The Nano Flower

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The sun hadn't quite risen high enough to burn the dew off Wilholm's lawns. Julia's Pegasus sent the pale grey and silver droplets scurrying in vast interference patterns as it landed.

She walked down the stairs from the belly hatch to be greeted with kisses and shouts from her animated children. Brutus barked at her, then started sniffing round her feet.

"You've been gone all night."

"Where did you go?"

"Was it with Uncle Greg?"

"Do you know where Daddy is yet?"

She put her arms around both of them, hugging tight. They started to walk towards the manor together, Daniella skipping.

Julia took a deep breath. "I'm sorry I had to rush off. It was Listoel. Yes. And, I think we might now." She laughed at Matthew, his jaw had dropped as he tried to match answers to questions.

"Where do you think Daddy is?" Daniella asked.

"New London. Your Uncle Greg is going up there today to find out if he truly is. We should know by tonight. I might have to leave again."

"Can we come?"

"No. If I find Daddy, I'll bring him straight back here. Promise."

Daniella and Matthew exchanged a look, annoyed and half relieved. Julia grinned at them. "Come on, I've got a teleconference in a minute, but we'll have some elevenses together first."

"No interruptions?" Matthew asked suspiciously.

"None at all."

David Marchant had been the first New Conservative Prime Minister elected after the PSP fell, a position he held for twelve years and two further elections before finally standing down in favour of his successor, Joshua Wheaton. Julia had found herself regretting his decision with increasing frequency over the last five years. Wheaton was too much like Harcourt, an image merchant desperate for public support, a spin doctor's cyborg. At least Marchant had the guts to make unpopular decisions on occasion. These days he had settled into a cosy role of elder statesman and New Conservative grandee. Always on the channel current affair casts, ready with an opinion and a quip. Perceived as the power behind Wheaton's throne. An accurate enough assessment.

When his image appeared on the study's flatscreen she felt herself relaxing. There had been a lot of head to head sessions in the old days, hammering out deals to their mutual advantage. Nowadays it was done through an army of assistants and lawyers, departmental interfaces, industry and government working groups, advisory committees.

One reason why the whole Harcourt problem had arisen in the first place. No hands-on control any more.

"Hello, Julia," he said. As always a rich resonant voice, instantly trustworthy.

"Morning, David. I have a problem."

"Whatever I can do, Julia, you know that."

"Choosing a better successor would have been a good start."

David Marchant smiled wisely. "Joshua is right for these times, as I was for mine. We needed strong leadership to recover from the Warming and the PSP, and now we need to loosen up a little, consolidate."

"There's a difference between loose and falling to pieces. Wheaton has lost just about all of his authority, over the country and the party. And I have Michael Harcourt on my back because of it."

"Michael is an ambitious man, admittedly."

"Michael is a bought man."

David Marchant laughed. "You're just annoyed because it isn't you who owns him."

"He isn't from your wing of the party. And if he does snatch the premiership from Wheaton, he'll purge the cabinet. You really will have to become a professional current affairs presenter if you want your voice to be heard after that. Trouble is, Jepson runs Globecast too. You'll be locked out. Give you a chance to get your golf handicap down," she said maliciously. Marchant hated sports; when Peterborough United won the FA cup she had sat next to him in Wembley's royal box for the match. He had emptied two hip flasks of whisky. Out of boredom, he always claimed.

"If you'd given Wheaton some support over Wales none of this would have happened, Julia."

"Life isn't as black and white as it used to be in your day, David. Politics isn't as simple, nothing is as simple. Which is a step to the good."

"Hardly, Julia; complexity is a step towards chaos."

"And simplicity makes control easy," she countered wryly. "It's oppressive."

"The PSP was oppressive, Julia, never us. We created the economic environment you thrived in, you have a lot to be grateful for. And as long as we remain in Westminster, Event Horizon can go on expanding. You have carte blanche, you know that."

"Event Horizon is already large enough, thank you. Besides, pure capitalism is as unsavoury as pure communism. I never favoured either extreme. There has to be a degree of regulation, and responsibility. A social market somewhere in the middle."

