Zendegi

1

Martin stared anxiously at the four crates full of vinyl LPs in the corner of the living room. A turntable, amplifier and speakers sat on the floor beside them, their cables draped in dust; it had been three weeks since he’d sold the shelving unit that had housed the components. The records would be far too heavy to take with him on the plane to Iran, and he didn’t think much of their chances if he sent them separately as surface freight. He’d contemplated putting them in storage, as he’d done when he’d gone to Pakistan, but having already spent a month selling furniture and throwing out junk he was determined to complete the process: to reach the point where he could fly out of Sydney with no keys in his pocket, leaving nothing behind.

He squatted beside the crates and did a quick count. There were two hundred and forty albums; it would cost more than two thousand dollars to replace them all with downloads. That seemed like an extravagant price to pay in order to end up exactly where he’d started, give or take a few minor scratches and crackles. He could always just replace his favourites, but he’d been lugging these crates around for decades without discarding anything. They were part of his personal history, a diary written in track lists and sleeve notes; there were plenty of bizarre and embarrassing choices, but he didn’t want to forget them, or disown them. Whittling the collection down would feel like a kind of revisionism; he knew that he’d never part with money again for Devo, The Residents or The Virgin Prunes, but he didn’t want to tear those pages from his diary and pretend that he’d spent his youth entirely in the exalted company of Elvis Costello and The Smiths. The more obscure, the more dubious, the more downright cringe-inducing the album, the more he’d have to lose by excising it from his past.

Martin knew what he had to do, and he cursed himself for not facing up to it sooner. Normally he would have scoured the web for the pros and cons of different methods, then spent another week mulling over the choices, but he had no time to waste. The crates held almost seven days’ worth of continuous music, and he was flying out in a fortnight. It was not impossible, but he’d be cutting it fine.

He left his apartment and walked two doors down the hall.

At the sound of his knocking, Alice called out grumpily, ‘I’m coming!’ Half a minute later she appeared at the door, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, as if she was about to brave the afternoon sun.

‘Hi,’ Martin said, ‘are you busy?’

‘No, no. Come in.’

She ushered him into the living room and motioned for him to sit. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

Martin shook his head. ‘I won’t take your time; I just wanted some advice. I’m going to bite the bullet and put my vinyl on computer—’

‘Audacity,’ Alice replied.

‘Sorry?’

‘Download Audacity; that’s the best software to use. Plug your turntable preamp into your sound card, record everything you want and save it as WAV files. If you want to split each album side into individual tracks, you’ll have to do that manually, but it’s pretty easy.’ She took a small notepad from the coffee table and scribbled something, then handed him the page. ‘If you use these settings it will make life simpler if you decide to burn CDs at some point.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Oh, and make sure you get the recording level right.’

‘Okay.’ Martin didn’t want to appear rude, picking her brains and then rushing away, but since she hadn’t taken her hat off he assumed she was itching to get moving herself. ‘Thanks for your help.’ He rose to his feet. ‘It looks like you were going somewhere-’

Alice frowned, then understood. ‘You mean this?’ She took hold of the hat by the brim and pulled it off, revealing a mesh of brightly coloured wires tangled in her short dark hair. ‘I didn’t know who was at the door, and it takes me ten minutes to stick all the electrodes back on.’ Though it didn’t look as if any hair had been shaved off, irregular partings revealed patches of white skin to which small metal discs adhered. Martin had a disconcerting flashback to his childhood: grooming the family cat in search of ticks.

He said, ‘Can I ask what they’re for?’

‘There’s a Swiss company called Eikonometrics who want to see if they can classify images by flashing them on a monitor subliminally and looking at the viewer’s brain activity. I signed up for one of their trials. You just sit and work normally; you don’t even notice the pictures.’

Martin laughed. ‘Are they paying you?’

‘One cent per thousand images.’

‘That’ll catch on.’

Alice said, ‘I expect they’ll replace the micro-payments with some kind of privileges scheme. Maybe give people free access to games or movies if they’re willing to wear the electrodes while they watch. In the long run they’re hoping to get it working with a standard gamer’s biofeedback helmet instead of all this DIY-neurologist crap, but off-the-shelf models don’t have the resolution yet.’

Martin was intrigued. ‘So what’s your angle?’ Alice earned her living as a website designer, but she seemed to spend most of her spare time on mildly nefarious projects, like the ‘Groundhog Cage’ she’d constructed that made thirty-day free-trial software think it was always on the first day of the trial. Apparently this was harder than simply lying to the software about the true date; there were exchanges with distant servers to be faked as well.

‘I’m still analysing the system,’ she said, ‘trying to figure out how to game it.’

‘Right.’ Martin hesitated. ‘But if the experts can’t write software that classifies images as well as a human brain can, how are you going to write a program to simulate your own responses?’

‘I don’t have to,’ Alice replied. ‘I just have to make something that passes for human.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘People aren’t all going to react identically,’ she said. ‘There might or might not be a clear majority response to each class of image, but you certainly won’t get the same signal from everyone. Some participants – through no fault of their own – won’t be pulling their weight; that’s a statistical certainty. But the company wouldn’t dare discriminate against people whose brains don’t happen to go aaah every time they see a fluffy kitten; they’ll still get the same rewards. I want to see if I can ride the coattails of the distribution.’

‘So you’d be satisfied with passing as a low-affect psychopath, just so long as you don’t actually come across as brain-dead?’

‘That’s about it.’

Martin rubbed his eyes. Though he admired her ingenuity, there was something about her obsessive need to prove that she could milk the system that felt every bit as crass as the brain-farming scheme itself.

‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tips.’

‘No problem.’ Alice smiled, suddenly self-conscious. ‘So when are you flying out?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Right.’ Her smile stayed awkwardly frozen, and Martin realised that it wasn’t her eccentric head-ware that was making her embarrassed. ‘I’m really sorry about you and Liz,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘How long were you together?’

‘Fifteen years,’ he said.

Alice looked stunned; she’d been their neighbour for almost a year, but the subject had probably never come up before. Alice was in her mid-twenties; fifteen years would sound like a lifetime.

Martin said, ‘I think Liz decided that Islamabad was the last hardship post she was willing to put up with.’ He couldn’t blame her; Pakistan and Iran were not the most appealing locations for Western women with no reason of their own to be there. Liz worked in finance, for a company that didn’t mind where she lived so long as she had an internet connection, but Martin suspected that somewhere in the back of her mind she’d imagined that the years in Purgatory were going to be rewarded with Paris or Prague. Martin’s employers reasoned instead that his time in Pakistan was the ideal preparation for their new Tehran correspondent, and after twelve months slacking off as an online news editor in Sydney, a return to the field was long overdue.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice repeated.

Martin waved her crib-notes in thanks and replied with a parody of a honey-toned late-night DJ from the eighties, ‘I’d better go spin some discs.’

Martin started with the Eurythmics’ Touch. He fussed over the cables and the software settings, checking and rechecking every option, and when he’d finished the recording he played back the entire album to be sure that everything had worked properly.

Annie Lennox’s voice still gave him goose-bumps. He’d only seen her performing live once, in a muddy field in the countryside north of Sydney in January 1984. Talking Heads, The Cure and The Pretenders had all played at the same festival. Unseasonal downpours had drenched the campgrounds and he could still remember queuing in the rain to use the unspeakable toilets, but it had all been worth it.

Martin had been eighteen years old then; he would not meet Liz for more than a decade. In fact, all of his vinyl predated her; by the time they moved in together he’d bought a CD player and now the soundtrack to their entire relationship was already on his hard drive, safely out of sight. These crate-loads of old music would carry him back to the era before her – and with the possible exception of Ana Ng, you couldn’t miss someone you hadn’t even met yet.

It was an appealing idea, and for a few hours he lost himself in Talking Heads, drinking in their strange, naïve optimism. But by late evening he’d started on Elvis Costello and the mood was turning darker. He could have hunted through the crates for something cheerier – there was a Madness compilation in there somewhere – but he was tired of steering his emotions. Even when the music simply made the years melt away, the time-tripping itself was beginning to leave him maudlin. If he kept this up for two weeks he’d be a wreck.

He continued with the recording marathon, flipping and changing the albums like pancakes, but he turned down the playback volume so he wouldn’t have to listen any more. Better to start thinking of the imminent future; Martin opened his browser and began catching up on the news from Iran.

The opposition group that had garnered the most attention in the run-up to the impending parliamentary election was Hezb-e-Haalaa, literally the ‘Party of Now’. Tongue-tied foreigners occasionally pronounced this almost indistinguishably from Hezbollah, ‘Party of God’ (not to mention confusing the Iranian Hezbollah with the Lebanese group of the same name), but the two could not have been more different. Among other things, Hezb-e-Haalaa had announced a policy of recognising Israel; as Dariush Ansari, the party’s founder, put it: ‘Iraq killed a million of our people in the war, but we now have normal diplomatic relations with them. In proposing the same with Israel, I am not giving my blessing to anything that nation has done, any more than our esteemed leaders who sent their ambassador to Baghdad were giving theirs to the invasion of our territory and the slaughter of our people.’

Ansari travelled with a bodyguard to discourage freelance zealots from physically rebuking him for this line of reasoning – and there was still a chance that his big mouth would get him sent to Evin Prison – but his positions on economic, legal and social reform were far less controversial and received substantial support in opinion polls. Even in a perfectly fair and open ballot, Hezb-e-Haalaa probably would not have won a majority in the Majlis – a body that had only limited power, in any case – but in combination with other reformists it could still have embarrassed the conservative president.

However, the final say on eligibility fell to the twelve-member Guardian Council, who had just declared every candidate who happened to belong to Hezb-e-Haalaa unfit to stand in the election. There would be no need to engineer the results to keep them out of the Majlis – risking fresh cries of ‘Where’s my vote?’ – now that they had been pre-emptively wiped right off the ballot.

The flight to Singapore left Sydney at the very civilised hour of nine a.m., but Martin had been up for forty-eight hours dealing with a plethora of last-minute tasks and his biological clock no longer recognised the distinction between good and bad times to travel. He spent the journey drifting fitfully in and out of sleep. Eight hours later as he strode through Changi Airport he still felt like a pared-down version of himself, an automaton with tunnel vision ignoring everything but signs that promised to take him closer to the right gate for Dubai. He actually had a ninety-minute layover, but he could never relax until he knew exactly where he had to be at departure time.

On the flight to Dubai the mental fog began to lift. He knew he’d have a headache for the next few days, but at least he was sure that he’d ticked everything off his list and wouldn’t have to send a stream of emails back to Sydney begging people to tie up loose ends for him. If the plane went down over the Indian Ocean he could drown in peace, with no fear of real estate agents blacklisting him in the afterlife for failing to dryclean his curtains.

The passenger in the seat beside him was a telecommunications engineer named Haroun who was headed for Abu Dhabi. When Martin explained that he was going to be covering the Iranian election, Haroun replied good-naturedly that he doubted it would be as newsworthy as the previous, presidential vote. Martin couldn’t argue with that prognosis; after the turmoil of 2009 this was likely to be the most tightly managed poll in decades. Still, no one believed that the fire beneath the ashes had been extinguished.

In his present state it was pointless re-reading his background notes on the election; he slipped on his headphones and started up iTunes. The music library software had provisions for storing cover art and he’d started out taking photos of each album himself, but it had been hard to get the lighting and the angles right, so he’d ended up grabbing images off the net instead. Many of the sleeves had also included lyrics, notes or extra artwork, but he hadn’t had time to digitise any of that. The day before he’d flown out he’d taken the crates to a charity shop in Glebe, but they’d told him that unless he had collectors’ items, vinyl wasn’t worth their shelf space. By now, it would all be landfill.

Martin flipped through the cover art. It was certainly a richer cue for memory than a mere list of names, but though the images had been endowed with perspective and reflections in some imagined glossy shelf-top, the faux-3D effects made it look like a museum exhibit trying too hard.

No matter; he had the music itself, and that was the main thing. He’d even diligently backed up everything to an external drive; his laptop could fry itself and these memories would still survive intact.

He wanted to hear something by Paul Kelly, but he couldn’t make up his mind where to start so he let the software choose. ‘St Kilda to King’s Cross’ filled the headphones; Martin closed his eyes and leant back in the seat, beaming nostalgically. Next came ‘To Her Door’, a song about a break-up and reconciliation. Martin kept smiling, focusing on the power and simplicity of the lyrics, refusing to countenance any connection to his own life.

Something made a loud crackling noise. He tugged off the headphones, wondering if he was missing an emergency announcement by the pilot. But the plane was silent, save for the engines’ monotonous drone, and he could see a flight attendant chatting calmly with a passenger. Perhaps it had been some kind of electrical interference.

Halfway through the next song, ‘You Can’t Take It With You’, he heard the crackling sound again. He paused the song, skipped back a few seconds and replayed the same section. The noise was there again, as if it was part of the recording itself. But it didn’t sound like dust on the stylus, a scratch on the vinyl, or some random electronic pollution that had snuck into the circuitry from a mobile phone or fluorescent light. As Kelly’s voice surged it became the noise, as if something mechanical inside the headphones might be scraping against its housing when the sound became too loud. But when Martin replayed the track with the volume turned down two notches, the noise was still there.

He started playing other tracks at random. His heart sank; about a third of them had the same problem, as if someone had gone through his record collection with a piece of sandpaper. He pictured Liz flipping through the crates in the dark, urged on by the ghost of Peter Cook from Bedazzled. But petty vindictiveness wasn’t her style.

Haroun said, ‘You seem very angry with that machine. You’re welcome to borrow my laptop if it’s any help.’

Martin wondered nervously if the obscenities that had been running through his head had remained entirely unvocalised; it didn’t take much erratic behaviour for an overzealous flight marshal to pump you full of horse tranquilliser and lock you in the toilet. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he replied, ‘but it’s nothing urgent. And I don’t think the problem’s with this laptop.’ He explained what he’d done with his music collection. ‘I checked the first seven or eight albums and everything sounded perfect.’

‘May I listen?’

‘Sure.’ Martin cued up an example of the strange blemish and passed Haroun the headphones.

After a moment Haroun gave a smile of grim satisfaction. ‘That’s wave shaping. I’m afraid you’re right: there’s nothing wrong with your playback, it’s part of the recording.’

‘Wave shaping?’

‘You set the recording level too high.’

‘But I checked that! I adjusted the level when I did the first album, and it was fine for at least six more!’

Haroun said, ‘The signal strength would vary from album to album. Getting the right level for the first few would be no guarantee for all the others.’

No doubt that was true, but Martin still didn’t understand why the effect was so ruinous. ‘If the level from the turntable was too high for the computer, why doesn’t the recording just… fail to be as loud as the original? Just lose some dynamic range?’

‘Because when the level is too high,’ Haroun explained patiently, ‘you’re not shrinking the waveform, you’re decapitating it. Once the voltage exceeds the highest value the sound card can represent as data, it can’t take it upon itself to re-scale everything on the fly. It just hits the maximum and draws a plateau there, in place of the true signal’s complicated peaks. And when you truncate a wave like that, not only do you lose detail from the original, you generate noise right across the spectrum.’

‘I see.’ Martin accepted the headphones back from him and tried to laugh off the setback. ‘It seems I’ll be paying these starving musicians a few more cents after all. I just can’t believe I wasted so much time and made such a bad job of it.’

Haroun was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘Let me show you something.’ He booted up his own laptop and summoned a website from his browser’s offline cache. ‘This book is a translation into English of a story in Arabic; it was published in the nineteenth century, so it’s now in the public domain. An American company obtained a copy and scanned it, making it available to the world. Very generous of them, no?’

‘I suppose so.’ Martin couldn’t see the screen clearly from where he was sitting, but the title bar read The Slave Girl and the Caliph.

‘Optical character recognition isn’t perfect,’ Haroun said. ‘The software can sometimes recognise that there’s been a problem and call on human help to patch things up, but that process isn’t perfect, either. This story is obscure, but my grandfather gave me a copy when I was ten, so I know that the heroine is named Mariam. This digital version, scanned from the English translation, has turned the “r” and “i” in her name into an “n” throughout. Mariam has become Manam – which, other than being an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, so far as I know means nothing in any language.’

Martin said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a mistake the translator would have made. Not unless he was in the middle of an opium-smoking competition with Richard Burton.’

Haroun closed his laptop. ‘I’m sure no human was involved, beyond feeding the book down a chute, along with ten thousand others.’ He was smiling, but Martin could see the frustration in his eyes. He’d probably tried emailing these custodians of culture to put them straight, to no avail, while the grating error had seeped into mirror sites, multiplying irreversibly.

He gestured at Martin’s own damaged library. ‘With time and care everything could be preserved, but no one really has the patience.’

‘I was about to leave the country,’ Martin explained defensively. ‘I had a lot of things to do.’

Haroun inclined his head understandingly. ‘And why wouldn’t any traveller want to turn their fragile music into something robust and portable? But so many processes are effortless and automatic now that it’s easy to forget that most things in the world still play by the old rules.’

‘Yeah.’ Martin had to concede that; having treated the first few albums with care, he’d let himself imagine that the rest would follow as easily as if he’d merely been copying files from one hard drive to another.

‘We’re at the doorway to a new kind of world,’ Haroun said. ‘And we have the chance to make it extraordinary. But if we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we’re standing right now, we’re going to trip and fall flat on our faces, over and over again.’

2

‘Bidar sho! Agha Martin? Lotfan, bidar sho!’

Martin stirred, his head throbbing. He squeezed the button for the light on his watch; it was just after two in the morning. He recognised the voice: Omar, his neighbour from downstairs, was banging on the door, pleading with him to wake.

What was Farsi for fire? Martin had picked up a smattering of Dari – the Afghani dialect of Farsi – when he’d been stationed in Pakistan, but even after two months in Iran, most of it spent working with a professional translator by his side, his Farsi remained rudimentary.

‘Aatish?’ he called back. That was fire in Urdu, but he was fairly sure it was the same in both languages.

‘Na!’ Omar’s tone was impatient, but not baffled, so at least the question had made sense. ‘Lotfan, ajaleh kon!’ Omar usually spoke English with Martin, but whatever the emergency was it had apparently driven the language from his brain.

Martin switched on the bedside lamp, got into his trousers and stepped out into the entrance hall of the cramped apartment. When he opened the door, Omar was tinkering with his phone. Martin suppressed a groan of irritation; it had been bad enough in Sydney, but in Tehran nobody could go five minutes without whipping the things out and doing something pointless with them.

Omar handed the phone to Martin. Sometimes the tinkering wasn’t so pointless: the screen displayed an email message that had just been translated into English by a web service. It took Martin a while to make sense of the mangled syntax, but he suspected that in their present state he and Omar would have needed an hour playing charades to get the same information across.

There had been an accident on Valiasr Street, one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares. The two drivers, along with two passengers from one of the cars, had been taken to hospital with minor injuries. One of the passengers was Hassan Jabari, a high-ranking jurist and politician. The other passenger’s identity was unknown, but a bystander had filmed the aftermath of the accident on their phone and a still from that movie was embedded in the message.

Martin squinted at the ill-lit image of a paramedic helping a woman from the wreck. ‘Could that be his wife?’

Omar roared with laughter; his English hadn’t deserted him completely. The woman was flashily attired, with glittering pendant earrings and a tight-fitting evening gown. Tehran certainly had its Gucci set, and behind closed doors – or the tinted windows and dividing partition of a limousine – even the most respectable woman was no longer bound by the rules of hejab. But looking again at the still, he thought perhaps that was stretching the bounds of probability.

‘Okay, so it’s his mistress. Or a prostitute.’ Even so, Martin was a little surprised that Omar and his friends would treat such a revelation with anything more than cynicism. Dozens of young Iranians had told Martin that their rulers were two-faced hypocrites, moralising endlessly in public while they embezzled oil money and lived like kings. One student had shown him a famous cartoon: in the first panel, the despised former Shah cupped his hands beneath a torrent of gold falling from the sky, with just a few stray coins spilling out from between his fingers to reach his subjects below. In the second, a glowering, bearded mullah stood in the Shah’s place – and this time every last coin was caught, with nothing slipping through.

Omar wiped tears from his eyes. ‘Bebin!’

Martin looked at the picture again, wondering what he was missing. The woman was statuesque, with striking bone structure – was she a famous actress, or a singer? Perhaps it was just the poor quality of the image, but there was something theatrical, almost mask-like, in the excess of make-up she was wearing-

‘Mibinam,’ he said. ‘Mifahmam.’ He understood, now, why Omar had woken him.

Hassan Jabari, former government prosecutor and current member of the Guardian Council – the body that had declared more than two thousand aspiring candidates for last month’s election to be insufficiently loyal to the principles of Islam – had just been caught in his chauffeured Mercedes Benz in the middle of the night in the company of a glamorous, begowned transsexual.

