Papal Inquisition, who just happened to be a Yank.” Petrovitch remembered. Cold stone steps, a bottle, two glasses. It’d been a while since he’d spoken to Carillo. “You haven’t got any Stagg, have you?”

“Get him the whiskey,” said Newcomen. “I’ll pass.”

“Sir.”

“Is that true?” asked Newcomen when the steward had hurried off again.

“Which one? The liver or the cardinal?”

“Either, I guess.”

“Both. Maddy always used to joke about my robotic spleen, since I vent it so often, but it turned out it was my liver that packed in first: too much cheap vodka destroying what was left of a radiation-damaged organ. And yeah, I get on well enough with Cardinal Carillo. He might even make pope one day. I don’t pretend to know how that works — I know smoke’s involved — but for a God-botherer he’s okay.”

Newcomen sat slightly hunched over, nursing his drink. The steward brought Petrovitch another bottle, thankfully without all the extras this time.

“Za zhenshhin!” he said, and again emptied the entire measure in one go. He smacked his lips. “There is a way back, you know. You don’t have to live the rest of your life like…”

“Like a milquetoast, you mean.”

“I should know. I’ve run before. I ran from St Petersburg. I abandoned my family and everyone who ever knew me. It got me into the habit of running from everything. Then, even before the whole New Machine Jihad thing kicked off, I decided I was in so much trouble, I was going to have to run again: I ripped up my Samuil Petrovitch persona, said goodbye to everyone important — though that took precious little time. I’d even booked plane tickets to Auckland under yet another false name.”

“None of that was in the book.”

The corner of Petrovitch’s mouth twitched. “It wouldn’t be.”

“So what made you change your mind?” Newcomen frowned. He was becoming interested, despite himself.

“That is a mystery known only to, well, whatever God you believe in. The man threatening me with death was an even bigger bastard than I was, and I realised no one was going to be able to stop him. And right there and then I decided I was going to be the one to take him down. I stopped running and started fighting. It wasn’t the wisest of decisions, and I can’t even pretend it was anything but entirely self-serving.” Petrovitch chewed at his lip. “But at least I can look at myself in the mirror without shuddering with disgust. That, as it turns out, is quite important when it comes to being a fully signed-up member of the human race.”

Newcomen faced forward, and watched the back of the seat in front for a while. His face held a series of expressions, but Petrovitch couldn’t read any of them. Something was starting to change. For better or worse.