"That's rich, coming from you. You know the gains to be made from our policies. Without us acting in tandem this country would only be a second-rate European state, not the leading power we are today."

"You people, you're always so hemmed in by geography, aren't you? It ruins your thinking. The rest of Europe, the rest of the world for that matter, needs to develop their economies to the same level as England. If for no other reason than if they're poor they can't buy our goods."

"Nice in theory, Julia. You'll never see it in practice. Governments are too parochial, too protective. They have to be; it's how they get elected."

She favoured him with an indolent smile. "Unless they're Welsh governments."

"Touché. So what did that little shit Harcourt offer you?"

"He claims a direct line to Jepson, which he'll use to tell me what the other bids are. That's his edge. The rest of it was a standard government to industry inducement package."

"Hmm." David Marchant rubbed the bridge of his nose, thinking hard. "Well, of course, the inducement package will remain, that goes without saying. After all, my natural successors are placed in the Exchequer as well as Number Ten. That just leaves us with the problem of the actual bid. Fortunately, the PM can offer you Treasury backing for any offer you make to Jepson. In which case anything Harcourt tells you becomes irrelevant. I imagine Wheaton will consider a more appropriate position for him afterwards; Minister we can all blame for traffic jams, or somesuch. I take it you are arranging a suitable figure for Jepson with your financial backing consortium."

"Yes," she said grudgingly. Another bloody problem. Her finance division chief had briefed her during the flight from Listoel; the banks and finance houses were terrified by atomic structuring, running round like headless chickens. It was making business extremely difficult in the money markets.

"Good. Simply put in a figure you know the kombinates can't match. We will bridge the gap between that and the amount the banks will advance you. Blank cheque, Julia. And interest free."

"It will run to tens of billions, if not hundreds."

"So? Taxpayers are a bottomless source of money for governments. And they're not going anywhere."

"As a taxpayer, I object."

"Ah, but, Julia, you don't pay much tax, do you? New Conservative policies see to that."

"What about Wales?"

"I'm sure that if you have a chat with Joshua Wheaton he'll convince you to see our point of view. Perhaps you could say a few words to that effect when you leave Number Ten, there's always a lot of reporters hanging around outside."

"Tell me one thing, David. Why do the New Conservatives want to hang on to Wales?"

"A large country is a stable and strong country. Without Wales, we would be weakened, possibly fatally. I have no intention of allowing that to happen, to waste all we have built over the last seventeen years. It would be national suicide."

"And you would lose your majority in Westminster."

David Marchant gave a delicate shrug. "If we lose, you lose, Julia." The flatscreen went blank.

Going to be one of those days, I think, Juliet, her grandpa said.

Yes. And if I'm not extremely careful, it might be the last.

You should have told him about the alien.

No. I don't want people like him to make first contact; there's first impressions to consider as well.

And Royan is the perfect choice for that, is he, girl?

She couldn't answer.

Julia went upstairs for a shower after the teleconference. Wilhom's master bedroom was large, with a high ceiling, its windows looking out over the lake. A Paris design house had been contracted for the decoration, giving it walls of royal purple and emerald, a mossy cream carpet, gold fittings, heavy curtains that hung from the ceiling to the floor. A solid four-poster made from oak, with a plain white silk canopy.

On impulse she sat on Royan's side of the bed and opened the door of his cabinet. Inside she found a couple of bottles of aftershave, comb, a hardback set of The Lord of the Rings, AV memox crystal recordings of black and white films from the nineteen-forties and fifties, a cybofax that must have been ten years old, it was so bulky.

She took them all out and arranged them on the bed, lining them up according to size. Not much of a legacy. She remembered buying him the cybofax, the Tolkien books too, come to that.

Clothes? She slid open the door to his walk-through wardrobe. The biolums came on automatically. Dust filters kept the air clean. She walked between the two rails, her hand brushing along his shirts and jackets and waistcoats, setting them swaying gently. The shoe rack along the far wall was well stocked: cowboy boots, suede ankle boots, trainers, alligator shoes, hiking boots. Some of them hadn't even been worn. Then there were ties, belts, hats.