‘Berim be-’ Martin struggled.

‘Hospital?’ Omar suggested.

‘Dorost,’ Martin agreed.

Behrouz, Martin’s translator, had taken a fortnight’s leave to visit his parents. With the non-event of the election over and half the country shut down for Noruz, the Persian New Year, Martin was officially on leave himself, but he’d decided to stay in Tehran and catch up on paperwork.

As they drove into the city, Martin contemplated the task ahead of him with unease. He recoiled from the prospect of treating anyone’s sex life as news – least of all when there was a potential death penalty hanging over the participants – but the email was already circulating, the revelation a fait accompli. The real story now was not Jabari’s behaviour, but the way the regime and the public would respond to the exposure of his hypocrisy.

‘We should call him “Hugh Grant” Jabari,’ Omar suggested – rather proudly, as if the time was long overdue for an Iranian celebrity to grab the attention of the international tabloid media.

‘I’m pretty sure Hugh Grant was caught with a woman,’ Martin said.

Omar racked his brain. “‘Forty-Eight Seconds” Jabari.’

‘Keep this up and you’ll be hosting the Oscars.’

Omar owned a shop that sold consumer electronics – and the odd bootleg DVD under the counter. His English had come back to him completely now, but Martin wished he wasn’t so reliant here on Omar’s help. Omar was a partisan player in all this, an unashamed pro-reformist; Martin was grateful for his tip-off, but it would be both naïve and unfair to expect him to act as an impartial colleague, like Behrouz.

They drove down Taleghani Avenue, past the ‘Den of Espionage’ formerly known as the US Embassy. The walls of the compound were emblazoned with bombastic slogans – helpfully translated into English for the edification of tourists – and a series of murals that included a skull-faced Statue of Liberty that would not have looked out of place on a Metallica album. Even at this hour Tehran’s traffic made Martin nervous, with the ubiquitous Samands and old fume-belching Paykans weaving between lanes without warning, and motorbikes zigzagging into every tiny space that opened up before them.

As he turned his company Peugeot Pars into the cramped hospital car park he hoped they hadn’t arrived too late. In a perfect Orwellian police state, Jabari’s companion – and every witness to the crash – would already have vanished without a trace, but Tehran was a very long way from Cold War East Berlin. He doubted that Jabari’s double life had been an open secret among the rigidly pious regime’s upper echelon, and while elements of VEVAK, the intelligence service, might have known about it – keeping it on file for a time when a political favour was needed – it would not surprise him in the least if they had not yet even heard about the accident; the email had been distributed in encrypted form to a relatively small number of people. In the first instance Jabari’s driver would be charged with keeping everything under wraps, but if he were out of action, who would call in the fixers?

Martin turned to Omar. ‘So what does a paramedic do when he comes across a man dressed as a woman?’ He was assuming Jabari’s companion was pre-operative, though that wasn’t necessarily the case; Ayatollah Khomeini, no less, had issued a startlingly enlightened fatwa in the eighties, declaring that gender reassignment surgery was a perfectly acceptable practice.

Omar said, ‘For a heroin addict lying in an alley, who knows? But for this, I think he acts like he doesn’t notice. Why make te-rouble?’

Martin pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. A male paramedic had an excuse to play dumb, but what happened when a female doctor examined the patient more closely? Notwithstanding Khomeini’s ruling, there was no guarantee that a man who took oestrogen and put on an evening gown was going to sail through the segregated medical system without igniting some form of commotion.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he asked Omar. ‘If I screw things up myself, the worst anyone’s going to do to me is deport me.’

Omar looked irritated. ‘I want you here as a witness, but no way you could do it alone. Berim.’

It was a busy night; Omar spent ten minutes in a queue at the reception desk before a polite but harried woman could speak with him. Martin stood at his shoulder and tried to follow the conversation without letting the effort show. Omar said his wife had been in an accident. What was her name? Khanom Jabari: Ms Jabari. Martin’s skin crawled at the audacity of it, but this scenario offered them their only chance. Iranian women kept their family names when they married; Hassan Jabari’s sister would remain Khanom Jabari. If Jabari’s companion was still passing as a woman, it would surely be too risky to register as his wife, so claiming to be his sister was the only respectable option left.

The receptionist typed something into her computer, then glanced up at Omar. ‘Shokouh Jabari?’ She gave a date of birth.

‘Dorost, dorost,’ Omar replied impatiently, as if these details were trivially familiar to him. Martin waited to see if the receptionist would ask Omar to confirm his own name against a recorded next of kin, but she had better things to do. ‘Bekhosh shishom,’ she said. Ward six? Omar was already walking.

Martin caught up with him. ‘Your first wife will be thrilled by this addition to the family,’ he joked.

‘Fuck you!’ Omar snapped back angrily. Martin was startled by the intensity of his reaction, but on reflection he realised that he had no right to be surprised. Omar loathed political and religious extremism, but the DVDs under his counter tended more to Rambo than Transamerica; on this issue he was probably to the right of the ayatollahs. He was here for the sake of political expediency; this was not some humanitarian rescue mission.

At the entrance to the ward, Omar spoke with the nurse on duty; she glanced inquiringly at Martin, and Omar said something that sounded like dayeam: my uncle. The nurse summoned someone else to organise the visit; fifteen minutes later the two of them were led into a small, curtained-off space, where a figure dressed in a baggy grey manteau and a black shawl and head-scarf sat in a wheelchair, one foot bandaged and elevated. For a moment Martin thought there’d been a mistake, but the hospital must have supplied the modest clothing. The angular face beneath the scarf was the face from the emailed image of the crash site.

The three of them were left alone.

‘Salaam khanom,’ Omar greeted Shokouh nervously. ‘Chetorin?’

‘Bad nistam,’ Shokouh replied. ‘Shoma chetorin?’ Martin found it hard to judge how her voice would sound to a native speaker; she spoke quietly in a slightly reedy falsetto, but it was not forced or uneven.

‘Tell her we’re her friends,’ Martin said, ‘or she’ll think Jabari sent us.’ Shokouh looked up at him, startled, and he realised he’d just managed to put that idea right out of her head. ‘Ruznaame negaaram,’ he explained. I’m a journalist.

Omar spoke in a low voice; Martin could follow only a small part of what he was saying. Shokouh replied, heatedly, at length.

‘She wants to go to Europe,’ Omar announced, dismayed. ‘She’ll only come with us if we es-wear to get her to la France.’ On their drive into the city Omar had mentioned safe houses, but his plans clearly hadn’t stretched as far as Paris.

Martin said nothing. He still had the phone numbers of some people-smugglers in Quetta he’d interviewed for a story a few years before, but he decided against offering Omar an introduction; the smugglers had sometimes dealt with Iranian clients, but he doubted that Shokouh would be safe travelling through Baluchistan, even fully veiled in a burqa. In any case, he was meant to be covering this story, not orchestrating it.

‘Maybe there’s a way,’ Omar mused. He sounded doubtful, but then he added decisively, ‘If we do it, we should do it quickly. Before everyone wakes up and knows what they’re missing.’ He spoke with Shokouh again, and they seemed to reach an agreement. He told Martin, ‘I get the-’ He mimed crutches, and disappeared in search of a nurse.

‘Ingilisi baladin?’ Martin asked Shokouh.

‘Very less,’ she replied. ‘Parlez-vous français?’

‘Une petite peu.’ He’d studied it in high school, but by now his French was probably worse than his Farsi.

Shokouh lowered her gaze to the floor. Martin set his frustration aside; if Omar could pull off this miracle, Sandra Knight in the Paris bureau could interview her face-to-face in a language they both spoke fluently. Even if he’d had Behrouz beside him it would have made little difference; whatever promises of discretion he’d offered, Shokouh would have to be crazy to disclose a long list of potentially suicidal details while she was still in the country.

Omar returned with a pair of crutches and together they helped Shokouh to her feet. There was some paperwork to complete, but Shokouh had already been medically cleared to be discharged.

As they were leaving the ward, the nurse stopped them. There was a brief exchange before they moved off down the corridor. Once the nurse was out of sight, Omar’s forced smile evaporated, and he urged them forward.

‘What was that about?’ Martin asked.

‘She said Khanom Jabari’s cousin has arrived at reception, wanting to make a visit. I said tell him we’ll meet him there. But maybe he doesn’t want to wait.’

‘Okay.’ Martin digested the news. ‘At least it wasn’t another husband; that would have been awkward.’

They reached an intersection with a side corridor; Omar tilted his head and Martin took Shokouh’s arm and helped her to make a sharp right turn.

They should have borrowed the wheelchair, Martin realised belatedly. This was hopeless; the ‘cousin’ would reach the ward and double back to find them before they could get even halfway to the car park, and if he had colleagues covering the exits-

‘We’re screwed,’ he said.

‘Not yet,’ Omar declared.

Martin glanced at Shokouh. She was hobbling as quickly as she could, but her face was tensed against the pain. They’d moved away from the wards into some kind of service area, and only every third of the ceiling bulbs were lit.

Omar tried a series of doors in succession until he found one that opened into a tiny utilities room. There was a mop, bucket, cleaning products, and a small sink. Omar and Shokouh had a terse exchange.

Martin said, ‘What’s the plan? We can’t hide in here all night.’

‘You hide. I’ll send someone to get you.’

‘Me? It’s not me they’re looking for.’

‘We need your ca-lothes,’ Omar explained. ‘For disguise.’

Martin’s stomach clenched painfully. ‘No, no, no!’ He gestured at Shokouh. ‘It won’t work! Look at her eyebrows!’

Omar addressed her in Farsi. Shokouh took off her scarf and shawl; the earrings from the crash were long gone. She went to the sink and, with the aid of a few drops of floor-cleaner, washed off every trace of make-up. Then she ran wet fingers through her thick black hair, quickly reshaping it. The end result was a slightly dated male Persian pop-star look, the fringe flopping down to all but conceal her forehead. With no pencil darkening her plucked eyebrows, close up she looked more like a burn victim than anything else.

Martin said, ‘Whoever’s looking for her, they’ll know she can pass as a man.’

‘But if we’re quick,’ Omar countered, ‘they won’t expect it. The nurse will tell them one woman, two men.’

There was no denying that a rapid switch could improve the odds. Tehran had dozens of crashes every night; the injured would be coming and going until morning. So long as they could sneak out of the wing unseen, a young man on crutches crossing the car park with a male friend would not be an obvious target – and anyone trying to maintain a low profile for Jabari could hardly throw a cordon around the hospital and check everyone’s sex before letting them pass.

Martin steeled himself. He couldn’t tell Omar to do the swap himself; it was clear which one of them was the better fit. Lurking half-naked in the women’s wing of an Iranian hospital was not a risk-free proposition, but the truth was, he was more afraid of humiliation than any actual physical harm.

‘Okay,’ he said.

Omar left them. Martin turned his back on Shokouh as they undressed. When he handed her his clothes it was impossible not to notice her breasts, but the sweater he’d worn was loose, and would be looser still on her; this was not a lost cause, not yet. She handed him her own trousers and manteau, and after a moment’s hesitation he put them on; it was worth it for the warmth alone, and there was nothing blatantly effeminate about the garments to creep him out. In fact, he could have walked down any street in Pakistan dressed like this; it was almost the same as a unisex shalwar kameez.

Martin opened the door. Omar saw him and pressed his fist into his mouth, stifling a guffaw, but he regained his composure rapidly.

‘Car keys,’ he demanded. Martin handed them over.

‘My fe-riend will be-ring you ca-lothes,’ Omar stuttered, battling his way through the English tongue-twisters.

Shokouh picked up the crutches that were leaning against the sink. ‘Merci,’ she whispered.

‘Bonne chance,’ Martin replied.

He closed the door and stood in the dark, listening to the sound of the crutches as she moved down the corridor, hoping the hospital’s cleaners wouldn’t start their shift before dawn.

3

‘Guardian Council member Mr Hassan Jabari,’ Behrouz translated, ‘left hospital today after recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident three nights ago. Police have interviewed the driver of the other vehicle, but found that nobody was at fault.’ He turned away from his computer screen to see how Martin was taking the press release.

‘No appeal for witnesses?’ Martin replied, struggling to concentrate. Their cramped office in the outskirts of Tehran sat directly over a bakery; three or four times a day the aroma wafting up from the ovens became impossible to ignore.

‘Apparently not. I expect they got everything they needed from YouTube.’

Martin smiled. YouTube was blocked in Iran, but Shokouh’s Paris interview, along with the anonymous bystander’s movie of the crash scene, had been posted on dozens of other websites. Each time the official blacklist was updated to screen them out, the files turned up somewhere else. Internet download speeds in Iran were severely limited – by law, not by infrastructure – but in the past twenty-four hours Martin hadn’t met a single adult Tehrani who had not seen both movies.

So far, though, the government hadn’t blinked. Martin had phoned three different ministries seeking a comment, but nobody was willing to go on the record, not even to denounce Shokouh’s words as slander. ‘Do you seriously expect an official statement every time a prostitute claims to have a politician as a client?’ one bureaucrat had demanded incredulously.

‘What about the movie of the crash site?’ Martin had pressed him. ‘Doesn’t that support her version of events?’ Martin had briefly contemplated trying to track down the paramedics – whose faces were pixellated-out in the public version – but he’d decided he had no right to compound the dangers they already faced.

‘If such a movie exists, it’s a Zionist forgery.’

‘Can I quote you on that?’ Martin had warmed to this conspiracy theory, but it needed a bit more work. Maybe Shokouh could be portrayed as a Mossad agent who had made the ultimate sacrifice, purely for the sake of embarrassing the Iranian regime. Or, as it turned out, not quite the ultimate sacrifice, which only compounded the embarrassment.

In the absence of a black ops extraction team with helicopters and night-vision goggles, Omar had managed to get Shokouh a doctored passport and a second fake husband – this one to escort her from the country and take the focus off her own documents. That she’d made it through the airport at all suggested that the ‘cousin’ at the hospital had been acting for Jabari alone; VEVAK, mercifully, appeared to have dozed through the whole thing.

Martin’s phone chimed. There was a message from Kambiz, a student he’d met in the run-up to the election; it read ‘Please go to Ferdowsi Square.’

Downstairs, people were lined up outside the bakery for the lunchtime rush, men and women in separate queues. Some carried their stacks of flatbread from the serving window to a cooling table, compounding the olfactory lure. When Martin slowed down to savour the smell, Behrouz grabbed his elbow and tugged him through the crowd towards the alley where their car was parked.

They reached Ferdowsi Square just as the demonstration was getting underway. About thirty young men and women had gathered on a grassy traffic island around a statue of the famous poet. They were holding up signs, all bearing the same slogan: haalaa entekhaab-e-taazeh! Martin had no trouble reading Persian script when the calligraphy wasn’t overly ornate – the alphabet was almost the same as Urdu – and in this case the individual words could not have been more familiar: New Election Now!

The signs themselves offered no English translation; though that might have made for wider coverage in the Western media, it would have opened up the protesters to accusations that they were British or American stooges. Nor was there any reference to Jabari to attract charges of defamation. But the slogan appeared to have hit the right note; Ferdowsi Square was one of the busiest roundabouts in the city, and most of the passing drivers were honking and cheering over the roar of the traffic.

Martin spotted Kambiz, but when their eyes met the young man looked right through him; Martin respected his wish not to be singled out as the reason a foreign journalist was here. There were no police yet, and only one other reporter – Zahra Amin, from the reformist weekly Emkaanha – but Kambiz wouldn’t need to be paranoid to worry that there might be informers among the demonstrators themselves. Martin headed for the opposite side of the group to Zahra, to avoid having to compete with her for interviews. He and Behrouz approached a young, plainly dressed woman and introduced themselves. Her name was Fariba; she was studying engineering at Tehran University. Martin asked her permission to record the interview on his phone; he no longer carried a separate audio recorder. She baulked at first, until he showed her the controls and satisfied her that he would not be recording vision.

‘You’re calling for a new election,’ Martin began. ‘What was wrong with the one you’ve just had?’

‘Two thousand candidates were banned from taking part,’ Behrouz translated. ‘That’s not a fair election. People wanted to vote for many of those candidates, but they didn’t have a chance.’

‘But isn’t it too late to complain now? Wouldn’t it have been better to protest before the election?’

‘We did protest! We were ignored. The government didn’t listen at all.’ As she spoke, Martin kept his eyes on Fariba’s face and paid close attention to her tone of voice, letting Behrouz’s unimpassioned words seep into his mind through a separate channel.

‘So what conditions are you calling for, if a new election is held?’

‘It must be open to anyone who wishes to stand. The approval of the Guardian Council should not be required.’

‘But isn’t that role written into the Constitution?’ Martin asked. ‘It can’t be discarded overnight.’

Fariba hesitated. ‘That’s true, but the Guardian Council should make a commitment to do their job impartially and only disqualify real criminals, instead of everyone with different political ideas. That would be a gesture of good faith, a way of showing that they trust their own people. We’re not children. They’ve put themselves above us, but they are not above us. They’re ordinary people, no better than anyone else.’

Martin knew better than to press her to comment directly on the Jabari scandal; that last oblique sentence would have to suffice. And while the Western media were, predictably, chortling over Jabari’s indiscretion – Omar’s fondest wish having been granted by everyone from CNN to Saturday Night Live – the political ramifications of the phrase they are not above us had a potential life that stretched far beyond Jabari’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Martin thanked her, and went on to seek comments from some more of the demonstrators. He was halfway through his third interview, with a goateed accounting student named Majid, when Behrouz broke off in mid-sentence. A green police car had pulled up on the island, one side of the vehicle still protruding into the road, and three uniformed officers disembarked.

The senior officer was carrying a megaphone; he raised it to his lips. ‘You are instructed by the Chief of Police to move on,’ Behrouz translated. ‘This gathering is a distraction for drivers and a threat to public safety.’

‘We’re big fans of public safety!’ one demonstrator shouted in reply. ‘Drivers should keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel at all times!’ Majid and the others laughed, and Martin saw the two junior officers struggling to keep themselves from cracking up.

‘You are instructed to disperse,’ the senior officer persisted. ‘This is a reasonable and lawful request.’ He didn’t sound particularly vehement, or particularly confident that anyone would obey him.

‘People like our signs!’ Majid called back. ‘We’re not distracting anyone.’ One of the cops came over and asked to check Martin’s papers, but he wasn’t belligerent about it, chatting matter-of-factly with Behrouz and trying out his English.

‘I like Australia,’ he said, returning Martin’s passport. ‘We beat you at football last year.’

‘Mubaarak,’ Martin replied. Congratulations. He’d long ago given up hope of finding a country anywhere in the world where it was safe to tell total strangers that he had no interest in sport whatsoever.

A small motorbike with a pillion passenger drove up onto the grass, closely followed by three more. The young men on the bikes wore dark glasses, army boots and green-and-brown camouflage trousers; some had full beards, but most were clean-shaven. Martin couldn’t see any firearms, but at least two of the men were carrying batons.

‘Basij or Ansar-e-Hezbollah?’ he wondered aloud; both paramilitary groups had a habit of showing up at demonstrations. Martin was expecting Behrouz to answer, but it was the cop who replied, ‘Basij.’

Two of the Basijis strode to the front of the assembly. The policemen did nothing, but Majid went to join the ranks of his companions. Martin couldn’t see Zahra any more; there were too many people crowding the island. He switched his phone to video mode, hoping the battery would hold out.

‘Put down the signs, you traitors!’ one Basiji began. ‘We’ve had the election! The honest Iranian people have spoken. We don’t need you parasites to tell us what to think.’ Martin heard the buzz of small engines yet again; more Basijis were arriving.

Some of the demonstrators began jeering angrily. There was too much for Behrouz to translate at once, and most of the fragments he offered sounded so idiomatic or obscure that they added nothing to the obvious body language. Martin tensed; he knew what was coming next. In Pakistan he’d covered protests that ended in gunfire, in bomb blasts, in visits to the morgue, but he hadn’t become desensitised; none of that had inured him to lesser acts of violence. Before the first blow had even been struck a voice inside him was already screaming at the Basijis to stop.

Instead, they started: with fists, batons, boots. They were aiming for the placards, but they pummelled and tore at everything that lay in their path. The demonstrators were not outnumbered, but they were hemmed in on all sides. They were attempting to regroup to protect the women, and at the same time trying to hold on to the placards and keep them aloft as a gesture of defiance. The men being beaten on the perimeter were quickly becoming dazed and bloody, but it was hard for their comrades to pull them back from the front line without ceding ground. Martin heard brakes squealing. He swung around. A tarpaulin-covered truck had stopped dead in the road, and for one terrible moment he had a vision of soldiers with automatic weapons piling out. But nobody emerged from the back of the truck, just the driver and two companions from the cab. They were solidly built middle-aged men, in work clothes, not uniforms, and they threw themselves into the fray with a grim, unflinching determination that reminded Martin of one of his uncles trying to separate feral cousins at a family gathering thirty years before. He filmed one of the men grabbing a baton-wielding Basiji under the arms and flinging him back onto the grass as if hefting a sack of potatoes.

In rapid succession there was a mosquito whine of more bikes arriving, angry shouting from the road, then another group of civilians joining the fight. Underneath his struggle to remain detached and simply record the details, Martin felt a mixture of admiration and dread. Most Iranians had no tolerance for seeing defenceless people being beaten, and they weren’t shy about taking on thugs. But one punch-up on Ferdowsi Square would not settle anything. Unless someone within the regime came up with a political solution, people’s frustration at the repression and hypocrisy they faced would continue to escalate – until the only possible response was a full-scale, bloody crackdown: 2009 all over again.

Martin could see nothing at ground level now but a scrum of backs and furious elbows, but someone deep within the pack, propped up by companions to a visible height, was still holding one of the placards over their heads. As Martin tilted the phone to capture the sight, a Basiji turned and glared at him.

‘Hey, motherfucker! Hand it over!’ He seemed to have learnt English from one of Omar’s DVDs – perhaps the mujahedin-friendly Rambo III. As the Basiji approached, baton in hand, Martin lowered the phone and looked around for an escape route, but between the vehicles parked on the roadside and the brawling mob spread across the grass, he was fenced in.

Behrouz caught his eye; in all the turmoil they’d become separated and he’d ended up about twenty metres away, near the edge of the square’s ornamental pool. He held up his hand and Martin tossed the phone to him, half expecting it to end up in the water as punishment for his lifelong neglect of ball skills. But Behrouz caught it, and without a moment’s hesitation dashed out into the traffic and vanished behind an approaching truck. Martin froze, waiting for an ominous squeal and a thump, but the sound never came.

‘Khub bazi,’ muttered the cop admiringly. The Basiji grimaced and spat on the ground, but did not give chase. Martin’s heart was pounding. Behrouz had his own keys to the car, which was parked a few hundred metres away; he’d get the phone to safety, then come back.

Martin turned to the cop. ‘So, how do you feel when passing truck drivers have to do your job for you?’

The cop looked wounded. He held out his hands, wrists together. We can’t interfere. Our hands are tied.

4

Nasim called in sick and prepared to spend the day at home, watching rumours and snippets of news ricochet between the satellite channels and the Persian blogosphere. She didn’t have to go through the charade of making her voice sound pitifully hoarse and congested; the department’s new personnel system made it as simple as choosing an option on her phone’s menu, and for a single day’s absence she wouldn’t need a medical certificate.

The truth was, she really did have a cold coming on, which always happened when she was short of sleep, but normally she would have brushed off the symptoms and joined her colleagues in the lab. Her mother was more disciplined; she too had stayed up half the night, channel-hopping beside Nasim, but she’d still gone in to work. Her students needed her, she’d declared. Ordinary life couldn’t grind to a halt just because there were people battling for the future of their country half a world away.

Nasim sat in the living room with her laptop beside her, listening for the ping of News Alerts while she cycled the TV between the BBC, Al Jazeera and IRIB. The Iranian government had ordered the country’s internet providers to shut down all domestic accounts and coffeenets, but they had not yet disabled business access or international phone lines, so journalists and some bloggers were still getting news out. Nasim suspected that the government didn’t really care; they were far more interested in keeping their own people in the dark than they were in fretting over international opinion.

IRIB, the national broadcaster, wasn’t ignoring the unrest, but it was covering it as a kind of social malaise arising directly out of unemployment. The poor state of the economy was not an unmentionable topic, but the network’s commentators blathered platitudes about the need for people to be patient and give the ‘new’ Majlis time to address the problem.

Nasim had almost dozed off when a brief coda to IRIB’s main news bulletin brought her fully awake. ‘Guardian Council member Mr Hassan Jabari says his research into the drug problem has been misrepresented by malicious elements of the foreign media.’ Nasim thumbed up the volume. ‘Mr Jabari issued a statement in Tehran this afternoon, describing a recent visit he made to an area of the city frequented by drug users, in order to gain insight into this tragedy. Having met one confused young man in urgent need of spiritual counselling, Mr Jabari agreed to drive him to his own mosque, in order to obtain advice from the mullah there. Unfortunately Mr Jabari’s car was involved in an accident, and now his act of charity has been portrayed in some quarters as an act of immorality. Mr Jabari stated that he would not take legal action against the slanderers, as his reputation among honest Iranians has not been affected by these lies.’

Nasim experienced a strange sense of cultural dislocation. This sounded exactly like the kind of story a senator in Washington might try to spin, as an intermediate step between the initial flat-out denial and the inevitable, tearful press conference with spouse, booking into rehab and finding of Jesus. She tried to picture Hassan Jabari standing at a podium with his wife beside him, blaming everything on prescription pills, then announcing that he was off to Qom for six months to get in touch with his spiritual side.

The doorbell rang. Nasim ignored it, hoping it was an easily discouraged Jehovah’s Witness, but the caller was persistent. She muted the TV and walked down the hall.

She opened the door to a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who asked, ‘Nasim Golestani?’ When Nasim nodded, she went on, ‘My name’s Jane Frampton, I’m a science journalist. I was hoping to have a word with you.’

‘A journalist?’

Frampton must have mistaken Nasim’s expression of alarm for some kind of struggle to place her name, because she added helpfully, ‘You might remember me from such New York Times bestsellers as The Sociobiology of The Simpsons and The Metaphysics of Melrose Place.’

‘I… don’t have much time to read outside my field,’ Nasim managed diplomatically.

‘May I come in?’

‘What is it you wanted to talk about?’ By now her mother would have had the woman ensconced in the living room, sipping tea and chewing gaz, but Nasim considered hospitality to be a greatly overrated virtue.

Frampton smiled. ‘The HCP. Off the record, of course-’

Nasim replied firmly, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible. You should direct all your questions to the MIT News Office.’

‘There’ll be no comeback, I promise,’ Frampton insisted. ‘I know how to protect my sources.’

‘I’m not a source! I don’t want to be a source!’ Nasim was bewildered. Why would any journalist go to the trouble of tracking her down? She was all in favour of academic free speech, but a costly, politically sensitive project still awaiting funding was never going to get off the ground if every postdoc who hoped to play a part in it started acting as a self-appointed spokesperson.

When she’d finally convinced Frampton that she had nothing to offer her, Nasim returned to the living room and sat with her laptop on her knees, reading the latest blog entries. Jabari’s statement was already being torn apart by dozens of expatriate Iranians, and even a few in-country bloggers had managed to get their own sardonic responses out onto foreign servers. As Nasim scrolled obsessively through the posts – all of them quoting the same tiny crumbs of information – she knew she was beginning to act pathologically, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t contributing anything to the struggle; she could sit here reading blogs all day, endorsing some views and arguing with others, but nothing she did would change the situation on the ground in Tehran or Shiraz. She should have gone to work, taken her mind off the protests, and caught up with all the news when she came home.

She glanced over at the picture of her father on the wall, impossibly young, frozen in time. What would he have expected of her? Probably not to care about anyone’s expectations. But when she followed her own instincts, ignoring her mother’s sensible example, she ended up sitting here in a masochistic stupor, hitting keys like a trained rat, aching for a reward that could never be delivered.

The doorbell rang again. Nasim tore herself away from the laptop and opened the door this time on a gaunt young man.

‘Can I help you?’ Looking at the hollows of his face she could easily have imagined that he was going door-to-door begging for food, but he was wearing a designer-label jacket that probably cost as much as a small car.

‘Are you Nasim?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Nate Caplan.’ He offered her his hand, and she shook it. In response to her sustained look of puzzlement he added, ‘My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it.’

‘Aha.’ Nasim was beginning to wonder if it was possible to overdose on cold remedies to the point of hallucinating.

‘I know I look skinny,’ Caplan continued, ‘but I have no lipid deficiencies that would lead to neurohistological abnormalities. I’ve had biopsies to confirm that. And I’m willing to give up the caloric restriction if you make it worth my while.’

Nasim knew what was happening now. This was why her contact details were supposed to be kept private, even while the Human Connectome Project remained nothing more than a set of ambitious proposals surrounded by a fog of blogospheric hype.

‘How did you get my address?’ she demanded.

Caplan gave her a co-conspirator’s smile. ‘I know you have to be careful. But I promise you, I’m not setting you up. You’ll get the money, and it will be untraceable. All I want from you in return is a guarantee that when the time comes, I’ll be the one.’

Nasim didn’t know where to start. ‘If the HCP goes ahead, the first maps will be utterly generic. We’ll be tracing representative pathways within and between a few dozen brain regions, and then extrapolating from that. And we’ll be using hundreds of different donor brains, for different regions and different tracing techniques. If you really want to kill yourself and donate your organs to science, go right ahead, but even if I took your bribe and somehow managed to get your brain included in the project… you’d have no more chance of waking up in cyberspace than if you’d donated a kidney.’

Caplan replied, more puzzled than offended, ‘Do I look like an idiot? That’s the program now. But ten years down the track, when you’ve got the bugs ironed out, I want to be the first. When you start recording full synaptic details and scanning whole brains in high resolution-’

‘Ten years?’ Nasim spluttered. ‘Do you have any idea how unrealistic that is?’

‘Ten, twenty, thirty… whatever. You’re getting in on the ground floor, so this is my chance to be there with you. I need to put the fix in early.’

Nasim said flatly, ‘I’m not taking your money. And I want to know how you got my address!’

Caplan’s previously unshakeable confidence seemed to waver. ‘Are you saying the rabbit wasn’t your idea?’

‘What rabbit?’

He took his phone from his pocket and showed her a map of the area. A small icon of a rabbit wearing a mortarboard was positioned at the location of her house. When Caplan tapped the icon with his finger, an information overlay popped up, giving her name, affiliation and research interests. The HCP wasn’t mentioned explicitly, but anyone in the know could have worked out that she belonged to a group that was hoping to be part of the project.

‘You really didn’t put that there?’ Caplan asked, clearly reluctant to abandon his original hypothesis: that Nasim had inserted herself into a map of Cambridge sights and attractions as an inconspicuous way to solicit bribes from wealthy anorexics.

‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘a bunny rabbit is not an accurate representation of my mood right now.’ She started to close the door, but Caplan held up one skinny arm and took hold of the edge.

‘I’m sure you’ll want to talk about this again,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve thought it over.’

‘I’m sure I won’t.’

‘Just give me your email address.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Nasim increased her pressure on the door and he started yielding.

‘You can always reach me through my blog!’ he panted. ‘Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future-’

He pulled his hand free just in time to avoid having it squashed between the door and the jamb. Nasim locked the door and waited in the hallway, checking through the peephole until he gave up and walked away. She went to her room and summoned the Cambridge map on her own phone. Caplan’s version hadn’t been a hoax; the inane rabbit was there, exactly as before. Somehow it had been written into the map’s public database.

Who had done this to her? How? Why? Was it a prank, or something nastier? She started mentally listing names and pondering motives, then caught herself. Instead of drifting off into a paranoid fantasy, she needed to gather some solid information.

Nasim took her phone and walked three blocks down the street. After a delay of a minute or so, the rabbit icon on the map moved to match her new position. She walked further, to a small park. Once the rabbit had caught up, she switched off the phone. Back in the house, she checked the map again, via her laptop. The rabbit was still in the park.

So nobody had disclosed her home address, as such – but her phone had taken it upon itself to broadcast her location in real-time to the world.

Using the landline, she called the department’s IT support.

‘This is Christopher, how can I help you?’

‘My name’s Nasim Golestani. I’m with Professor Redland’s group.’

‘Okay; what’s the problem?’

She explained the situation. Christopher sank into a thoughtful silence that lasted almost half a minute. Then he said, ‘You know AcTrack?’

‘No.’

‘Sure you do. It’s a reality-mining plug-in that learns about academic networking using physical proximity, along with email and calling patterns. Last semester we put it on everyone’s phones.’

The phones were supplied by the department, to ensure that everyone had compatible software; Nasim just accepted all the upgrades they sent out without even looking at them.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘so I’m running AcTrack. Is everyone else who’s running AcTrack appearing on Google Maps?’

‘No,’ Christopher conceded, ‘but you know Tinkle?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a new femtoblogging service going through a beta trial.’

‘Femtoblogging?’

‘Like microblogging, only snappier. It tells everyone in your network where you are and how you’re feeling, once a minute. Tinkle are working on ways of extracting mood and contactability data automatically from non-invasive biometrics, but that part’s not implemented yet.’

‘But why am I running it at all,’ Nasim asked wearily, ‘and why is it telling complete strangers where I am?’

‘Oh, I doubt you’re actually running a Tinkle client,’ Christopher said. ‘But on the server side, AcTrack and Tinkle are both application layers that run on a lower-level platform called Murmur. It’s possible that there’s been some glitch with Murmur – maybe a server crash that was improperly recovered and ended up corrupting some files. Tinkle does hook into Google Maps, and though it shouldn’t be putting anyone on the public database, if you don’t belong to any Tinkle Clan it might have inadvertently defaulted you to public.’

Nasim digested this. ‘So what’s the solution?’

‘I’ll contact the company that administers Murmur and see if they can get to the bottom of the problem, but that might take a while. In the meantime, you could try shutting down AcTrack; that won’t take you off the map, but it should stop the location updates.’

Following his instructions, Nasim interrupted the phone’s usual boot sequence to enter a set-up mode where she could disable AcTrack. She checked the map again. The rabbit was still present – and still proclaiming her identity – but even though the phone was switched on, the icon hadn’t moved from the park back to her house. She wouldn’t get any more door-knockers.

She thanked Christopher and hung up. The whole bizarre episode had fractured her mood; the TV and the blogs had lost their hypnotic attraction. She paced the living room, agitated. People who might have sat beside her in a classroom fifteen years before were facing batons, water-cannon and bullets. The sheer fatuousness of her own tribulations made her life here seem like a mockery.

So, what was she supposed to do? Jump on a plane to Tehran and get herself arrested at the airport? She and her mother had departed illegally; they didn’t even have Iranian passports any more. And as far as she could tell, her adopted country was already following the best possible course: keeping its grubby fingers right out this time. And if they weren’t, she doubted that the CIA was prepared to take advice from her.

The truth was, she had nothing to contribute. Whatever happened, it would all unfold without her.

Nasim picked up her phone and found the menu option for ‘I’m not as sick as I thought, I’m coming in after all.’

Instead of the usual reassuring tone confirming success, there was a disapproving buzz and an alert popped up.

‘AcTrack plug-in disabled,’ it read. ‘Unable to complete this function.’

John Redland’s group had the twelfth floor of Building 46 all to themselves. From her corner of the lab, Nasim could peer across Vassar Street at the Stata Centre, an apparition out of a cartoon fairy-tale with its façade of tilted surfaces intersecting at vertiginous angles. As an architect’s sketch or computer model it must have looked enchanting, but in real life this gingerbread house had developed all manner of leaks, cracks and snow-traps.

Nasim turned back to her computer screen, where a tentative wiring map for part of the brain of a zebra finch was slowly taking form. The map wasn’t based on any individual bird, nor was it the product of any single technique. Some of the finches who’d contributed to it had been genetically engineered so that their neurons fluoresced under UV light, with each cell body glowing in a random colour that made it stand out clearly from its neighbours; that was the famous Lichtman-Livet-Sanes ‘Brainbow’ technique, developed over at Harvard. Others had had their brains bathed in cocktails of synthetic molecules – tagged with distinctive radioisotopes – that were taken up only by cells bearing receptors for particular neurotransmitters. A third cohort had been imaged after selective labelling, with monoclonal antibodies, of the cellular adhesion molecules that bound one neuron to another. And a fourth set of birds had been subject to no chemical interventions at all, and simply had their brains peeled by an ATLUM – an Automatic Tape-collecting Lathe Ultra Microtome – into fine slices which could then be imaged by electron microscopes and reassembled in three dimensions.

Altogether, nearly a thousand finches had lived and died to create the map that lay in front of her. Nasim hadn’t personally touched a feather on their heads, though she’d watched her colleagues operating, injecting and dissecting. None of the procedures carried out on the living birds should have left them in pain, and with decent-sized cages, plenty of food and access to mates, their lives probably hadn’t been much more stressful than they would have been in the wild. Nasim was never sure exactly where she’d draw the line, though. If it had been a thousand chimpanzees instead, for a project equally distant from any urgent human need, she didn’t know if she would have found a way to rationalise it, or if she would have walked away.

The map on her screen described the posterior descending pathway, or PDP, of the birds’ vocalisation system. The contributors had all been adult males, each with a fixed song of their own that was somewhat different from the others’. Redland had chosen the PDP for the sake of those two characteristics: it controlled a single, precisely repeatable behaviour in each individual – the bird’s fixed song – but there was also a known variation between the contributors thrown into the mix: no two birds sang quite the same song. Unless the team’s mapping techniques could cope robustly with that degree of difference, making sense of anything as complex as the brains of rats who’d learnt to run different mazes would be a hopeless task.

Nasim slipped on her headphones and linked the latest draft of the zebra finch map to a software syrinx, a biomechanical model of the bird’s vocal tract. She had plenty of fancier, more quantitative ways to gauge her progress, but listening to the song these virtual neurons created seemed an apt way to judge success. The songs of the individual live birds had been recorded, and Nasim had heard them all; she knew exactly what the fast, rhythmic chirping of an adult zebra finch should sound like. As she tapped the PLAY button on the touchscreen, her shoulders tensed in anticipation.

The song was disorganised, weak and confused, more like an infant finch’s exploratory babbling than anything a confident adult would produce. She glanced at a histogram showing a set of simulated electrical measurements; the statistics confirmed that they were, still, nothing like the signals measured by micro-electrodes in the brains of real adult birds.

The different mapping techniques complemented each other, each one excelling at revealing certain aspects of the neural architecture, but for the data to be meaningfully combined she needed to find common signposts that could be used as points of alignment. It was easy to build, say, a composite human face by locating all the eyes and noses in a thousand photographs, then making sure that you merged eyes with eyes, rather than eyes with noses. But for a thousand birds with a thousand different songs encoded deep in their skulls, the signposts were subtle aspects of the neural network, and they had to be coaxed out of the partial, imperfect data that each individual map supplied. Right now, it sounded to Nasim as if she were merging pitch from one bird with tempo from another, to produce a musical concoction that was not so much generic as puréed.

She steeled herself and plunged back into the computer code for the map integration software. The task was proving more difficult than she’d expected, but she did not believe it was hopeless. She was sure that once she found the right perspective, the right mathematical point of view, the signposts would become clear.

Nasim usually brought a packed lunch with her, but all her routines were askew today. By two o’clock her concentration was failing, so she went downstairs to the Hungry Mind Café. She bought the vegetarian ragoût and took it to a table where three of her colleagues were seated.

‘How’s the revolution going?’ Judith asked her.

‘There was a big demonstration in Shiraz yesterday,’ Nasim replied. ‘Ten thousand people, according to some witnesses. Not quite a general strike, but it’s spread far beyond just students now.’

‘Have you still got relatives in Iran?’ asked Mike.

‘Yes, but I haven’t really stayed in touch with them,’ Nasim confessed. When her father had been executed, her aunts and uncles on both sides of the family had declined to speak out against his killers, and Nasim had been so angry with them that she’d cut herself off from everyone, even before she and her mother had fled. Fifteen years later she was less inclined to judge them so harshly, but she’d never tried to rebuild bridges, and the blameless cousins she’d once played with were strangers to her now.

Hunting for a chance to change the subject, she gestured at the empty plates on the table. ‘Looks like you’ve all been here for a while. So what gossip have I missed?’

‘Mike broke up with his girlfriend,’ Shen announced.

Nasim looked at Mike to see if it was true; he didn’t seem too devastated, but he didn’t deny it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It was going nowhere,’ Mike replied stoically. ‘We were philosophically incompatible: she belonged to True Love Waits… I belonged to True Love Wilts.’

‘So how can we take your mind off this tragedy?’ Nasim wondered.

Shen said, ‘Actually, we’ve been playing Thirty-Second Pitch. You want to choose one?’

‘Hmm.’ Nasim’s mind was blank, then she said, ‘Mike, you have thirty seconds to make yourself indispensable to… Amazon.’

‘Amazon?’ He grimaced with distaste. ‘I’d rather work for the IRS.’

‘Twenty-five seconds.’

‘Okay, okay.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I offer to write a psycho-linguistic compression algorithm for text. MP3s for the written word.’

‘Compression?’ Judith interjected sceptically. ‘I don’t think Kindle is facing bandwidth problems.’