She let the styles and colours sink into her mind, seeing him in various combinations. He'd grown into quite a sharp dresser.

But what had he been wearing the day he left? She couldn't remember. There was no spare hanger.

The wardrobe, the beside cabinet, they shook loose memories. Not her usual processor indexed recollections, real memories. Human memories. They were twinned with emotional responses. Messy.

She left the cube of clean silence, shutting the door behind her. He hadn't cared enough about the clothes to take them with him. They were hers as much as the manor and the company. He wore them for her, when he was with her. Plugging into the role she'd given him.

Kirsten McAndrews was waiting for her in the study, sitting behind a terminal on the long central table. A dark African vase had been placed in the middle, full of pale pink rose buds. They gave off a thin aromatic scent.

Julia took her own chair at the head. Open Channel to Selfcores. I want you to run a search through patent office memory cores and see if Clifford has filed anything on the generator yet.

He hadn't yesterday, we checked, NN core one said.

Well, check again, and assign a monitor routine to keep me updated. As soon as it's filed I want to know.

I see, NN core two said. Why hasn't he filed one already?

Quite. By telling people he has the generator data for sale he's exposed himself to every hotrod and tekmerc in existence running a snatch deal against him, not to mention us and kombinate security, probably certain defence ministries too with these stakes. All he has to do is file it with a patent office and he's covered.

He ain't got it, Philip Evans said.

That's what I'm beginning to think, Grandpa. Which means he's batting on a very sticky wicket. He must know that if I get to the alien before it squirts him the generator data I'll make it an offer that'll be difficult to refuse. Event Horizon has interests in every human discipline. Whatever it wants, I ought to be able to supply it.

Then why didn't it contact you in the first place, girl?

I don't know. More to the point, if it is up in New London how did it contact Clifford? That's something we've overlooked. It couldn't have been a direct broadcast from the asteroid.

We don't know what the alien's technological limits are, NN core one said. I mean, how could it get into New London unnoticed in the first place? The strategic defence sensor coverage up there is just as good as the low Earth orbit networks.

Ask Royan, she said bitterly. He's the expert.

Right, we'll keep you updated.

Cancel Channel to Selfcores. "How is Peter Cavendish progressing with Mutizen?" she asked.

"Ah yes," Kirsten typed rapidly on her terminal. "Problems there. I've scheduled a meeting for ten thirty; he said they seem to be stalling."

Julia allowed herself a moment of satisfaction amid the gloom. Greg was right, Mutizen's offer was a blind. God damn the Dolgoprudnensky.

SelfCores Access Request.

Expedite.

Sorry, girl, bad news.

What is it, Grandpa?

Victor's Nigerian office has just called in. Three of the survivors the coast guard picked up from the Colonel Maitland's wreckage are now unaccounted for. it looks like they sneaked out of the hospital some time last night. Two nurses have been injured, and a porter's vanished.

Bugger.

One of the missing survivors fits Leol Reiger's description.

I imagine he would, she said.

Victor is already putting a snuff deal together. Reiger won't hazard anyone for much longer, Juliet.

He won't have to, this situation is very close to being resolved, one way or another; twenty-four hours at the maximum.

You're probably right. Why don't you call Clifford, see if you can settle your differences peaceably?

I might.

Talking never hurt anyone.

Yes, thanks, Grandpa.

Always here for you, Juliet. And today's company status review is still waiting here with me.

Oh, Lord. All right, let's get started.

The sprinklers had risen out of Wilholm's lawn on metre-high metal stalks, like incredibly thin mushrooms wound with a spiral of flexible hose, pumping out long white plumes of spray. Julia stood by the study's window, listening to the faint whup whup sound of the water as it left the nozzles under high pressure. Puddles were forming in the indentations left by undercarriage bogies. Water was streaming off the wings of her Pegasus.