‘Not compression for the sake of bandwidth,’ Mike explained, ‘compression to save the reader’s time. Abridgement. Like Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, but fully automated, and based on a rigorous scientific analysis of what readers will actually retain. With music, we know that it’s safe to strip away certain sounds that are masked by others… so surely we can figure out what words can be omitted from a great slab of Melville or Proust without altering the impression that they leave behind. People are far too busy these days to indulge in rambling, discursive novels… but if they can feel just as Prousty in two hours as they would have in eight, every word lost is time found.’

‘Moby-Dick left no impression on me at all,’ Judith said. ‘I might as well have not read it. But other people can recite long passages from it verbatim. Doesn’t that undermine the whole idea of compression?’

Mike hesitated. ‘No, it just means it will have to be tailored to individuals, based on a personal brain map. So who better for Mr Bezos to hire than someone with brain-mapping experience?’ He turned to Nasim. ‘I rest my case.’

She smiled. ‘Well done. You’re hired.’

Shen said, ‘Can you improve their recommendations algorithm while you’re at it?’

‘Once they have your brain on file,’ Mike replied, ‘everything they do for you will be beyond reproach.’

Nasim spotted Dinesh approaching, beaming ecstatically. He was carrying an opened envelope and a letter.

‘I’ve got funding for HETE!’ he exclaimed, waving the letter. ‘Lab space, equipment and ten people! For three years!’

‘Congratulations!’ Nasim glanced back at the others and caught a flicker of irritation crossing Mike’s face.

Dinesh joined them at the table. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. That was usually an empty protestation, but he sounded genuinely dazed. ‘It’s really going to happen.’

Mike said, ‘So you’re just giving up on the HCP?’

Dinesh couldn’t stop smiling. ‘What difference does this make to the HCP? That will happen or it won’t, it’s not up to me.’

Judith said, ‘Where’s the money coming from?’

‘Bill and Melinda – bless his shoddy, monopolistic software.’

‘Sure it’s not the Turd Foundation?’ Mike quipped lamely.

Judith scowled. ‘What are you, seven years old?’

Mike said, ‘Try laying some pipes. It’s not rocket science.’ He rose from his chair and walked away.

Dinesh looked baffled. ‘What did I say?’

‘He broke up with his girlfriend,’ Shen explained helpfully.

‘I’ll still be here for another two months,’ Dinesh said. ‘That’s as long as Redland has funding for me anyway. It’s not as if I’m jumping ship.’

Nasim said, ‘No one’s accusing you of deserting us.’ And it was absurd to be jealous of the funding he’d obtained when the HCP would require ten thousand times more.

HETE was Dinesh’s dream project, which he’d been planning since his undergraduate days: Human Excrement Treatment Ecosystems. An ordinary composting toilet could deal with human waste in situ, but it was still far too expensive and finicky to be much help to most of the people who faced a chronic risk of disease from poor sanitation – let alone those caught in the aftermath of a flood or an earthquake. The aim of the HETE project was to develop a whole portfolio of microbial communities that could render human waste safe in almost any situation, with an absolute minimum of labour and no expensive infrastructure. Disease prevention was the first priority, but in most cases there would also be useful by-products, such as fertiliser, solid fuel or biogas. In the most ambitious versions Dinesh had sketched out, a single ecosystem would be capable of being pushed between three or four different equilibrium states simply by nudging the population ratios of the various microbes. That way, broken or partly flooded latrines in a disaster area could be reconfigured easily – perhaps even automatically – to focus on destroying pathogens as rapidly as possible, and then switched back into more productive modes when the emergency was over.

Shen and Judith excused themselves; they’d already overrun their lunch hour. Nasim asked Dinesh if he wanted to share her ragoût – it was more filling than she’d anticipated – but he was too excited to eat.

‘My great-grandfather spent his entire life mopping out communal latrines,’ he said, ‘from the age of ten until the day he died. And there are still people doing the same job today. Human beings sweeping shit into drains that take it straight into the rivers.’

‘I am trying to eat,’ Nasim reminded him.

‘Sorry. I know it’s not a pleasant subject. I just want my own grandkids to be able to say that nobody is stuck with the same disgusting work.’

‘Yeah. I hope so, too.’

‘This is going to be a huge challenge,’ Dinesh admitted soberly. ‘The microbes living in our gut already outnumber our own body cells ten to one. Now we have to mimic and extend and improve upon that system, outside the body, in a safe, robust way. Dozens of species, thousands of genes, millions of interactions.’ He looked up at Nasim and smiled. ‘We’ll need the best bioinformatics expert we can find.’

‘Aha.’ Nasim put down her fork. It seemed everyone was trying to ambush her today.

‘Of course I’d have to follow standard procedures,’ Dinesh explained, almost apologetically. ‘I’d have to advertise the job and look at all the applicants. But from your experience here alone, I’m sure you’d leave everyone else for dead.’

‘Umm…’

Dinesh laughed. ‘I promise you, you won’t need a face mask. You can sit in a nice clean office analysing metabolic networks all day; nobody’s going to ask you to dig pit latrines.’

‘Can I think about this?’ she pleaded. Turning down a bribe from that idiot Caplan had been easy, because she’d simply had no power to give him what he wanted. But not only was Dinesh’s project worthy, she couldn’t even claim that it was beyond her ability.

Dinesh seemed to sense that he was losing her. He said, ‘I know the brain will always be sexier than the bowel. I didn’t exactly run away from the chance to work with Redland myself. But if we’re going to use technology to improve ourselves, this is the place to start: engineering a second gut that sits in the ground, banishing cholera and turning waste into fuel and fertiliser. Isn’t that every bit as amazing as a brain implant, in its own way? You could even think of it as a rehearsal for the HCP – because some of the deep, underlying network dynamics is sure to be the same. It wouldn’t be taking you far from your current path. It would all be experience; nothing you learnt would be wasted.’

With that, he ran out of steam; he just stopped and waited for her reply. Nasim couldn’t argue with anything he’d said, and though she still felt somewhat flustered to be put on the spot, she could hardly blame him for asking. Every time he’d discussed the project with her in the past, she’d told him how much she admired the idea.

But she’d worked too hard to get where she was to risk taking a detour. It was one thing to say that, in principle, it was all good experience, but she knew what the competition would be like for the HCP, and she knew which projects would shift her résumé towards the top of the pile, and which would shift it towards the bottom.

She said, ‘You’ll find someone else for the job. Someone who’s as keen on the whole thing as you are.’

Dinesh slumped against the table theatrically, trying to look suitably disappointed, but he was obviously still elated that the project was going ahead at all. ‘Ah well. If you’d said yes that would have been perfect, but it was too much to expect.’

When he’d left, Nasim sat toying with the unappetising remains of her cold ragoût. How would it feel, she wondered, to know you’d been part of an endeavour that had saved a few million lives? Such a triumph was no foregone conclusion, of course, but now that she’d ruled out any part in it for herself it was hard not to feel a twinge of regret. Fate and distance had robbed her of her chance to rage against the ayatollahs; missing out on the war against cholera and dysentery had been her choice alone.

Still, the brain beckoned. Trying to turn a blurred jigsaw puzzle of snapshots from a thousand dead finches into something that could mimic their song was a very strange job, but she had to keep hoping that it would be good for something eventually.

5

Martin left his office at ten o’clock in order to cover the protest scheduled for noon outside the Majlis, but by the time he and Behrouz arrived at Baharestan Square the crowd already filled the street and they could get no closer than the Mosque of Sepahsalar, a hundred metres south of the centre of the gathering. Martin’s permit to travel to Shiraz had, unsurprisingly, come too late for him to cover the big march there the week before, but it looked as if the Tehranis were determined to outdo their cousins and reclaim the record for the biggest demonstration since the fall of the Shah. Police lined the street, and though they were heavily outnumbered and were not intervening so far, every one of the protesters would be aware of the bashings and shootings by militia in this very location, just three years before. Simply being here took a great deal of courage.

The Mosque of Sepahsalar also functioned as a madrassa, and Martin took the opportunity to buttonhole a few of the young men who were squeezing their way through the crowd to reach its gates. Most of these pious Islamic students turned out to be noncommittal, rather than angrily opposed to the protests. ‘The people have many legitimate grievances,’ one ventured. ‘I won’t march with them, but they deserve to be heard.’ The uprising had become far too broad to be dismissed as a conspiracy of traitors and stooges; apart from a solid core of die-hard loyalists who refused to accept any criticism of the regime, many conservative Iranians had started to take a highly jaundiced view of the status quo. Once your children had been jobless for a decade, the streets were flooded with heroin and the guardians of morality had proven themselves to be hypocrites, what was left to fear from reformists who preached transparency and offered new economic ideas?

Certainly the demographics were changing: this crowd was dotted with grey-haired men in suit coats, and there were quite a few middle-aged women. Most of the latter declined to be interviewed, but Martin managed to get a quote from one woman who looked to be in her fifties. ‘I marched against the Shah,’ Behrouz translated, ‘because he shot his own people and imprisoned his opponents. Why wouldn’t I march against thugs in clerical robes who think they can settle disputes the same way?’

Given that she was willing to speak so plainly, Martin decided to risk asking her opinion of Jabari.

She smiled. ‘Really, I don’t care about that stupid man. It gives us all some encouragement to see a tyrant with his trousers around his ankles, but having seen it once we don’t need to stop and stare.’

Martin had been trying to wend his way through the crowd towards the Majlis as he fished for vox pops, but a steady stream of people were squeezing in from other directions, and he still couldn’t catch a glimpse of the parliament’s distinctive pyramid-shaped chamber. Whether or not the symbolism was intentional, the architectural heart of Iranian democracy was dwarfed and obscured by the tall, rectangular towers full of government offices that rose up beside it, so you could only see the thing itself if you were standing directly in front of it.

Still, he’d come within sight of the core of the protest, where placards and banners were thicker on the ground. The original slogan – New Election Now! – had been replaced by a single word: Referendum! That might have sounded tame to outsiders, or just plain cryptic, but no Iranian would be in any doubt as to what it meant. The 1979 referendum had approved the present constitution; to call for a new referendum was to call for a change in the whole system of government.

Martin’s phone emitted a forlorn beep. He took it from his pocket, expecting to find that the battery was flat, but the message on the screen read NO SIGNAL.

He held it up to Behrouz. ‘What about yours?’

Behrouz checked. ‘Same thing. It looks like they’ve shut down the phones.’

Martin felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. Blocking internet access had made it harder for the protesters to organise, but text messages and phone trees were better than nothing. Now the movement had lost all communications, just when it needed to be able to respond to events as rapidly as possible.

There was a squawk of feedback from a public address system, then a voice reached them, so distorted by the dodgy amplifier and overlaid with echoes from the surrounding buildings that Martin couldn’t even make out his usual one word in three. Behrouz did his best to give a running translation, staying close to Martin and keeping his voice low to avoid annoying the people beside them, who were straining to hear the original.

The protest organiser welcomed the crowd and commended them for their courage, bringing an answering roar of approval: ‘Balé!’

‘And because we are brave, we will be peaceful!’

‘Balé!’

‘And because we are peaceful, the people will listen!’

‘Balé!’

‘And because they listen, they will join us!’

‘Balé!’ The last cheer was deafening, and Martin felt an intoxicating wave of optimism sweep through the crowd. A rush and a push and the land is ours? The regime still had tens of millions of supporters, and loyal militias ready to deal with dissent just as brutally as they had the last time. But while part of his mind clung to those dismal facts, the sound of some hundred thousand people shouting in unison made him feel that anything was possible.

All of this was just a warm-up act; the unnamed organiser announced that a distinguished speaker would now address the gathering. Before the introduction was complete, Martin could hear applause breaking out closer to the podium.

‘We welcome Mr Dariush Ansari, founder of Hezb-e-Haalaa!’

As Martin scanned the crowd he spotted a handful of people whose greeting looked distinctly lukewarm, though there were not as many as he would have expected. Ansari’s conciliatory foreign policy did not endear him to everyone who was simply weary of the regime, but he was the first politician to address one of these rallies, so perhaps people would give him credit for that. Thirty student leaders and more than two hundred demonstrators were already in prison; seven people had died in clashes with the militias. What he was doing carried no small risk.

‘In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful,’ Ansari began; the familiar words of the bismillah needed no translation. ‘I am honoured by the invitation to speak here today, at this peaceful gathering of my fellow Iranians. I was in Shiraz last week – not to speak, only to listen – and I can tell you that whatever you read in certain newspapers, the people there were peaceful too. The shop-keepers whose windows were broken should send their accounts to the Ministry of the Interior.’

That attracted some wry laughter from the crowd and even a few embarrassed smiles from the police, who had already formed a protective human chain in front of a long row of nearly identical establishments specialising in men’s shoes. Martin wasn’t sure that anyone would feel better to be reminded that they too could expect to be blamed for the vandalism of provocateurs; then again, maybe a bit of pre-emptive truth-telling would ease their frustration in the face of that inevitable libel.

Ansari continued in this unassuming fashion. He was no fire-brand, but nor did he drone on interminably; Martin’s attention had wandered for only a few seconds before Ansari had come to the point.

‘If my brother is behaving in a way that troubles me, I might speak to a mullah and ask his advice. If I’m contemplating a business deal and my conscience can’t decide if it’s fair to everyone, perhaps a mullah can assist me. After all, it’s his job to have studied the Qur’an and the Hadith, to have thought deeply about many complex moral questions, to have refined his ideas by disputation with his colleagues.

‘But it is a very different thing to hand the mullah a machine-gun, an army, a prison, and tell him: if anyone questions your power, silence him. After more than thirty years, we have seen with our own eyes what the consequences are: the weight of all their weapons and privileges has dragged the mullahs down so they are no closer to God than anyone else.

‘I believe the time has come for us to take responsibility for our own lives before God. The advice of true scholars should always be welcome, but let them live like scholars, not rule like kings. We need to prise open this closed system that protects itself from all possibility of change-’

Ansari broke off. Martin couldn’t see what was happening, but the people who could were remaining silent and orderly, so it was unlikely that he’d been seized and dragged away.

After about a minute, Ansari spoke again. Behrouz translated: ‘I’ve been told that the President has just appeared on television and made an announcement. Mr Hassan Jabari has resigned from the Guardian Council, because – I quote – “it is for the good of the nation to rob the disruptive elements and their foreign supporters of their dishonest ammunition”.’ Behrouz winced apologetically; however pompous the original, he usually managed to produce less turgid English than that.

‘Furthermore, the President tells us that he has appointed a senior judge to review all of Mr Jabari’s decisions when he was Prosecutor, as a guarantee against any hint of impropriety.’

Martin contemplated this odd move. Bringing charges against Jabari would have been both embarrassing and unlikely to succeed; this would act as a sop to those conservatives who’d believed the accusations against him. Now an independent judge could reassure them that Jabari had not, after all, abused his earlier position to protect a secret cabal of sexual deviants.

‘Finally,’ Ansari continued, ‘the President has declared that this must be the end of the matter. No complaint against the institutions of government, however fanciful, remains. So the people must leave the streets and return to their ordinary business.’

An uneasy silence followed. Martin looked around at the faces of the demonstrators; no one was quite sure how to take the news. Deposing a member of the Guardian Council might have been seen as a great victory if it had flowed directly from a political dispute – say, a deadlock with a reformist Majlis. But Jabari had not been removed for frustrating the will of the people, and his replacement would be yet another conservative. The next election would see exactly the same kind of candidates disqualified as before. Nothing had changed.

Ansari broke the silence. ‘I must respectfully disagree with the honourable President. I say that many complaints remain – and they are not fanciful at all.’

It was a simple observation, but the response was electric; the shouting and applause went on for at least a minute. If the announcement of Jabari’s resignation had been timed to puncture the mood of the demonstration, that had been badly misjudged; instead, it had given everyone in the crowd a chance to affirm, with the vocal support of their fellow malcontents, that the momentum of the uprising was undiminished.

The organiser took the microphone and began giving detailed instructions for the march. After reminding everyone of the route, he added, ‘Most importantly, please obey the marshals wearing green sashes.’ Martin looked around and located a woman a few metres away, only now draping a broad strip of green fabric across one shoulder of her brown manteau.

They began to move north, towards Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue. The marchers wouldn’t expect any help from the traffic police, but the protest had been publicised well enough to deter most drivers from the route, and in any case, sheer force of numbers gave the pedestrians right of way. The density of the crowd kept their pace to a shuffle, and the afternoon heat was beginning to bite, but the atmosphere was upbeat, and the constant rhythmic chant of ref-eren-doom – the English loan-word imported virtually unchanged into Farsi – was echoed playfully between different groups, breaking up the monotony and sparing people’s throats.

Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue was a broad, elegant street, with a stately row of fountains where it met Baharestan Square. It had been spared from the current spate of road-works that plagued much of central Tehran – all the flyovers and tunnels-in-progress that filled the streets with concrete dust, coating Martin’s trouser cuffs and shredding his nasal membranes. Some of the upmarket clothing shops along the route were closed and shuttered, but others had banners of support in the windows, and a few had proprietors, sometimes even whole families, standing in the doorways waving and cheering. Martin thought back to 2003, when he and Liz had joined an anti-war march through Sydney, just before the invasion of Iraq. Given the outcome, that was hardly an encouraging comparison, but he wasn’t reaching for a political analogy. It was simply that the measured, determined mood of the crowd, the steady rhythm of their advance, the whole texture of sounds and emotions, had been cut from the same cloth.

Martin felt a sudden ache of loneliness; he could not have expected Liz to be marching beside him here, but it would have been enough to be able to sit with her in the evening and say: You know what I was reminded of today? Now their shared memories meant nothing.

‘Did you see that?’ Behrouz asked him.

‘Sorry, I was-’

‘Her phone.’ Martin followed his gaze; the green-sashed marshal was using it to talk to someone. Martin checked his own phone; there was still no signal.

‘Do you want to ask her about it?’ Martin suggested. ‘If you can convince her we’re not informers.’

When she’d finished the call Behrouz approached her and made introductions. The woman gave her name as Mahnoosh.

She addressed Martin directly, in English. ‘I read some of your stories before they cut the internet.’

Martin felt a twinge of self-consciousness; his reports were written for Australian readers skimming half-a-dozen foreign political stories over breakfast, not sophisticated Tehranis in the thick of the action. He said, ‘I hope you’ll excuse any mistakes I made; I’ve only been here a few months.’

She smiled slightly. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you how your phone’s working?’

‘It’s not going to the towers,’ she said. ‘Just direct to other phones.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She spoke with Behrouz. ‘We’ve set up a mesh network,’ he translated. ‘It doesn’t rely on any infrastructure from the phone company; the phones just pass the data between themselves. Email, text messages, voice calls, web services.’

Martin was impressed. No doubt the government would soon find a way to block the system – they were already jamming satellite TV – but for now the protesters had an unexpected advantage. ‘Can I plug into this network?’

Mahnoosh held out her hand and he passed her his phone. She inspected it for a few seconds then returned it. ‘Sorry, no. The best one is this-’ She took her own phone from her pocket and showed it to him. The manufacturer’s logo was one he’d never seen before: a triangle formed from three copies of the letter S.

‘Who makes these?’

‘Slightly Smart Systems,’ Mahnoosh replied, a hint of amusement in her eyes at the wonderfully self-deprecating name. ‘Indian software, Chinese hardware. But we made some changes ourselves.’

Martin handed the phone back. He was surprised that Omar hadn’t tried to sell him one, knowing how useful it would be. But since the night of the crash they’d been more circumspect in their dealings with each other; when Sandra Knight broke Shokouh’s story in Paris she’d kept Martin right out of the picture, but the authorities would automatically have stepped up their surveillance of all foreign journalists.

They passed Cinema Europa, then Cinema Hafez. The Iranian stars gazed down coolly from their billboards, offering neither encouragement nor disapproval. Ahead of the marchers, a long stretch of asphalt was utterly deserted, empty of cars as far as the eye could see; even with the chanting crowd around him, Martin had a moment of end-of-the-world goose-flesh. Police were following the march, but they remained at the edges and he hadn’t seen them administer so much as a provocative shove. Perhaps the authorities had decided to allow people to let off steam, unmolested, in one last show of defiance before Jabari’s resignation was used to draw a line under everything that had come before.

Martin and Behrouz moved through the crowd, gathering quotes. ‘Jabari’s resignation means nothing,’ one man opined. ‘It won’t bring down rents. It won’t give my son a job.’

‘But how would a referendum help the economy?’ Martin pressed him.

‘Not quickly,’ the man conceded. ‘But it would open the door to different ideas, not the same group holding power year after year. The hardliners call everyone else un-Islamic, but Ansari is not un-Islamic. I asked him myself, would he ban the headscarf in some places, like they do in Turkey. He said no, it’s up to each woman if she wants to wear it or not.’

Other people expressed similar views. They were tired of the stale, self-perpetuating clique that clung to power by wrapping itself in claims of piety. If throwing out the veto powers of the Guardian Council – or abolishing the Council entirely – was the only route to change, so be it. The voters themselves were perfectly capable of rejecting candidates who would harm the nation; as one woman put it, ‘We aren’t infants who need the bones picked out of our food.’

‘Rast! Injaa rast!’ Mahnoosh shouted urgently, raising her arms and gesturing. Right, here! She was steering the march off Jomhuri-ye-Eslami, into a side-street. She was not especially tall, but her voice carried, and her instructions were heeded and echoed back through the ranks. As the crowd squeezed into the narrower road Martin approached her.

‘What’s happening? I thought we were going straight to Ferdowsi Street.’

Mahnoosh held up her phone, displaying an image of a train-carriage packed with militia, some of them carrying guns. A sign on the platform beside the carriage said Imam Khomeini Station – one stop south of Sa’di Station. If the marchers stuck to their original route, they would be approaching Sa’di Station just as the armed Basijis emerged from the Metro.

Martin exchanged a glance with Behrouz; did they want to break from the march and check out Sa’di? Martin was tempted, but then decided it was better to stay with the crowd and see how they fared.

He said, ‘So you’ve got a network of people with these phones… in all the Metro stations, on street corners?’ Mahnoosh responded with an irritated scowl, as if to say: Of course, but don’t expect me to spell it out.

She said, ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’ She stepped out of the flow and stood at the roadside, shouting instructions, ensuring that nobody in her charge got confused and failed to take the detour. Martin made a mental note to try to get a copy of the picture of the carriage from her later. This wasn’t the time to beg for it, but his editor would kill him if he didn’t get that image eventually.

The detour, Saf Street, was reserved for pedestrians, so the marchers had no cars or motorbikes to contend with, just groups of startled shoppers and a couple of vendors selling balloon animals. After the run of men’s shoe shops opposite the Majlis, this whole street seemed to be dedicated to women’s shoes and handbags; the advancing crowd drove many of the leisurely window-shoppers through the doors of these establishments, possibly doubling the day’s sales.

When they’d gone a few hundred metres Behrouz looked back and said nervously, ‘I hope there won’t be people coming round that corner for another half-hour.’ The whole march would take a long time to flow through, and the Basijis could be at the intersection in as little as ten minutes.

Martin squeezed his way to the side of the road and climbed onto an electricity junction box. From this vantage he could see the crowd stretching all the way back to Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue, but as he watched, the tail of the procession came into sight. He said, ‘Looks like the organisers have split up the march. They haven’t just put a kink in the route; the people behind us must have been sent south.’ The Basijis would find no easy targets ahead of them, just a long deserted avenue.

‘There’ll be cops and informers tracking every move,’ Behrouz reminded him. ‘They won’t make it obvious with helicopters, but they’re still watching.’

‘Yeah.’ The cops had their radios; they didn’t need Slightly Smart phones. Still, splitting up was better than everyone marching blindly into an ambush, and at least the Basijis had lost the advantage of surprise.

‘Chap, chap!’ Mahnoosh commanded them. Pedestrian-friendly Saf Street was coming to an end and the street ahead was narrow and full of cars. Martin tensed, expecting a heated confrontation between marchers and drivers, but after a short battle of wills, accompanied by a lot of honking and shouting, the crowd prevailed. A few drivers managed to reverse out of the way; others just stopped where they were and allowed the protesters to squeeze around them.

Martin stayed within sight of Mahnoosh, trying to pick a good time to ask her for an update on the militias. After a couple of minutes she motioned to him to approach again.

‘We chained the gates at Sa’di Station,’ she confided, ‘but we didn’t succeed to close Darvazeh Dowlat, and now half the Basijis are headed there.’ Darvazeh Dowlat was the next station up the line. If the marchers had kept going north they would have been heading into danger again.

‘We couldn’t go back to the Majlis?’ Martin wondered.

‘There’s another group headed for Baharestan Station.’

The street they were on ended at a T-junction with Sa’di Street, which ran between the two Metro stations; here, they were about the same distance from both. Mahnoosh called a halt, then instructed the marchers to leave their banners on the ground, cease all chants and disperse in groups of no more than three.

A young man behind Martin began objecting loudly, shouting that he hadn’t come onto the streets just to surrender, but nobody else spoke up in his support, and his friends did their best to calm him down. It looked like most people felt they’d achieved a reasonable trade-off: having shown their numbers outside the Majlis and marched in defiance of the President’s orders, they had not been cowed, but nor would they be reckless.

As the protest broke up, Behrouz said, ‘I want to find a pay phone and see if I can call my wife.’

‘Okay.’ Martin could imagine how she’d be feeling, with fresh denouncements of the protesters all over the TV and the mobile network disabled. He remembered when the army had opened fire on a demonstration in Peshawar and he’d left Liz wondering for hours if he was dead or alive. He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the car in an hour.’ They were parked about three kilometres away, and Martin wanted to hang around a little longer and try to get that photo and some more background information from Mahnoosh.

Behrouz headed off. Martin looked around; Mahnoosh was nowhere in sight. He stood at the corner for a while, scanning the street, swearing under his breath. He’d lost her.

He decided to head south towards Sa’di Station; if he couldn’t show his readers a train packed with Basijis, he might yet get a snap of them emerging from the Metro en masse. As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still see people around him that he recognised from the march; most had heeded the suggestion to break up into small groups, but there were also visible packs of young men – some of them dressed in heavy metal T-shirts, the uniform most despised by the regime – walking together, talking and laughing. It was easy to sympathise; there was something undignified about being asked to disown your comrades and slink away into the crowd.

Martin heard angry shouting from further down the street; he couldn’t make out the words, but he had no doubt what was happening. A group of women with shopping bags walking ahead of him turned around and hurried away; at the same time he could see people running to join the fray. Part of him wanted to slip into the safety of a shop or an alleyway – nobody would know, nobody would reproach him – but he forced himself to keep walking. It suddenly struck him that he’d been far less timid in Pakistan, when it should have been the other way around: back then, he should have been thinking about Liz. But back then, whatever insanity he’d been swept up in, he’d always pictured himself telling her about it. Just having her to share his stories with had made him feel bulletproof; if nothing was quite real until he’d recounted it to her, how could the world ever intervene and break that narrative thread?

The source of the shouting came into sight: on the opposite side of the street, five Basijis were fighting with three young men, relentlessly swinging batons into flesh. One Basiji was brandishing an automatic pistol, ranting about traitors and pointing the weapon at anyone who came near, keeping a larger group of angry civilians at bay.

One of the youths in the centre of the mêlée was swaying drunkenly, bleeding from a head wound, clearly in bad shape. Martin checked his phone, but there was still no signal. He looked around; a shopkeeper was standing in a doorway watching nervously. Martin mimed holding a handset and asked ‘Ambulance?’

‘Kardam,’ the man replied tersely: he’d already called. The landlines must be working.

Martin turned back to the fight and took some pictures. As he pocketed his phone he saw another, larger group of Basijis in the distance, coming north from Sa’di Station along his own side of the street. He was about to turn and begin his retreat when something else caught his eye: a green sash draped across the shoulder of a brown manteau. Mahnoosh was about fifteen metres from him, walking south.

Martin was baffled; he hadn’t taken her for a martyr, deliberately putting herself in harm’s way. Then he understood: she hadn’t chosen to keep the sash on as a mark of defiance; she’d simply forgotten she was wearing it. She’d done her best to shepherd her section of the march to safety, then she’d walked away, alone, imagining that she’d become invisible, no more a target than any other woman in hejab.

Martin started walking towards her, trying to judge his pace so he’d reach her in time without drawing attention to either of them. The second group of Basijis were shouting slogans at the people they passed, but they were yet to start bashing anyone; Martin doused a shameful hope that they’d find some guy in a Rammstein T-shirt to keep them occupied.

Some of the people ahead of him were turning back, but Mahnoosh continued, undeterred. Why had she headed south at all, when she’d known what was coming? Maybe she’d wanted to see how things unfolded here – to bear witness to any violence, even if there was nothing more she could do to prevent it.

It could not have been more than thirty seconds before Martin was finally walking a pace behind her, but his heart was pounding as if he’d sprinted all the way. He spoke quietly in English without wasting time giving his name, trusting her to recognise his voice. ‘Please don’t turn around. You’re still wearing the sash.’

For a second he wondered if his voice had been too soft – he hadn’t wanted to attract curious stares from the shoppers around them – but then Mahnoosh reached to her left side and unclipped the sash, where it was fastened together near her waist. In a sequence of quick movements, she gathered up the swathe of material, sliding it lengthways across her shoulder until it was entirely in her hands.

When she’d stuffed the sash into a pocket of her manteau, Martin finally dared to look up to see if any of the Basijis were watching, but her deft manoeuvre seemed to have gone unnoticed. Then, just as he was contemplating turning around and heading north, one of the men met his gaze for a second, and he realised that he was too close now to flee without attracting attention. He was middle-aged, conservatively dressed, and even if his features marked him as a likely foreigner at least he wasn’t toting a video camera. Far better to brazen it out than to act suspiciously.

He walked on briskly past Mahnoosh and into the oncoming Basijis, trying to prove his clear conscience by giving them no wider berth than he would have offered any other pedestrians, trying to channel the persona of a distracted foreign businessman who’d simply wandered out of his hotel at a bad time. There were ten of them, all with identical green batons, three with pistols. He could smell their acrid sweat. They’d been outmanoeuvred and humiliated, and even if they had no hope now of reliably picking protesters out of the crowd, it would not take much to be judged worthy of helping them work off their frustration.

One of them brushed against his shoulder. Martin said, ‘Bebakhshid, ’ and kept walking. He continued to the next street corner, then looked back. Mahnoosh had passed them too, unmolested. For a moment he considered approaching her, but with the streets full of Basijis it was still too dangerous; she was no longer marked as a protester, but she had no right to be talking to an unrelated, foreign man.

As Martin began climbing the stairs to his apartment, Omar’s wife Rana appeared at her door. She greeted him politely, but it was clear that something was wrong.

‘Have you heard from Omar?’ she asked.

‘No. Why, was he at the march?’ Martin would not have expected to see him there; waving placards wasn’t his style.

Rana shook her head. ‘But he didn’t come home from the shop, and he’s not answering the phone there.’

‘Maybe his car broke down?’ The mobile phone service was still disabled; Martin was about to mention the mesh network he’d seen Mahnoosh using, but Rana would have tried that already if it had been an option. Perhaps the devices weren’t thick enough on the ground to provide a connection out here in the suburbs.

He said, ‘Would you like me to drive to the shop and take a look?’

‘Please, if you could. We’ll come with you, bizahmat.’

‘Of course.’

Martin waited in the open doorway while she fetched her father-in-law, Mohsen, to accompany them; the whole family treated Martin warmly, but there was no question of him going anywhere with Rana alone. He felt a tug on his trousers; Omar’s three-year-old son had grabbed hold of his knee.

Martin squatted down to greet him. ‘Salaam, Farshid jan.’

Farshid frowned. ‘Baba kojast?’

‘Namidunam,’ Martin confessed. ‘Zud be khane miayad.’ He’ll be home soon.

Mohsen and Rana appeared and the three of them headed for the car, leaving Farshid with his grandmother. Mohsen’s English was as patchy as Martin’s Farsi, but Martin worked out that he wasn’t too worried yet: Omar had probably just been called away on business, somewhere with no access to a phone.

As they drove towards the city Martin scanned the radio stations for news. The official news agency had already announced that twenty-seven people had been hospitalised after the march; the hospitals themselves refused to give out figures, and he could no longer guess whether casualties were being downplayed to exculpate the militias, or inflated in order to warn people off.

When they reached the shop it was locked and dark; Omar’s car was still parked in the rear. Rana went inside to look around; Mohsen waited outside with Martin, leaning against the car, smoking. He had lost both legs in the war with Iraq; he had prosthetics, but he needed crutches to get around. After a couple of minutes Rana emerged, distraught. She spoke to her father-in-law, showing him a scrap of paper, then she explained to Martin, ‘He left a note inside the cash register. Someone arrested him, took him away.’

‘Who arrested him?’

Rana shook her head. ‘He didn’t know who they were. Or he didn’t have time to write it.’

Martin didn’t want to dwell on what would happen if VEVAK had uncovered Omar’s role in getting Shokouh out of the country. ‘We could go to the police station, ask there,’ he suggested. He couldn’t think of anything else to try; they’d be hard-pressed to find a lawyer at this hour. Rana repeated this to Mohsen, and he agreed.

The central police station was more crowded than Martin had seen it before, with a queue of anxious relatives spilling out onto the street and halfway down the block. There’d been no mass arrests at the march itself, and the brawls with the Basijis had not been widespread – the only explanation Martin could think of was that there’d been some kind of crackdown in the hours after the march, with hundreds of minor dissidents rounded up. He tried to find a positive spin on that: if Omar had been arrested for nothing more than a few indiscreet comments overheard by informers, the chances were he’d be released within a day or two, uncharged.

When they joined the queue the first half-dozen people ahead of them offered to cede their place to Mohsen; he politely declined, but they kept insisting until he accepted. Martin couldn’t entirely fathom why he wasn’t simply admitted to the head of the queue; it wasn’t as if the dozens of people who were now content to remain in front of him were any less respectful of his status as a veteran. Perhaps it was a kind of trade-off, a gesture that showed respect without overstepping the mark into condescension.

Rana wouldn’t lift her gaze from the ground, and she resisted Martin’s attempts to distract her with small-talk and optimistic prognoses. He was trying to keep his own imagination in check; he knew what went on in Evin Prison, but nobody was going to round up and torture every last Iranian who’d ever stocked contraband action movies. Only if they’d traced Shokouh’s false passport back to Omar would he be in real danger.

Martin spotted a woman further along the queue speaking on a phone, though she was doing her best to hide it in her sleeve. As far as he knew the Slightly Smart phones weren’t illegal, though perhaps they soon would be.

When she hung up the call, she turned and spoke agitatedly with her neighbour. Whatever the subject, it was not a private matter; within minutes Martin could see the news being spread up and down the line. Maybe the authorities had decided to charge Jabari after all; if his resignation hadn’t been enough to win back conservative support, why not pull out all the stops and have a show trial, to prove that nobody was above the law?

But any mention of Jabari always conjured up at least a few wry smiles. Nobody was smiling as they heard this news.

The rumour finally reached Mohsen and Rana; Martin’s Farsi had largely deserted him, but once he had heard Ansari’s name mentioned he could think of only two possibilities.

‘Have they arrested him?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Rana said, ‘he’s been shot. They’ve taken him to hospital, but he’s not expected to last the night.’

6

Nasim hunched over her computer screen, gazing intently at a section of code from her neural map integration routines, blocking out thoughts of anything else.

No two zebra finches sang exactly the same song; no two finches had identical brains. So how could you use partial, imperfect images of a thousand different finch brains to build up some kind of meaningful composite?

On a gross level the same structures within the brain appeared in more or less the same anatomical locations, but as you zoomed in towards the level of individual neurons, the cues that counted most were the cells’ biochemistry and their patterns of connections. The problem lay in keeping the notion of a pattern of connections from becoming meaninglessly vague, uselessly rigid, or maddeningly circular. If ten thousand cells of biochemical type A sent axons to ten thousand cells of type B, that certainly didn’t mean that they were all interchangeable. But if you insisted that only neurons that were wired up to identical neighbours in identical ways could be treated as common features, there would be no matches at all. Worse, if you could only characterise every neuron by first characterising the neurons to which it was joined, you ran the risk of pushing everything down a rabbit hole of endless self-reference. The whole endeavour was like trying to reconstruct the human skeleton from a thousand incomplete – and partly inconsistent – translations of ‘Dem Dry Bones’ into unknown foreign languages. ‘The fifflezerm’s connected to the girglesprig…’

Over the months she’d spent working on the problem, Nasim had tried all manner of high-powered statistical techniques and classification schemes from abstract network topology, but the approach that was finally showing signs of a payoff involved searching for distinctive sub-networks, not by their pattern of connections per se, but by their function. An engineer staring at a circuit diagram could group the components into various kinds of functional blocks – say, half-a-dozen that formed an oscillator, another half-dozen comprising a filter – without requiring an absolutely rigid, unvarying design for each of these meta-components. An oscillator was anything that oscillated; it didn’t have to be a perfect match for the first one you’d encountered in a textbook. Similarly, if a group of neurons had the same general effect on their inputs as another group, it didn’t really matter if there happened to be thirty-nine neurons in one group and forty-five in the other. ‘The same general effect’ was easier said than defined, but Nasim had been refining the notion for weeks now, and she was convinced that she was finally closing in on a set of meaningful categories.

She tweaked a few definitions in her code and started it running again. It would take a couple of minutes to process the full data set; she looked away from her screen and across the lab. Everyone was unnaturally quiet today; Redland was down in Washington, testifying before a House Select Committee on the mooted Human Connectome Project, and Judith had gone with him. The Committee had been holding hearings for a month, and Redland was just one of dozens of scientists who’d been called to give testimony, but the occasion of his trip had reminded everyone that their funding, and their future, lay in the balance.

The composite map appeared on the screen. Nasim was about to slip on her headphones when a mischievous impulse took hold of her. She pulled the headphone plug out of its jack, rerouting the computer’s audio to its speakers. Then she fired up the software syrinx and ran the latest simulation of the finch brain’s vocalisation pathways.

The infantile babbling of her early trials had slowly been giving way to a more ordered song, but this time hairs rose on the back of her neck. The distinctive rhythms of an adult bird’s call – the whole style, the whole structure – were finally present.

With the song still playing, she checked the simulation’s virtual EEG. The waveforms were not an exact match to any of the biological recordings on file, but the statistics all fell within the population ranges. If she’d handed the traces to a neurobiologist, they would not have been able to pick the artificial one from the real.

Mike stepped away from his bench and looked around, annoyed. ‘Who took the bird out of the animal house?’ he demanded. He was wearing a hairnet and something that resembled a plastic shower cap. ‘If I get droppings in my cell cultures, that’s a month’s work down the tube!’ He finally homed in on the sound and turned to glare angrily at Nasim. ‘Where is it?’

It took her a moment to realise that he wasn’t joking. She said, ‘No droppings, Mike, I promise.’

Mike, Shen and Dinesh gathered around her desk and watched as she ran through a battery of further tests. She kept the syrinx warbling, trying to shake off the eerie feeling that she’d stitched together something gruesome from the corpses of the birds and could now feel the awakened result fluttering its wings in her hand.

Shen said, ‘We should play this to a female bird and see if she’s attracted. A Turing test for zebra finches.’

‘No,’ Mike countered, ‘we should simulate a female’s auditory centres, and see if that simulation is attracted.’

‘One program fools another program? How is that a test?’ Shen demanded.

‘It’s not a test,’ Mike agreed, ‘but it would be much easier for them to consummate the relationship.’

Shen pondered this. ‘I think the Media Lab could put together some avian tele-dildonics faster than we could construct a purely software female capable of mating.’

‘Can we cut the Bride of Frankenfinch crap?’ Nasim pleaded. ‘There’s nothing in there but the vocalisation PDP. If that can feel lust all by itself, then so can a Casio keyboard.’

Dinesh said, ‘There’s nothing in there that can feel lust, yet. But now that you can integrate maps from different imaging techniques, it would take us, what, eighteen months to do the whole finch brain?’

‘Who’s this “us”?’ Mike replied. ‘You mean the people who are actually sticking around to fight for the HCP?’

Nasim plugged her headphones into their jack, cutting off the speakers. ‘The recital’s over,’ she said. ‘I have work to do.’

At lunchtime, Nasim joined the others gathered around a wide-screen monitor in the conference room, watching Redland give his testimony to the Select Committee. The session had taken place a few hours before, and the video had been posted on the web.

Redland stuck to the usual big targets: schizophrenia, autism, depression and Alzheimer’s. The Human Connectome Project, he declared, would shed light on them all. This was almost certainly true in the long run, and it was a relatively easy goal to sell to the public, but Nasim still had her doubts about the wisdom of the strategy. It didn’t take much reflection for people to start wondering if there weren’t better, cheaper, faster ways to address those conditions. Mapping every corner of the brain would be a triumph of human self-understanding – with payoffs, eventually, that left the genome in the shade – but if you were going to spend billions of dollars and decades of hard work on that goal, selling it as a cure for some Affliction of the Month would only risk making the whole project seem like a bloated white elephant as soon as a drug came along to make that role redundant.

As Shen closed the playback window for the recording, he noticed a small image showing the site’s live feed. ‘Hey, they’re talking to Zachary Churchland!’ He put the feed into full-screen mode.

Churchland was an octogenarian oil billionaire who had raised the possibility of funding his own brain-mapping project, in competition with any government effort. The press had started calling him ‘the Craig Venter of the HCP’, but unlike Venter, he had no biotech skills himself. The neuroscientists advocating the HCP treated him with kid gloves, as they would any potential sugar daddy, but his professed motives could not have been further from their own statements about Alzheimer’s and apple pie.