Matthew was back in the pool, practising his dives under Qoi's vigilant gaze. He could already do a forward somersault flip. Julia watched him try a back flip, landing on his side with a big splash, limbs flailing. He got out and tried again.

Daniella was just visible in the paddock below the lake, riding her horse. Brutus trailed along after her, tail drooping in the mid-morning heat.

They normally invited their friends round to Wilholm in the holidays. Julia enjoyed the sound of the youngsters rampaging through the manor; they seemed to wake the old place up, breezy laughter blowing out the encroachment of dutiful solemnity. And the games they played roaming around the grounds gave the security team headaches. The defence hardware and gene-tailored sentinels all had to be reprogrammed to cope. Julia wasn't about to impose restrictions on the kids, childhood was too precious for that. And the shaggy woods and unkempt fields were a magical kingdom when you were that age.

But they hadn't asked anyone to visit today; or more likely Daniella had bullied Matthew into not asking his friends, mistakenly believing they'd be helping her.

There was a knock on the door, and Peter Cavendish came in, dabbing at his forehead with a navy-blue silk handkerchief. His face was heavily flushed, pure white hair damp with perspiration.

Julia turned away from the window and gave him a welcoming smile. If it hadn't been for the fact he was wearing a different suit from yesterday she would have said he hadn't been home, he certainly looked like he hadn't slept at all. "Sit down, Peter, you look like you've been overdoing it to me."

He slipped into one of the black chairs round the table, sighing gratefully. "I don't understand it, Julia. Negotiating with Mutizen is like wrestling fog. We've had our contractual team sitting up with their Mutizen counterparts for eighteen hours solid, and every time we look like we're reaching an agreement, they throw us a blocker. I'd say they're deliberately stalling, but that doesn't make any sense. They came to us, remember?"

"Yes. But I'm afraid you're right, they are stalling. They are not in possession of the generator data, nor have they ever been in possession. The offer was purely an attempt to goad me into taking some hasty action."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!"

"I'm sorry. I only found out myself early this morning."

"Great. Hell, what now?"

"Fall back on Clifford Jepson and Globecast. How's that negotiation going?"

Peter Cavendish tucked his handkerchief back into his suit pocket. "Second disaster. We've thrashed out a more or less satisfactory contract with Globecast's lawyers, but it hasn't been costed out yet. And it won't be until we submit it officially. We were waiting for Michael Harcourt to come through with the data on the other bids, like you said."

"Oh, Lord… Sorry, I haven't decided if I'm going to take Harcourt up on that yet. It turns out he's Jepson's cyborg, so we probably couldn't rely on his figures anyway. But David Marchant has made a counter-bid for our co-operation, quite a good one."

He gave her a long look, then slipped a couple of centimetres deeper into his seat. "Hell, Julia, I'm not sure if I belong here any more. Nothing stays stable long enough to establish a picture these days. I mean, we get a perfectly ordinary contract finalized. Then it's not just the goalposts which get moved, we're not even playing the same game we were when we started. I've got to have something that doesn't twist on me, Julia, a set of values I can depend on."

She returned his mournful gaze. "It's not us, Peter. We're not at fault."

"Yes, sure, in a perfect world."

"Something like that."

"But in the mean time—"

"We do what we can."

"OK, Julia, you win."

"Just think how the other side must feel."

"Some comfort. You want me to go ahead with the Clifford Jepson partnership, then?"

"Yes."

"OK, how high do you want us to bid?"

"How high is up?" she murmured. "I'll get the Finance Division to work out what sort of bid we can realistically afford, and commercial intelligence to provide estimates on the opposition's bids. Then we'll sit down this evening and decide what to offer Clifford. One piece of good news, I can have Treasury backing any time I want." She didn't mention the price tag which came with it; Peter didn't need to know. Come to that, would he care about Wales?

"Right," he said. "At least that's something concrete."

"Have you managed to bring any of the kombinates in on our side, put in a joint offer?"