‘Congressman, the ultimate goal of my project would be universal immortality,’ Churchland declared. His voice reminded Nasim of William S. Burroughs, a writer whose words had been sampled on one of her favourite dance tracks; she’d never sought out his books, suspecting they’d be rather strait-laced and stuffy, but he had such nice diction that she’d come to think of him as the epitome of twentieth-century gentility. ‘If there are public health benefits along the way, then that’s well and good, but all of public health becomes a minor sub-problem when viewed in the light of the digital migration.’

Congressman Fitzwaller, chairman of the Select Committee, pondered this reply in silence for a moment. He could hardly have been ignorant of Churchland’s views unless he’d had his head in a paper bag for the last six months, but now that the man was there in front of him, in the flesh, giving testimony before this august body, he seemed not quite able to believe what he was hearing.

‘Mr Churchland, the scientists who have come before this committee have all been quite clear: the Human Connectome will not be a personal map of any one human’s brain. It will not describe any individual’s memories, or personality, or goals. Do you dispute that expert testimony, sir?’

Churchland made a sound that could either have been a sigh, or a sign of emphysema. ‘No, Congressman, I do not. I accept that a generic map is a necessary intermediate step on the road towards the mapping of individuals. Having reached that point, a great deal of work will remain to be done in order to achieve personalisation. But to pretend that we will reach that point and then halt is simply absurd. We will continue. That is our nature.’

Fitzwaller said, ‘What timescale do you anticipate for that development? For what you call “personalisation”?’

‘I am not an expert,’ Churchland replied, ‘but the people I have consulted on the matter suggest that it might be possible within twenty or thirty years.’

‘So this is not a development from which you would hope to benefit yourself, sir?’

‘On the contrary, Congressman,’ Churchland replied crisply, ‘I am unlikely to see out the year, but upon my death my body will be frozen. If I do set up a trust to support this research, the deeds of that trust will expressly state that its goals include my own digital resurrection.’

Fitzwaller looked down and shuffled through his papers with something of the air of a doctor reluctant to deliver bad news. Nasim could sympathise with his discomfort. She suspected that uploading would become feasible at some point in the future – perhaps by the end of the century – but to watch a dying man clutching at straws like this was just painful.

Fitzwaller said, ‘Mr Churchland, do you really have that much faith in this technology? We are all grateful for the achievements and ingenuity of the medical profession, but surely there are limits to what mere humans can do.’

Churchland reached off-camera and retrieved an oxygen mask, which he held over his mouth and nose for three deep breaths before replying. ‘Indeed, Congressman. And I would not wish to mislead this committee into thinking that I have definitely resolved to fund a project of the kind we are discussing. In fact, over the last month or so I have received some very persuasive representations from a group who believe that it might be at best inefficient and at worst highly dangerous to proceed in this fashion.’

‘Can you elaborate, sir?’

‘I have been invited to fund an enterprise known as the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project,’ Churchland explained. ‘Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor, which will be armed with superior versions of all the skills the original possessed. The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. Once this process is set in motion, within weeks – perhaps within hours – a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.’

Nasim resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. However surreal the spectacle unfolding on the screen, there was, in retrospect, something inevitable about it. The uploading advocates who’d sold Churchland on an imminent digital resurrection hadn’t lost their critical faculties entirely, but their penchant for finessing away any ‘mere technical problems’ that might stretch out the timetable was, nonetheless, intellectually corrosive, to the point where the next step probably didn’t seem like such a great leap any more: hand-waving all practicalities out of existence, transforming the cyber-eschatologists’ rickety scaffolding of untested assumptions into a cast-iron stairway to heaven.

Fitzwaller cleared his throat. ‘Mr Churchland, it’s not entirely clear to me how that matter is pertinent to the business of this committee.’

Churchland said, ‘Rather than trust humans to perfect the brain-mapping technology that we’ve been discussing, I am leaning towards putting my fate in the hands of an artificial God, for whom such problems will be trivial. The Benign Superintelligence will rule the planet with wisdom and compassion, eliminating war, disease, unhappiness, and of course, death. I am told that it will probably disassemble most of the material in our solar system in order to construct a vast computer that will exploit all the energy of the sun. Perhaps it will spare the Earth, or perhaps the Earth will be reconstructed, more perfectly, within that computerised domain.’

The camera caught Fitzwaller in the transition from bewilderment to revulsion. ‘ “Rule the planet”? Am I to understand that you’re contemplating funding a body that advocates overthrowing the lawful government of the United States?’

Churchland required more oxygen before replying, ‘Keep your shirt on, Congressman. There’s no point fighting it, and the alternative would be far worse. Imagine if one of our country’s enemies did this first. Imagine the kind of despotic superintelligence that Al Qaeda would create.’

‘Mr Churchland,’ Fitzwaller said evenly, ‘does it not occur to you that most people on the planet would prefer not to have their affairs dictated by an artificial intelligence of any kind?’

‘That’s too bad, Congressman,’ Churchland retorted, ‘because I am coming to the view that we probably have no choice.’

Judith stormed into the conference room and slammed her briefcase down on the table. For a moment Nasim assumed that she’d been watching the same feed, but then it became clear from her body language that she was oblivious to the sight of half the HCP’s potential funding sprouting wings and flying away. She was livid, but it had nothing to do with Churchland’s deathbed embrace of Bullshit Squared.

‘Whoever’s idea it was,’ she fumed, ‘it really wasn’t funny.’

Nasim said, ‘Whoever’s idea was what?’

‘Can you think of a reason why five sleaze-bags would have hit on me this morning in Reagan Airport alone?’

‘New perfume?’ Mike suggested. Judith picked up the whiteboard eraser and hurled it at him; he squirmed sideways but it clipped his shoulder.

Dinesh spread his hands innocently. ‘How could that possibly be our doing? You think we’re paying men to harass you, as some kind of prank?’

Judith took her phone from her pocket. ‘Someone, somehow, has signed me on to… PowerFlirt, or HookMeUp, or whatever the fuck it’s called when total strangers get a message on their phone the moment I walk into sight-’ She must have noticed the growing expression of discomfort on Nasim’s face, because she loomed towards her and demanded, ‘What do you know about this?’

Nasim cringed. She’d thought Christopher in IT would have fixed everything by now, but she’d never got around to switching AcTrack back on and checking if her own problem had gone away – let alone following up the whole question of whether Murmur had made its system less prone to bizarre cross-infections. ‘I should have told everyone sooner,’ she confessed, flustered, ‘but I put the rabbit in the park and I just forgot about it.’

Judith stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.

Shen said, ‘Phwoar. Isn’t it called Phwoar? That’s what I heard.’ He was sitting next to Nasim, and through the floor she could feel his chair resonating with a dull mechanical vibration.

7

Crouched in the dark recess behind the freezer-truck’s compressor, Martin was wishing that he’d brought some music for the trip. He was wearing earplugs, but the relentless thumping of the compressor still seeped into his skull, and he was beginning to hallucinate snatches of songs emerging from the noise. In principle that might have been entertaining, but the songs were all terrible: soppy Bollywood love duets with doleful heroes and squeaky-voiced heroines; monotonous aerobics-class remixes of undeserved hits of the eighties; vapid punk-metal droning by airheads sporting novelty contact lenses. If he’d known before he’d left Tehran that there was so much bad music buried in his skull, he would have shoved a screwdriver up one nostril and done his best to scrape it all out.

Behrouz was wedged behind the other side of the compressor, and though it probably would have been safe for them to yell at each other while the truck was moving, Martin suspected that bellowing pleasantries and idle observations wouldn’t have done much to help them pass the time. And being caught at a checkpoint playing ‘Twenty Questions’ would just have been embarrassing.

Martin tried seeding counter-hallucinations, mentally dredging up a few bars of songs that he actually wanted to hear and hoping that whatever bizarre neural process was turning the noise into music would take the hint. ‘Infected’ by The The should have been perfect, with a pounding rhythm that he could usually summon at will, but the compressor took it and mangled it into the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Run Run Run’ morphed into Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. When The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ became Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’, Martin decided to quit while he was ahead, but then the King himself devolved into a dire rockabilly act called the Stray Cats.

With no hope of an entertaining soundtrack, Martin was at a loss as to how to fill the hours. He didn’t want to dwell on Omar – on what it meant, after a fortnight, that no authority would even acknowledge taking him into custody – so he devoted all his effort to not thinking about Mahnoosh. His brain fell for the ruse, and her face kept floating out of the darkness in defiance of his sham attempts to banish it. He’d seen her on that one day only, at the march, but whether through memory or imagination he had a vast library of snapshots of her in his head, already catalogued by mood: calm and reflective; mischievous; implacable – a thousand micro-expressions framed and accentuated by her no-nonsense olive headscarf.

The truck came to a halt and the driver shut off the engine. Refuelling, or yet another checkpoint? Under the emergency decrees all Iranians now required a permit to travel between cities; that had always been the case for foreign journalists, but Martin had never felt compelled to break the rules before, back in the days when it would have been easy. He checked his watch and guessed they were somewhere close to Ahvaz, which would put them within a hundred kilometres of their destination, but his phone hadn’t been able to get a GPS signal since he’d crawled into the hiding place.

He heard the rear door open and someone heavy climb into the truck. A stack of crates was scraped across the uneven metal floor, as if unloading had begun, but the driver had assured them that there were no deliveries to be made along the way. Martin felt the floor vibrating under approaching footsteps; one instinct commanded him to move as far away from the intruder as he could, but instead he used his millimetres of freedom to slide his body in the other direction and brace himself against the thin sheet of rigid plastic that separated him from the cargo area. Something hard struck the partition: a baton, or maybe a rifle butt. There was a pause, then two more blows in rapid succession. Martin didn’t flinch; his weight against the plastic kept it from buckling, absorbing the energy and deadening the sound of the impact. The cavity was meant to be packed with insulating foam; without his intervention it would have sounded hollow as a drum.

But did it sound like foam, or did it sound like flesh? He waited for an angry shout, an imperious command; a blade thrust through the plastic, or a bullet.

The floor vibrated again, the intruder retreated. The door swung closed.

After the truck had been unloaded in a noisy warehouse, the driver parked nearby and unscrewed the panels that concealed his extra cargo. Behrouz was released first, but he was still bent double and massaging his legs when Martin emerged, hobbling and squinting. He’d grown used to the smell of machine oil from the compressor, but it had been masking the cargo area’s own distinctive scent of unwashed refrigerator. He glanced over at Behrouz. ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can find me a hot bath in the next fifteen minutes.’

Behrouz snorted. ‘What am I now, a tour guide? Don’t be such a wimp, we’ve got work to do.’

‘That would sound much more convincing if you showed signs of being able to walk.’

The nervous driver hurried them out of the truck onto a dark side-street, then took off with a deafening squeal of rubber. They were both wearing heavy coats and woollen hats, but away from the freezer they were overdressed for a summer evening this far south. Abadan was on an island bounded by rivers, fifty kilometres inland from the Persian Gulf. To the west, across the Arvand River – renamed Shatt al-Arab once crossed – was southern Iraq; Basra wasn’t far upstream.

Behrouz had brought a map of the city; he led the way to a truck-stop offering fast food and, most urgently, a toilet. In the restaurant, Martin slung his coat over his shoulder but kept the woollen hat on; in spite of the balmy weather many of the customers were wearing them, and though he’d always look foreign close up in good light, he still hoped that out on the street the right cues would prevent too many second glances.

The oil refinery was visible for miles, the vast complex lit up like a NASA launch site. Though it had been bombed into the ground by Saddam Hussein in 1980, it had been built up again after the war until it was once again the most productive in Iran, churning out nearly half a million barrels a day – when it was operating.

As they drew nearer to the complex, the streets became crowded; the picket line itself was still not in sight, but there were so many people coming and going – supporters bringing food and supplies to the striking workers, or people just wanting to witness the spectacle – that street vendors had set up half-a-dozen stalls. Martin saw a group of soldiers lined up in front of a government building, but they looked more uncomfortable than threatening.

Dariush Ansari had been born in Abadan, the son of an oil worker, and he’d worked in the same plant himself, briefly, as an engineer. His father had since retired, but his former colleagues had shut down the refinery for the funeral ten days before and they had not returned to work since. Ordinarily, Tehran would have sent in the army to deal with the pickets and bussed in workers from across the country, but someone in the regime must have grasped the fact that if they did that, it would end with the city in flames.

Half the people in the crowd were speaking Arabic; Martin’s vocabulary was negligible, but he could easily distinguish it from Farsi. Many of the refinery workers were Arabic-speaking Iranians; whilst Ansari had not belonged to that ethnic group, he had been a local, and fluent in the local dialect – quite different from the Arabic studied in Iranian high schools – and his willingness to use it in speeches here had helped attract supporters. But rather than trying to inflame ethnic tensions, or demanding special treatment for the region, he’d focused on the benefits of a determined, nationwide assault on corruption and nepotism. People here knew that their wealth was being pilfered and wasted, but Ansari’s answer had been transparency and equity, not separatism.

When they came within sight of the picket line, Martin saw that the usual Referendum! signs had been supplemented with photographs of Ansari and a new slogan that Behrouz translated as ‘Murderers, get lost!’ That soldiers weren’t tearing the signs from people’s hands was no less amazing than if they’d borne the strongest profanities, given that this accusation and advice was meant for the government.

Martin took out his new phone and snapped some pictures of the pickets, trying to balance a fervent wish to avoid being seen by the soldiers with a fear that if he looked too furtive the people around him would take him for an informer. One young man did move towards him, scowling, but Behrouz stepped in and whispered an explanation that seemed to satisfy him.

He checked the pictures and queued them up for their long, tortuous journey to Sydney. Even back in his office in Tehran he was no longer able to use the internet; he had to print out his copy and fax it. He’d tried uploading files direct to the newspaper’s computer using a dial-up modem, but the government was degrading international phone lines to the point where the modems just kept hanging up; even the faxes he sent arrived peppered with static and were only legible if he used an absurdly large font. The conventional mobile service was now disabled across the country, and every major city had installed transmitters to jam the frequencies that had enabled the mesh network Mahnoosh had showed him at the demonstration in Tehran.

Slightly Smart Systems, though, had left one last option open: infrared. Their phones could pass data to each other by IR along a line-of-sight path, and whilst the government could interfere with the system in a limited space, such as a stadium or public square, in principle, they could no more jam it everywhere than they could flood the whole country with strobing blue disco lights.

The point-to-point bursts of IR carried email and news in much the same way as those services had worked in the days before the internet proper, when university computers had been linked up only sporadically via brief late-night phone calls but, in lieu of fixed landlines, the modern incarnation involved ‘polling’ phones in the vicinity to discover which ones were in a position to exchange data. Before the restrictions on intercity travel had come in, Slightly Smart email had diffused across the country and over the borders in a matter of days; from Tehran, Martin had sent a test message to his editor and received a reply in four days, probably via Turkey. No doubt there would soon be government programmers working on ways to clog the whole system with spam – and plainclothes police strolling around arresting anyone who responded to their polling signal – but for now the benefits were worth the risk, and a crowd of Ansari supporters was a good place to start. Martin switched his phone to polling mode and parked it in his shirt pocket with the tiny lens of the IR transceiver exposed, leaving it to try its secret handshake on as many passing strangers as it liked.

As he looked around at the crowd, trying to judge whether it would be wise to attempt some interviews, Martin spotted the young man whom Behrouz had deflected earlier, returning with four physically imposing friends.

‘You think we’re in trouble?’ he asked Behrouz.

‘Who’s this “we”, beegaané?’ Behrouz replied.

The first man ignored Martin and went straight to Behrouz, while the wrestling team hung back, looking stern and inscrutable.

‘They’d like us to go with them,’ Behrouz announced.

‘Is that an invitation to tea, or should I phone my embassy?’

Behrouz smiled. ‘It’s up to you, but if you’d like to interview Ansari’s brother, they can take you to him.’

They walked for more than half an hour, heading into a maze of small, quiet streets far from the refinery. It was a poor neighbourhood, but not an especially rough-looking one, full of car work-shops, grocery stores and spice vendors. There were young children playing on the streets, and strolling teenagers who looked neither fierce nor fearful. Martin gave up feeling nervous; while it wasn’t inconceivable that he was being set up, foreign journalists from obscure countries would have no value as bargaining chips in this purely Iranian game. He suddenly recalled the time a friend of Liz’s had thoughtfully mailed her a DVD of A Mighty Heart, and he’d had to sit beside her in their apartment in Islamabad, watching Angelina Jolie convulsing with grief over the death of her journalist husband. Martin had given the movie four stars, and sent Liz’s friend an email that won him a place on her no-Christmas-cards-ever list.

They arrived at a slightly shabby terraced house and were admitted by a wary doorkeeper who insisted on patting them down and examining their phones and wallets. There were other men lurking inside the house, but, encouragingly, Martin had yet to see a single weapon.

Karim, the young man who’d spotted Martin taking pictures, handed the two guests over to a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Mehdi and offered them tea and halvaa; it would have been rude to refuse, and Martin was grateful for the sugar rush. They sat on the carpet, shoeless and cross-legged, while Mehdi chatted volubly with Behrouz and politely enquired about Martin’s health and family.

‘Hich zan nadaaram, hich baché nadaaram,’ Martin confessed: I have no wife, I have no children. Mehdi regarded him with a mixture of astonishment and pity.

‘Your parents?’ he asked in English.

‘They both died a few years ago.’ Mehdi couldn’t quite parse that, so Behrouz translated. Mehdi tssked and shook his head forlornly, momentarily as anxious and perplexed as if an orphaned child had turned up on his doorstep. But then he shifted his attention back to Behrouz and they started discussing football scores. There was a TV switched on in a corner of the room, tuned to IRIB’s Channel One, which was screening reruns of a popular historical miniseries, No Room to Turn. Martin had heard claims that the show – which featured a love story between an Iranian student and a Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Europe – was mere propaganda, portraying the endangered Jewish heroine sympathetically while caricaturing her Zionist relatives, but he’d yet to see enough of it to form his own opinion. In any case, it was a more enjoyable way to improve his Farsi than listening to Mehdi’s match post-mortems.

After almost an hour there was a flurry of activity in the adjoining room; Martin hadn’t heard the front door open, but apparently a small entourage had arrived, maybe through another entrance. Mehdi picked up the remote and turned down the volume on the TV. Martin managed to rise to his feet before Kourosh Ansari entered the room, alone.

Kourosh greeted Martin in English and Behrouz and Mehdi in Farsi. Martin said, ‘Please accept my condolences on your brother’s death.’

‘Thank you.’ Kourosh had deep hollows under his eyes, and a few days’ growth of beard set against a much longer moustache. ‘I heard him speak on a few occasions,’ Martin added. ‘He was impressive.’

Kourosh murmured agreement.

There was an awkward pause; Martin wasn’t sure whether it would be rude to get down to business immediately. He had never managed to get an interview with Dariush, and though that had rankled slightly, he’d understood why; the elder Ansari really hadn’t had any reason to court a foreign audience. All Martin knew about Kourosh was that he, too, had studied chemical engineering. He looked to be in his late thirties.

Mehdi invited everyone to sit, then went to fetch more tea. ‘Do you work in Abadan?’ Martin asked.

‘No, in Esfahan,’ Kourosh replied, ‘but my job there is finished. I will work for Hezb-e-Haalaa now.’

‘In what role?’

‘I have been chosen as provisional leader by the party’s executive council. At present, we face some logistical problems with holding an election for the position.’

‘I can appreciate that.’ It was a minor, and possibly short-lived miracle that mere membership of Hezb-e-Haalaa was not yet illegal. ‘So where do you see things going from here? The strike won’t be tolerated indefinitely.’

‘Of course not.’ Kourosh hesitated. ‘But I’m still hopeful that the government will give some ground. They want to look reasonable; they want to be seen to be reacting to the people’s anger. That’s why they had Jabari resign.’

‘But how much more ground can they give? What are you hoping for?’

‘A referendum within a year, to end the Guardian Council veto in time for the next presidential election.’

Martin said, ‘Is that realistic?’

Kourosh ran a hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t know. But I think it’s the smallest thing that the people would treat as anything but an insult. How much Iranian history do you know?’

‘A little.’ Martin fervently hoped that he wasn’t about to be tested on the names of the Safavid kings.

‘Abadan was once controlled by the British, by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. They refused to share their profits fairly – they wouldn’t even give Iran the same deal as the Saudis received – but it was only a strike by the workers that gave the Majlis the courage it needed to nationalise the industry.’

‘A move that ultimately cost Mossadegh his job.’

‘Of course,’ Kourosh agreed. ‘Mr Churchill persuaded Mr Eisenhower that our Prime Minister was a dangerous socialist, and the CIA engineered their very first coup. But if they’d left him in place to rein in the Shah, we would not have had the mullahs taking power twenty-six years later.’

‘Perhaps,’ Martin replied. Mossadegh himself had been a far-from-perfect democrat, and the clerics of the time had had their own problems with him.

‘Now I’m afraid we’re facing the risk of more American meddling, ’ Kourosh said.

‘Really? Have they approached Hezb-e-Haalaa?’

Kourosh scowled. ‘Yes, but that’s old news; my brother told them to keep their distance a long time ago. But now they’re trying to start a new game. My friends in Iraq tell me there are plans to unleash the MEK and send them across the border.’

The MEK – the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the People’s Army of Iran – was a nationalist group formed in opposition to the Shah. Its members had been pushed aside by Islamists in the 1979 revolution and ended up in exile in Iraq. Accepting the hospitality of Saddam Hussein while he’d engaged in a long and bloody war against their homeland had not been the best PR move in history. Though they claimed to answer to a kind of parliament-in-exile, they now had very little support within Iran, and since the 2003 invasion most of them lived in Iraq, in a strange twilight state, somewhere between refugees and prisoners-of-war.

‘You think Washington would actually do that? Re-arm them and let them loose, just to make trouble?’ The Bush administration had funded several armed Iranian opposition groups – including the MEK, and a Baluchi terrorist group called Jondollah – in the hope of eliciting a bloody crackdown from the regime that would serve as the pretext for an all-out war, but Martin thought those programs had been flushed down the chute with the change of administration. ‘You must have heard Obama acknowledge the CIA’s role in the Mossadegh coup, in that speech in Cairo not long after he came to power? Reaching out to the Islamic world and announcing an end to American interventionism?’

Kourosh said, ‘I’m in no position to know if this plan has the President’s blessing, or if some other arm of government has taken the initiative without his knowledge. But I can tell you exactly what would happen if the MEK came across the border: first, the Iranian Army would wipe them out with very little trouble, and second, the Iranian people would unite under the present regime and the reformist movement would be back in the wilderness for another twenty years at least. Not Hezb-e-Haalaa, nor anybody else, would try to exploit the situation for their own benefit. We are not traitors, and we are not idiots.’

‘Isn’t the MEK still classified as a terrorist organisation by the Americans?’

‘Yes,’ Kourosh replied. ‘So of course they would do this quietly. That’s why I prefer not to be so quiet.’

Martin finally understood why he’d been plucked out of the crowd so eagerly; Kourosh wasn’t interested in raising his celebrity profile; what he needed was a story that would embarrass the Americans into thinking twice – or dragging their rogue elements back into line, if none of this was actually coming from the top. Brother of Slain Reformist Condemns US Backing for Terrorists would get picked up immediately from his own paper’s website and splashed all over the American broadsheets.

He said, ‘I can write part of this story, but I’ll need to get messages to my colleagues in Washington and Baghdad to follow up on your claims.’

‘How long are you staying in Abadan?’

Martin glanced at Mehdi, who said, ‘You are my guest here tonight.’

‘Thank you.’

Kourosh said, ‘When you’ve written whatever you need to send, pass it to Karim. We can get your email on a boat to Kuwait within a couple of hours.’

‘Okay.’ Email on a boat no longer sounded strange; at this point, Martin would not have been fazed by pigeons carrying flash drives.

Behrouz glanced at the TV, and Martin followed his gaze; the Supreme Leader was making an address to the nation. Mehdi turned up the volume and the four of them sat and watched the grandfatherly man with his black turban, white beard and round glasses.

Behrouz didn’t bother translating; it had been a long day and Martin suspected there was nothing in the speech they hadn’t all heard before. He managed to pick up the usual admonitions: do not take part in strikes or demonstrations, work hard to show your love for God and the nation, don’t be fooled by the lies of the traitors and foreign enemies.

Just as Martin was tuning out, something in the speech caused Kourosh to stiffen with revulsion, then Martin heard jeers erupting from neighbouring houses all down the street. He turned to Behrouz.

‘He just thanked his beloved children, the Basijis, for showing restraint and keeping order across the country,’ Behrouz explained. Dariush Ansari had been shot in a motorcycle drive-by; if the killer had not actually been a Basiji, he’d been doing his best to imitate one. The police were investigating the murder, but so far nobody had been charged.

Kourosh left and Martin sat writing up the interview on his phone; the tiny virtual keyboard on the touch-screen drove him crazy, but it was still faster than using voice recognition then correcting all the errors. It was almost one o’clock when he finished; he realised he didn’t have PGP encryption keys for anyone but his editor, but she’d pass the story on to his colleagues almost as quickly as if he’d CC’d it to them himself.

He found Karim in the next room; the data jumped between their phones, then the young man went out into the night. Mehdi showed Martin to the guest room; as he lay down on a mat a couple of metres from where Behrouz was already sleeping he suddenly realised that he’d left his stupid woollen hat on all this time, even through the interview.

The next thing he knew, Behrouz was shaking him awake. Martin squinted at his watch, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the ceiling light. ‘If that’s not four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m going to have to kill you.’ He had a pounding headache and a lump of undigested food in his gut; as he sat up he discovered all the places he was aching from being confined in the freezer-truck the day before.

Behrouz handed Martin his phone, which was showing an image of a very large crowd at the entrance to a building. The picture had been taken at night, and Martin didn’t recognise the location. ‘What’s happening?’

‘That’s the Ministry of the Interior,’ Behrouz replied, ‘just before midnight.’

‘Did they trash it?’

‘I don’t know; at the time this was sent it was surrounded, but not actually occupied. Three people had been shot, but the crowd still hadn’t dispersed.’

‘News travels fast.’ This wasn’t random hitchhiking; Hezb-e-Haalaa must have set up some kind of data relay, stretching between the cities. ‘Thanks for waking me.’

‘I’ve organised a ride back.’

‘Can we get coffee on the way?’ Martin begged.

Behrouz looked dubious. ‘I said we’d be there by five.’

As they hurried through the dark streets, it struck Martin that the only thing preventing Behrouz from doing both of their jobs was the fact that, as an Iranian citizen, he’d face much harsher penalties for writing a story that crossed the line. Behrouz’s written English wasn’t perfect, but a subeditor could easily deal with the occasional minor blemish. And as for the supposedly greater journalistic impartiality of a foreigner, Martin had to admit that ever since he’d swapped clothes with Shokouh in the hospital his own claim on that virtue had been tenuous.

And Omar? What had Shokouh’s rescue cost him?

Martin finally realised that they were heading back to the place where they’d been dropped off the night before. When they arrived, the same freezer-truck was parked there, waiting for them.

He turned to Behrouz. ‘Have you got any decent music on your phone?’

‘Define decent.’

‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?’ Martin suggested hopefully. They’d never talked about music before.

Behrouz grimaced. ‘Do I look like a Sufi?’

‘Do I? I can still appreciate qawwali.’

‘The Sufi-est thing I’ve got is Metallica,’ Behrouz replied pityingly. ‘The rest is hardcore.’

‘So after twenty-five hundred years of Persian culture-’

‘Yeah, yeah. I already had that lecture from my grandmother.’

Martin slipped the driver a hundred US dollars and they followed him into the back of the truck. He tried to get ‘Mast Qalandar’ running through his brain, but by the time he’d been sealed in beside the compressor, ‘Enter Sandman’ was already rising up from the noise.

8

Nasim had stayed late in the lab, running simulations for the finch paper she was co-writing with Redland, so it was almost ten o’clock when she arrived home. Her mother was in the living room, watching the BBC World News channel.

Nasim kissed her on the cheek. ‘Anything I should know about?’

‘Did you eat?’ her mother replied.

‘Not really.’

‘I made khoresht sabzi.’

‘Oh, yum.’ Nasim could smell the delicate fragrance of the herbs; she went into the kitchen and opened the pot. ‘Khoresht sabzi?’ she wailed. ‘When did chicken become a vegetable?’

‘You should be happy,’ her mother protested. ‘I didn’t use beef.’

‘I’m a vegetarian! I told you that! Have you ever seen a chicken photosynthesise?’ Luckily there was a pot of rice, too; careful examination with a fork revealed sultanas, but no fleshy surprises. The rice was still warm; Nasim spooned a small hillock of it – along with what remained of the crisp tadigh where it had browned on the bottom – onto a plate and carried it to the living room.

‘One of my Ph.D. students is a vegetarian,’ her mother said. ‘He eats chicken all the time. Or maybe it’s fish.’

‘If he eats chicken or fish he’s not a vegetarian.’

Her mother sighed. ‘You should be eating beef. Women need iron. You talk to biologists all day, you should know that.’

‘And you’re an economist, so you should know that meat production wastes land, water and energy.’ She had given up meat only three months ago, but Nasim was already disgusted by the thought of eating flesh. ‘Anyway, it’s a personal choice. Imagine how you’d feel if someone tried feeding you pork.’

‘I ate bacon once,’ her mother confessed. ‘Accidentally, at a faculty party; it just tasted like fat drowned in salt. But the rule against pork is completely rational; the diseases of pigs are more communicable to humans. What diseases can you catch from cows or chickens?’

Nasim opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d simply have to accept that she’d need to cook for herself from now on. ‘What’s happening in Iran?’

‘They’ve arrested someone for shooting Ansari.’

‘Really?’

‘I recorded it.’ Her mother picked up the remote and hit a few buttons; the DVR began replaying the IRIB report.

The police had arrested a Palestinian immigrant, who had already confessed to the murder. His taped confession was played on air; he repeated no less than five times that he’d been acting alone, without assistance or encouragement from anyone. He’d been angry about Ansari’s policy on Israel, so he’d bought an AK-47 from a drug dealer and ridden his motorbike to Ansari’s house to make his opinion known. The police had also arrested the drug dealer, and were parading him as a kind of confirmatory witness.

Nasim didn’t believe a word of it. If it had happened six months ago it might have been just barely plausible, but this was far too convenient.

It looked like no one in Iran had been appeased either; when Nasim switched back to the BBC, they were showing smuggled images of huge crowds outside half-a-dozen government buildings. If Jabari’s hypocrisy had acted as a tiny seed for the superheated national psyche, just enough to make the simmering frustration visible, the murder of Ansari had brought everything to the boil. Ansari had not been a beloved national hero, just a calm, decent man with some modest ideas – but everyone in the country knew someone who had paid a high price for the crime of decency.

‘Too many to kill,’ her mother mused, with a chilling tone of detachment. ‘If there were a tenth the number, they’d just mow them down and say they were all in the pay of foreign governments.’

‘However,’ the BBC announcer interrupted her, ‘this reformist sentiment is far from unanimous. Government employees bussed into Tehran from the countryside have been seen brawling with the protesters and disrupting their vigils. Commentators say that this is likely to be a more effective tactic than armed confrontation, whether by the security forces or the conservative militias.’

Nasim felt her chest tightening with a familiar ache of helplessness. ‘Anything new about the MEK?’ she asked; the last she’d heard on the subject had come from the White House that morning.

‘The State Department, the Pentagon and the Iraqis have all chimed in with their own denials,’ her mother replied. ‘They insist that nobody in the MEK will be getting access to weapons, or a chance to cross the border.’

‘Do you believe that?’

Her mother frowned. ‘Now that it’s been denounced by Ansari’s brother and plastered all over the New York Times, I can’t see them going through with it. But maybe the publicity will do some good: the UN should be resettling these people somewhere else, because they’re never going to be safe in Iraq or Iran.’

‘Yeah.’ The MEK’s base in Iraq, known as Camp Ashraf, held thousands of Iranian exiles, including women and children – not just would-be soldiers. Until 2009 it had been guarded by coalition troops, but since Iraq had assumed responsibility for the camp the situation there had become far more precarious. Pro-Tehran factions in Baghdad were constantly trying to deport the occupants back to Iran – and if international pressure precluded shipping people straight into Iranian prisons, the same factions could still do their best to make the camp’s continued existence untenable. The MEK leadership certainly had a bloody history, and it was hard to know whether their renunciation of their old methods was sincere, but the whole community deserved something better than this desert limbo.

Nasim put her plate aside and curled up on the sofa beside her mother. It had been hard enough for the two of them, living illegally in Syria for three years, waiting for the UN to classify them as refugees and find a country willing to take them. They’d been cooped up in Damascus, in verminous apartments in the poorest neighbourhoods, sweltering in summer, freezing in winter. Their lives had revolved around evading the authorities, always having to move, or having to find the money to pay bribes to avoid being imprisoned or deported. Some schools had been willing to turn a blind eye to Nasim’s status, but that had generally proved both risky and expensive, so most of her lessons had been at home. Sometimes her mother had found back-alley jobs sewing clothes, and Nasim had stood beside her sewing machine, passing her pieces of material; at the end of the shift their ears would be ringing so loudly that they couldn’t hear each other speak. But she still met people who assumed that they’d simply jumped on a plane from Tehran to New York, where the mere mention of her dissident father had seen them naturalised on the spot, complete with bouquets and brass bands.

On the day they’d left Tehran, she’d wept twice as hard as on the day they’d hanged her father – because even after his death, she had felt she was abandoning him. She’d wanted to stay and fight, wanted to spit in the faces of his killers. That had been a meaningless, childish vision – and she would never forgive herself for the brutal accusations of cowardice she’d flung at her mother as she’d packed their suitcases – but even now, she couldn’t simply cast those emotions aside.

She knew that above all else, her father would have wanted the two of them to escape the shadow of the ayatollahs, to find a safe home, to flourish. But she doubted that she’d ever stop feeling that she owed him something more.

9

On the fifth day of the siege of Evin Prison, just before dawn, saboteurs got in among the protesters long enough to burn down the chemical toilets. Surveying the resulting black-edged sculptures in melted plastic, Martin wondered if the end had finally come. People couldn’t live like animals.

Within hours, though, shovels had been smuggled in from the surrounding suburbs and deep pits had been dug. Tents were commandeered, privacy was secured. By the time Martin confronted the inevitable and entered one of the reeking enclosures himself, the facilities were not just well-tested but adorned with graffiti, including some slyly vernacular English: ‘We honour Hassan Jabari for proving that a cock-up is better than a conspiracy.’

Evin Prison sat on the line where the northern suburbs of Tehran gave way, abruptly, to the Alborz Mountains, some twelve kilometres from the city centre. One minute there were crowded expressways, upmarket shopping malls and tiered apartment blocks in glittering white, the next there was barren rock sloping up into the mountains. Popular hiking trails began nearby, and a ski-lift wasn’t far away, though it was definitely not the skiing season. At the bottom of the rocky slope sat the prison, its high grey walls topped with razor-wire, watchtowers rising from the cell blocks. To the west lay a shady green park with a teahouse and restaurant; those facilities were closed now, but the park itself had proved invaluable, with the trees offering shelter from the sun, and now the soft, excavatable ground saving the assembled masses from complete indignity.

Protesters surrounded the prison on all sides, but the bare rock behind it had proved the hardest to defend. For three nights running, the police had used water-cannon to force a retreat back down the slopes. But they always ran out of water eventually, or their pumps ran out of fuel, and during the day the protesters rebuilt their barricades of metal drums and barbed-wire, and by sheer force of numbers pushed them up the mountain, driving back the police lines. Martin had watched from below as tear-gas grenades were smothered in drums of water or wrapped in fire-blankets, but never lobbed back to their senders. Apart from the sheer frustration of not prevailing, the police were offered no provocation: no stone-throwing, no swearing, no taunts.

The battles being waged in the suburbs around the prison were more complex, and it was hard to catch more than a few glimpses of the ebb and flow of territory, but the fact that supplies were still getting through demonstrated that the police had yet to form an impenetrable cordon between the protesters and their supporters. The authorities had cut off water to the drinking fountains in the park, but bottled water and a remarkable variety of home-cooked food were still finding their way in.

The prison itself was closed off now, but on the first day the guards had been only too willing to come out and interact. A line of protesters had stood at the main gate, and when ordered by a belligerent, near-hysterical officer to disperse, the first in line had replied, ‘My son is in your prison. He has committed no crime. I respectfully request that you release him now, or arrest me.’ IR links had ferried the man’s words from a phone in his shirt pocket all the way to a PA system in the park, and from there they’d blared out across the expressway.

When he’d been arrested, the next protester had stepped forward. ‘My sister is in your prison. She has committed no crime. I respectfully request that you release her now, or arrest me.’

The ritual had gone on for close to four hours; Martin had counted seventy-six arrests. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the intake had ceased and the guards had withdrawn behind the gate. Either the beast had literally filled its belly, or someone in authority had decided that they’d made a mistake to play along at all.

Four days later, and still nobody knew what had befallen those seventy-six people. Rumours were rife, but Martin did not believe the worst: after surrendering themselves into custody, they would not have been lined up against a wall and shot. But the emergency decrees had eroded the already shaky protections of the legal system, and there’d be a strong temptation to portray the relatives of the dissidents caught up in the sweep as something far more sinister than anguished parents and siblings. Self-confessed spies and saboteurs would do nicely, and in Evin confessions generally came with bruises, or worse. With officials under stress and arguing among themselves, there’d be a perilous volatility added to the usual brutal machinery.

In the male ablutions tent beside the latrines there was a hefty pile of water bottles, but they were outnumbered by empties waiting to be refilled. Martin poured a little water into a basin, washed his hands thoroughly with soap, wiped some of the grime from his face and neck, then emptied the basin onto the ground outside. He itched to do more – literally, in places – but it was almost time for the noon prayers, which would put a big dent in the supply; it would have been selfish to make himself vastly cleaner than his own beliefs required.

Outside, he looked across the park and spotted Behrouz, sitting on the grass near the boarded-up teahouse, his face in his hands. Martin called out as he approached; Behrouz looked up but didn’t reply.

‘Did you contact your cousin?’ Martin asked him.

‘Yeah.’ Slightly Smart email was still diffusing through the porous police lines and across the troubled city, but Behrouz had insisted that his wife not carry one of the incriminating phones, which in any case were in short supply. ‘He talked to Suri. She’s fine. She’s just worried.’ As he spoke, he picked nervously at a stain on his sleeve.

Martin sat beside him. ‘If you need to get out, get out. I think I can survive a couple of days without you.’

Behrouz regarded him sceptically. Martin spotted Mahnoosh walking briskly through the crowd with a cardboard box full of smuggled essentials. ‘Do you need anything?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘I’ll be back in a second.’ Martin jogged after her, sliding open his phone’s case as he went.

‘You get through these very quickly,’ Mahnoosh observed as he handed her his dead battery in exchange for a charged one.

‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not wasting them, I promise. I mean, I don’t play games.’

Mahnoosh said, ‘A man after my own heart.’

Martin tried out the recharged battery on his old phone first; there’d been cases of people’s phones getting fried, either by malice or some kind of inadvertent substitution. His old phone started up and gave the usual NO SIGNAL message, so he fitted the battery into his triple-S and waited to see if there was any data for him drifting through the crowd.

He made his way back to Behrouz, who was still looking despondent. ‘I’m serious,’ Martin said. ‘If you want to be with your family, just go. If they can get five shovels in past the cops, someone will be able to smuggle you out.’ In fact, he doubted that the police would be arresting deserters from the protest, but he didn’t want to put it like that.

Behrouz shook his head. ‘Forget it. Everything’s fine.’

The muezzin began calling from the mosque in the exhibition centre nearby; Martin could see the minaret from where they sat. Behrouz said, ‘I’m going to pray. I’ll meet you back here.’

‘Okay.’ Martin watched the crowd gathering on the grass, spreading their prayer mats. The regime had a long history of denouncing opponents who claimed to be good Muslims as ‘hypocrites’ – trying to inflate any political difference into a crime against Islam – but Jabari had rather robbed the word of its traction. In the face of defiance from hundreds of thousands of ordinary, moderately pious Iranians, there was a limit to how insulting they could be about their opponents’ religious bona fides, and even their gentlest fatherly admonitions were no longer being taken very seriously.

Martin’s phone chimed. No personal email had arrived, but he’d signed up to several newsfeeds. The system was being spammed, of course, but he’d only subscribed to digitally-signed bulletins from a whitelist of trusted senders; all the node-clogging disinformation being churned out by VEVAK was slowing down the network, but for most purposes it was invisible to him.

There were reports from across the country on the previous day’s Friday prayers; the phone’s translations into English were full of grammatical errors – and a few surreal touches that probably came from bad guesses between homographs in the source text – but Martin still found them faster to decipher than the original Farsi. The gist of it was that more than a dozen clerics in Tehran and the other large cities had come out publicly in support of constitutional change. Two months before, that would have seen them thrown into prison; Martin wasn’t sure that the more likely alternative these days wasn’t assassination, but in any case there’d been an infectious wave of outspokenness. Once religious scholars were ready to attest that velayat-e-faqih – their role as guardians of society – didn’t necessarily extend into every last corner of civil and political life, then the regime’s position was demoted to the status of just one view among many, all equally compatible with faith and tradition. And once those same scholars were willing to suggest – however politely – that the regime might in fact have abused its power, change became not just a possibility worth contemplating, but a positive duty.