He shook his head. "Ha, no chance. There's no alliances in this war. Everyone wants atomic structuring, and they want it exclusively. You should see the Stock Exchange this morning. There's not a share moving. The floor's waiting to see what's going to happen after the bids are in."

"Maybe nothing will happen. I have yet to be convinced Clifford Jepson has the generator data."

Peter Cavendish held up his hand. "No. Don't. I don't want to know." He showed her a plaintive little grin. "Win or lose, I'll be glad when this is over."

"Yes." Yet deep down in her mind there was an intuitive worry that this would never be over, that this alien was just the beginning. There were a hundred billion stars in the galaxy; each one of them waiting to pounce.

She remembered a newscast she'd seen on one of the channels, years ago; a drought-stricken village in Africa, Ethiopia, or the Sudan, somewhere that had never broken the poverty and drought cycle even in the twentieth century. And by the time the new millennium arrived they never stood a chance. A place where the Warming had killed even the dreams that there could be an end to suffering.

The village had been equipped with condenser mats, sucking precious drops of moisture out of the night air. They were pinned to the roof of every hut, the way European houses wore solar panels; a donation from some grandiose Bible-belt American Church charity. The inhabitants had been dying, now the flatscreen showed her healthy children, fat cattle, vegetables growing in hydroponic troughs. It was an oasis, surrounded by dead land, soil so dry it had long since crumbled to dust; the air was completely motionless, had been for years, a decade-long doldrum zone. There were bones out there beyond the huts; cattle, goats, chickens, bleached platinum-white, half buried by the slowly building dunes, they were circled by the skeletons of vultures.

The channel crew was there because the headman had killed the Church technician who'd installed the mats. A centenarian with wrinkled leather skin, protruding bones, a ragged old loincloth; the embodiment of land wisdom. He looked directly into the camera with cloned black eyes, undaunted and contemptuous. "Why have you done this?" he asked. "First you murdered the air with your greed, now you send us machines that bring water from nothing. You have stretched our agony across time. We live on the price of your pity, coins you have cast away. Miserable beggars whose piety and distress is our only weapon. We are reduced to eternal compassion victims. If you truly pity us, give us back our dependence on the weather. Bring back the rain and the wind. Then all men may be equal in our dependency again."

She had understood what the headman had meant, how he felt. The insulting humiliation of relying on a technology he couldn't begin to understand, sent as a gift by people he did not know, reducing him and his relatives to little more than chattels. A primitive culture preserved by godlike science, a throw-away act of charity. He'd lost every shred of dignity, his entire existence subject to whims outside his control. Whims of a culture that had wrecked his land in the pursuit of its own comfort. Unforgivable.

Primitive cultures were always assimilated into advanced cultures. Values supplanted, and finally ruined. A fundamental law of nature. And her own genetics laboratories had said the aliens were billions of years more advanced than humans.

Atomic structuring was the condenser mat all over again, and now she was a peasant villager. Greg's Russian general had the right idea, she thought, the same one as the headman.

The Pegasus dropped smoothly on to the Hambleton peninsula's mudflats, finishing up at a slight angle, nose pointing up towards the Mandel farmhouse. Julia made a grab for Matthew as the belly hatch opened. "Now listen, your aunty Eleanor is pregnant, and that means you're not going to cause the slightest trouble for her. You'll do exactly as you're asked, you'll do it without complaining, and without arguing. Understood?"

His face transformed itself into a picture of hurt innocence. "Mummy!"

"Is that understood?"

"Yes."

She narrowed her eyes.

"Really," he said.

"All right."

The groves were alive with activity, people and handcarts, tractors, smaller children running under the trees. Shouts and snatches of song carried down the slope to where she was climbing up the limestone chunks. Smells of cooking and cut grass mingled through the muggy air. Humidity next to the reservoir was wicked. She could see the travellers were all in hats and caps, men stripped to the waist. She was attracting quite an audience.

Oliver and Anita came down to meet them, accompanied by five other kids. Daniella and Matthew joined them, and they all took off towards the field where the cars and vans were parked; two security hardliners in casual clothes trailing along behind.

Three hardliners followed Julia up to the farmhouse, two of them carrying the children's bags. There was a sixteen-wheel lorry parked in the farmyard. A couple of men were busy loading it with white kelpboard boxes full of oranges. They glanced briefly in her direction as she came through the gate.

Christine drove a tractor in from the groves, its trailer piled high with more white boxes. She waved at Julia, but didn't get down. Picking was a serious business, Julia reflected. The girl started to back the tractor towards the lorry, grinding through the gears.

Julia rapped her knuckles on the kitchen's door frame as she came in. Eleanor was sitting in the carver's chair at the head of the long bench table, three cybofax wafers spread out before her. She glanced up. "Come in, you're not disturbing me. Trying to get some byte shuffling done. Looks like we've got a good yield this year."

"Thanks for having the children," Julia said. "I just hated the idea of my problems ruining their holiday."

"They're no trouble." Eleanor raised a glass to Julia. "Help yourself. It's only Perrier: if I can't touch alcohol then you can suffer as well."

"The odd glass of wine wouldn't hurt."

Eleanor's hand fluttered irritably. "Ha, you know what Greg's like. Bloody men. One prenatal clinic, and they're all qualified gynaecologists."

Julia pulled out a chair, and poured some Perrier out of the bottle. "Royan was the same. I suppose it's excusable in his case. After I had him stitched back together he was very health conscious—exercise, diets, screening cream. The works."

"You miss him?"

"Course I miss him." She rolled the glass between her palms. "That's the problem, I think. The way I treated him. I made him, Eleanor, took him out of Mucklands Wood and turned him into my ideal man. So stupid."

"Don't be silly, he had to leave Mucklands. You knew it, I knew it, Greg knew it. Royan did too, afterwards."

"Yes, but I never let him go free, did I? I had it all planned out, his role in life. We were such good friends, you see, after he saved Grandpa's NN core from the virus. It was a dream for me. I had to go out in public and be the Julia Evans, talk contracts, deal with politicians, arrange finance with banks. Dear Lord, I was only eighteen. Then when all that company work was finished for the day, I could run away into my mind, and there he'd be, waiting for me. It was like having one of those imaginary friends children invent to keep themselves company. No one else knew he was there, no one else could see him. He was all mine; and we talked, and he sympathized with me, and I felt sorry for him. What we had was precious. I thought it would be the same after Mucklands. I wanted it to be the same."

"He did too."

"Maybe. But he never knew there could be anything else, not at first. He really was born again. A whole new and bright world. But I kept giving him things to do, hotrod for me, father children. That was it, all along, the one thing that was always in our way: I couldn't change, not with Event Horizon to manage. So he had to fit into my life. We could never begin together."

Eleanor stood up, pressing her fist into her back as she straightened, and opened one of the wooden cupboards below the workbench. It was a fridge inside. She took out a bottle of white wine with a Kent label. "So he felt smothered," she said. "Men always do around women like you."

"Maybe. So how does Greg cope? You're not exactly a quiet obedient little housewife."

Eleanor poured a glass of wine and handed it to Julia, a faint smile at distant memories playing on her lips. "We worked it out. The gulf wasn't as big as you and Royan, mind."

"Yeah. Do you know what he called himself, Royan? A prince consort. Says a lot about how much consideration I gave him."

"Oh, come on, Julia, the whole world lives in your shadow. He knew that right from the start, the failure isn't all down to you."

She drank some of the wine, it was nice, dry and smooth. Eleanor understood, thank God; she was one of the few people Julia could really let her hair down with. They'd known each other long enough now; Julia had been the chief bridesmaid when she married Greg. "He wanted to be my equal, that's what he said."

Eleanor sniffed her wine and took a sip. "And what if he fails? Had he thought of that? What was he going to do then? Find a different alien?"

"Lord knows. He's causing enough trouble with this one. Like a child really, he never learned to accept failure. Week-long setbacks are as close as he's ever come. Everything is solvable in the end."

"Oh dear."

"Yes."

They smiled, and drank some more wine.