The list of strikes and vigils across the country now ran into the hundreds, and the general public were treating any outbreaks of looting and violence as entirely down to Basiji provocateurs. The police were stretched thin, but cars were not burning in the streets, and without the true anarchy needed to justify the harshest countermeasures, sending in the Revolutionary Guards against unarmed protesters would have risked an all-out civil war.

So the question was, how badly did the incumbents want to cling to power for its own sake? When the alternative was not Marxism, or a surrender to depraved Western hedonism, but a moderate, non-aligned social democracy that remained far more obedient to tradition and religion than, say, Turkey… was that a fate whose avoidance demanded tens of thousands of deaths and a country in flames?

It would have been nice to be able to put that directly to the President and his inner circle, but they just weren’t giving interviews these days. So Martin sat on the grass and wrote it into his Tehran Diary, the five-hundred-words-a-day reward that his editor had given him for his serendipitous encounter with Kourosh Ansari. He was usually averse to such rhetorical flourishes, but in this case there was one saving grace: there was a chance that by the time the question saw print, his readers would already know the answer.

The first meal of the day arrived around dusk. As Martin joined the queue with Behrouz, he saw some people offering morsels to the feral cats that had been attracted by the shantytown’s rubbish.

‘Is that animal welfare, or are they testing it for poison?’ Martin wondered.

Whatever travails the smugglers had faced, the plastic containers of stew they were dispensing were still warm. Martin hadn’t realised how famished he was until he started eating. With a couple of pieces of flatbread to act as scoops, there was no need for cutlery, and the meal was gone in about two minutes.

‘Kheyli khoshmazeh,’ he declared approvingly.

Behrouz said, ‘Don’t get too used to it, or you’ll have to find yourself an Iranian wife.’

Martin was tongue-tied for a moment; it wasn’t Behrouz’s style to be casually sexist. Had he noticed something? Martin tried to avoid protesting too much. ‘You don’t think I can learn to cook like this myself?’

‘Maybe you could,’ Behrouz conceded, ‘but it’s a fulltime job. Someone spent two hours just chopping the herbs for this.’

‘I think I can live with herbs from a packet.’

Behrouz laughed. ‘Then why bother? Why not just give up and eat pizza?’

‘There are limits.’ Iranian pizzas – though inexplicably popular with the local teenagers – were the worst Martin had tasted anywhere.

Later, they walked around the park trying to gauge the mood of the crowd. Everyone looked anxious and weary, but they’d all read the news about the dissident clerics; momentum was still going their way. Martin gathered a few quotes, but he didn’t push it; people didn’t want to be forced to measure and re-measure the situation, to keep spelling out the best and worst possibilities and calling the odds.

They came to a spot where one of the prison’s watchtowers was in sight; Martin could make out two uniformed figures with rifles. A floodlight above them swept around automatically, illuminating the park and the protesters as often as it shone down on whatever grim courtyard was hidden behind the walls. Martin had an image of Omar sitting on a bunk, shadows of bars sliding across his cell in synch with the very same light. If they’d found evidence linking him to Shokouh’s escape, surely they would have made it public and charged him. But then, if they suspected him but had no evidence, they would be trying to extract a confession instead.

‘They hanged my uncle in there,’ Behrouz said. ‘In eighty-eight.’

‘Jesus.’ Martin was floored; this was the first he’d heard of it.

‘I was only a kid, nobody told me much.’ As he spoke, Behrouz kept his gaze fixed on the ground. ‘But I heard my father and grandfather talking about it.’

‘Do you know why he was arrested?’ There’d been thousands of extra-judicial killings in 1988; no trials, just a formulaic interrogation on political and religious matters, with wrong answers leading to death.

‘He belonged to some kind of leftist group. They weren’t killing people, or blowing things up – just publishing pamphlets against the mullahs. Actually, he’d been conscripted into the army, he was in Tehran on leave when they arrested him. No one really knew for sure what had happened for about a year. Then my grandfather heard that he was buried in a mass grave in Khavaran Cemetery. He was twenty-two years old when they killed him.’

Martin said, ‘That’s fucked.’ No wonder the place cast a pall over him. ‘Look, if you want to get out of here-’

Behrouz shook his head. ‘I can do my job. I’m only telling you so you’ll stop asking me that.’

‘Okay.’ Martin got it now. ‘I’ll shut up about it, and we’ll both just do our jobs.’

‘Good.’

As they walked on, Martin felt a surge of anger, but there was nothing to be done with it; the last thing Behrouz needed was to hear him ranting against tyrants.

‘So if I’m hooked on Iranian cuisine,’ he said, ‘where exactly does a middle-aged, atheist foreigner start looking for an Iranian wife?’

Behrouz said, ‘Outside the divorce courts.’

Martin woke from shallow, unquiet sleep to the sound of helicopters approaching. He staggered to his feet, reluctant for a moment to let the blanket he was wrapped in drop from his shoulders. The sound was coming from the direction of the prison, and it was accompanied by spotlight beams sweeping across the park; he counted six before one of them struck his eyes, blinding him to any more detail.

He crouched down and shook Behrouz awake. People were already gathering around the park’s scattered trees; there was no sign of the kind of panic that would have ensued if anyone had actually seen a gun mounted behind one of the spotlights, and a part of Martin still refused to believe that the government would slaughter its own people en masse – even in 1988 they’d gone through an elaborate inquisitorial ritual, not just fired into an unarmed crowd – but what if they strafed the park lightly and killed a dozen protesters out of the thousands? Were they prepared to sell that, politically, as a necessary trade-off for the sake of restoring order? Were they ready to call the bluff of the majority of Iranians who’d stayed out of the fray so far, and say: choose us – with a few unavoidable casualties – or back the traitors, and blame only yourselves when the streets are running with blood?

Martin joined the huddle of bodies in the shadow of the nearest tree. Under the circumstances, the whole idea of shelter was marginal, but anything was better than standing beneath a spotlight on open ground. He glanced at Behrouz, who was ashen; Martin knew better now than to offer any solicitous remarks, but he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt at the disparity between them. Though he was far from nonchalant about the situation himself, he was certain that if he’d had a young family it would have been ten times harder to be here.

As the minutes passed, it became clear that this operation was not a simple aerial assault on the protesters. The spotlights remained trained on the park, but the helicopters were keeping their distance and showing no signs of dispensing anything unpleasant: no bullets, no tear-gas, not even a blast of pressurised water.

The dazzle of the beams made it hard to keep watching the airspace over the prison, but Martin noticed a subtle shift in the illumination on the ground; the lights bathing the immediate area hadn’t changed, but an adjacent region of the park had become darker. It took him a few seconds to make sense of that.

He turned to Behrouz. ‘I think one of them just landed inside the prison.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Meaning what?’

There was some angry shouting, and Martin saw people breaking cover and running across the grass to confer. Behrouz said, ‘I don’t know what it means, but they think the prison’s being evacuated.’

‘Okay.’ Martin considered this hypothesis. Anything was better than a hail of bullets, and maybe two could play the game of frustrating your enemy without bloodshed. There were plenty of inaccessible prisons out in the countryside – and even if they were full, it would have taken the government only a few days to assemble desert camps of huts ringed with razor-wire. If they plucked everyone out of Evin and deposited them in unknown or hard-to-reach locations, the siege would be deflated into an irrelevant farce.

Behrouz nudged him. ‘Look.’ Four men had picked up one of the concrete benches that were scattered throughout the park and were carrying it over their heads like an upside-down canoe. Martin supposed the concrete might offer a degree of protection from descending gunfire… but any safety advantages would be negated by the fact that the men were marching straight towards the prison itself.

When they passed out of sight behind a tree, Behrouz rose to his feet. ‘Come on.’

Martin’s skin turned to ice. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘We don’t have to get too close, but we should keep them in sight.’

For one uncharitable moment Martin wondered if Behrouz was just trying to outdo him in the bravado stakes – as if the mere suggestion that he might have wanted to rejoin his family had wounded his pride. But that was unfair; what he was proposing was reasonable. Martin stood and followed him, zigzagging across the grass from tree to tree, wondering what an observer from above would make of them scuttling along in the wake of the concrete canoeists.

They stopped at the corner of the park; they had a tree to themselves and a clear view of the road that ran past the park and alongside the prison’s perimeter wall. The men with the bench were already in front of the prison, twenty or so metres away. The wall itself blocked the line of fire from the watchtowers, but one of the helicopters was hovering directly above the prison gates. Martin couldn’t imagine what the men’s purpose was – unless they planned to use the bench as a battering ram, and he couldn’t see that ending well.

Before the men reached the gates they stopped and rid themselves of the bench, depositing it on the ground in an upturned V. Then they turned and walked back towards the park.

‘I don’t get it,’ Martin confessed. ‘Do they think the prisoners are going to be moved by truck?’

Behrouz said, ‘The general population’s about fifteen thousand, but even the thousand or so politicals would take an awful lot of helicopter trips. So maybe the helicopters are for the top brass, and the grunts and the prisoners will go by truck.’

‘Okay, but how is a park bench going to slow them down?’

Behrouz spread his hands; he had no idea.

Now that he was out of the direct glare of the spotlights, Martin could see the placement of the helicopters more clearly. Along with the one hovering above the gate, there were four lined up in a queue that stretched eastwards from the far side of the prison. As he watched, a sixth helicopter rose into sight and flew north, up along the slope of the mountains. Then the first in the remaining queue of four approached and descended inside the prison walls. It was like a taxi rank.

Another two groups of men came down the road, carrying two more benches from the park. Martin wasn’t sure how many benches there were in total, but perhaps a large enough pile of them would constitute more than a trivial nuisance that could be moved aside in seconds. As they approached the prison gate there was a burst of automatic gunfire from the helicopter standing sentry; Martin flinched and the men stopped walking, but nobody appeared to have been hit.

He stared at the surreal tableau: the grey wall, the hovering helicopter, the eight men standing in a bright pool of light, holding up the benches like office workers warding off rain with newspaper umbrellas. Belatedly he lifted his phone and began recording.

The group at the front started walking again. There was another burst of gunfire, and one man collapsed. His comrades heaved the bench onto the ground, then two of them lifted the fallen man, who was able to put his arms across their shoulders for support, and they all began walking back towards the park. The second group took a few steps forward, then they too dropped their bench and retreated.

As the injured man approached the edge of the park, a man and a woman ran forward to examine him. There was a dark patch of blood on his right thigh, soaking through his trousers, but he was still conscious; one of the men pulled off his T-shirt and the woman tied it as a tourniquet around the injured leg. Martin knew there were medical students among the protesters, though he hadn’t seen anything more than the most primitive first-aid supplies. He was torn between following the retreating group back into the park and retaining his present vantage point to see what the authorities’ next step would be. He suspected that at any moment a couple of guards would emerge to move the pieces of the aborted blockade aside – and unless all the rules of the game had changed and the protesters were preparing to physically attack the guards, that would be the end of it.

A new sound intruded on the relentless drone of the helicopters. Martin turned to see a white Paykan tearing down the road beside the park, both front doors propped wide open. The car shot past him, heading for the prison; he raised his phone and framed it just as the driver – wearing a motorcycle helmet, a leather jacket and thick swathes of cloth wrapped around his knees and elbows – jumped from the car and rolled across the ground. The gunner in the helicopter opened fire, but Martin couldn’t tell whether he was aiming for the car or the separated driver. In any case, the car kept moving straight ahead, struck one of the upside-down benches with its right wheel, veered sideways, and crashed into the prison gates.

Martin waited, tensed, half-expecting a fireball, but there was nothing; the car hadn’t been packed with explosives, and any damage it had done had been from momentum alone. Bollards protected the gates from being rammed head-on, but the impromptu ramp had allowed a long run-up followed by a sudden sharp swerve. The driver had taken cover in the bushes on the side of the road opposite the prison; he’d probably not got off unscathed, but unless he’d caught a bullet, he was probably not fatally injured either. Before the sound of the impact had stopped ringing in Martin’s ears, he heard a second car approaching. The helicopter left its post and flew rapidly towards the park; he grabbed Behrouz and pushed him flat against the ground, face-down in a mulch of decaying leaves, then stretched his arm out in what he hoped was the right direction and tilted his phone up.

He heard gunfire, then the roar of the car’s engine shifting pitch abruptly as it passed. The second crash was far louder than the first. Martin was shaking; the helicopter was hovering very close to their tree – he could feel the downdraft, and a gentle rain of dislodged leaves. After a few seconds he drew his right arm in towards his body and thumbed the controls on the phone to play back the footage it had captured. He’d caught the second car slamming into the first and travelling four or five metres down the road as the two of them gouged an opening in the prison gates.

Martin still had his left arm across Behrouz’s shoulder and he felt him move as if preparing to stand.

‘Don’t,’ he insisted, ‘it’s right on top of us.’

‘So what’s the plan?’ Behrouz asked.

Having failed to defend the prison from damage, the gunner was probably suffering from a strong urge to compensate by firing at anything that moved. It was possible that the two of them were already visible through gaps in the branches above, but until someone screamed through a loud-hailer that they should get to their feet with their hands in the air, playing possum seemed by far the best strategy.

‘We wait for it to move,’ Martin said.

‘Wait how long?’

‘I don’t know. It can’t stay there forever.’ Martin pictured the helicopter hovering above the tree, the gunner sitting in the open bay. He’d be wearing night-vision goggles, but with any luck he’d be scanning the park and the road for approaching threats, not looking straight down.

A branch above them creaked perilously. Martin wondered if the downdraft could dislodge something heavier than leaves; apparently Behrouz had the same idea. He pushed Martin’s restraining arm aside and rolled onto his back to see what was happening. When he failed to volunteer a report, Martin took a look for himself.

A man was standing in the tree, slowly edging his way out along one of the branches. He was steadying himself with one hand, carrying something in the other. Martin couldn’t actually see any part of the helicopter chassis through the branches and foliage, but the downdraft and the spill from the spotlight gave him a good idea of its location: it was only a few metres from the top of the tree, and their arboreal companion was moving closer to it.

Behrouz said, ‘If the chopper pilot sees him, which way will it move?’

‘Back towards the prison, so the gunner can get a better aim at him.’

‘But if we run in the opposite direction, into the park, we’re going to be right in the line of fire, aren’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Martin agreed. ‘Good point.’

‘So we should run… sideways?’

‘I think so.’

Behrouz shifted into a squatting position, ready to move, and Martin did the same. He was still mesmerised by the man in the tree. He could now see that the object in his hand was one of the shovels they’d brought in to dig the latrines. Maybe he’d been hiding up there since nightfall, waiting to swing it into the face of the next Basiji saboteur who crept in to mess with the waste disposal arrangements.

The man brought one shoulder back, stood poised for a second or two, then flung the shovel like a javelin; Martin couldn’t see his target, but there was a thwack followed by a deranged mechanical clatter. Behrouz ran one way, Martin the other, but the javelin thrower chose this moment to jump from the tree, landing on top of Martin and knocking him flat.

‘Fuck!’ He disentangled himself and looked up to see the helicopter spinning wildly, moving backwards away from the park as it spiralled towards the ground. The shovel must have wedged between the tail rotor and its support, long enough to do real damage before the handle snapped and it fell away.

Martin clambered to his feet; he’d hurt his back and his right knee was giving him alarming signals, but he could just about walk. He couldn’t see where the javelin thrower had gone, but a dozen men were running across the park, carrying tree branches and other improvised clubs. Martin watched anxiously as they neared the wounded helicopter; the pilot was struggling to bring it down safely, but it was rolling and pitching erratically as it descended.

It hit the ground with a thud about twenty metres away. The spotlight went out immediately, but as the men rushed in the main rotor was still turning. Martin waited for gunshots, but all he could hear over the engine was shouting. He looked around for his phone and finally located it a few metres away on the grass. He picked it up to start recording the scene, and it emitted a chime; the IR transceiver had come within sight of someone carrying fresh news.

Martin ignored the bulletin and kept filming, though he could make out almost nothing of what was happening in the shadows around the helicopter. The engine finally cut off, making it easier to hear the shouting, but apart from a general tone of belligerence this left him none the wiser. Then three uniformed men emerged from the mêlée, walking with their hands clasped behind their heads in front of a protester carrying an automatic rifle. Their captors made them kneel on the grass, then bound their hands with what Martin guessed were strips of webbing cut from harnesses inside the helicopter.

Behrouz approached. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah. You?’

Behrouz nodded. Martin handed him his phone. ‘Can you read this? I don’t think I’m up to Slightly Smart translations right now.’

Behrouz checked the newsfeed and said, ‘The Ministry of the Interior has been occupied. Seven officials have been taken under citizens’ arrest.’ He held up the phone to show Martin a group portrait of sullen bureaucrats kneeling with bound hands, almost echoing the scene on the grass.

Martin looked over towards the prison. The taxi rank was empty now, with the last of the helicopters flying north across the mountains. He said, ‘They’ve evacuated the management, that’s all.’ Maybe they’d never even planned to move the inmates; rather, the tide was turning so rapidly now that the prison officials and intelligence officers with the most to fear from the crowd’s retribution had opted for self-preservation and a pre-emptive retreat.

They approached the group of men clustered around the helicopter. Martin spotted Kambiz, the student who’d tipped him off to the first protest in Ferdowsi Square; his jacket was torn and he was grinning nervously, managing to look both jubilant and anxious at the same time.

‘What now?’ Martin asked him.

Kambiz gestured at the helicopter. ‘They’re trying to raise someone inside the prison on the radio. Now that VEVAK has run away, maybe we can negotiate with the remaining guards. We’re not here to set thieves and murderers free. But anyone who hasn’t even been before a court should not be in this place.’

Martin said, ‘You’ve got one gun and three prisoners. What is there to negotiate with?’

Kambiz shook his head. ‘It’s not about weapons. I wasn’t even born when the Shah was toppled, but everybody understands that when something rotten starts to fall, you don’t want to be standing where it will bury you.’

Martin glanced up at the watchtower; the sentries there had a clear line of sight, but they hadn’t fired on the men who’d captured the helicopter crew. Nobody wanted to be charged with treason by the present regime – but neither did they want to be charged with murder by their successors.

Half an hour later, the protesters sent a delegation of five people into the prison to negotiate face-to-face. No doubt there were things to be said that couldn’t be spoken over an open radio channel. Martin passed the tense hours that followed interviewing some of the people who’d been involved in the bench/car manoeuvre; the injured man had already been evacuated, but the other participants turned out to be mechanical engineering students who’d rehearsed something similar in the countryside a week before – albeit not with live ammunition and a helicopter. ‘We wanted to fit remote controls to the cars,’ one of them told Martin, ‘but we couldn’t get the parts without attracting suspicion.’ They’d bought half-a-dozen cheap Paykans from wrecking yards and left them in side-streets around the park before the siege had begun.

Just before dawn, the delegation returned. A deal had been struck in which the guards would continue to defend the cell blocks under the control of the prison authority – which held mainly convicted criminals – but they would not interfere with anything that took place in Evin 209 and 240, the political wings which came under VEVAK’s control.

Behrouz translated the news, but when he’d finished he told Martin bluntly, ‘If you report that deal, you can have my resignation. ’ If the regime survived, Martin doubted that his own silence would be enough to save anyone; someone on the inside would surely betray the prison guards to their brave superiors who’d flown off over the mountains. Then again, putting all the details down in newsprint would certainly diminish any prospect of a face-saving decision to let the guards’ inaction go unpunished.

He said, ‘I won’t mention it.’ He could find a circumspect way of phrasing things without actually lying. The protesters were still going to storm the prison, and the guards would still tactically withdraw, to concentrate on keeping the most dangerous prisoners confined. Nobody munching cornflakes in Sydney needed to know that certain choices had been made to allow all this to happen without bloodshed.

The sky was pale blue, but the sun was still hidden behind the apartment blocks of north Tehran as the protesters surged through the broken gates of Evin Prison. Martin let more than a hundred people enter before he even tried to elbow his way into the stream. If there was unexpected resistance ahead, he wanted to be close enough to the vanguard to witness it, but he didn’t feel obliged to put himself at any unnecessary risk. This wasn’t his revolution.

Still, as he and Behrouz passed through the gates and walked with the hushed throng between the grey cell blocks, Martin felt the history of the place weighing down on him. This was where the Shah’s henchmen had imprisoned and tortured his enemies. This was where thousands of opponents of Khomeini had been hanged in mass purges. This was where labour activists, journalists, homosexuals, scholars, environmentalists and women’s rights campaigners had been thrown into solitary confinement, beaten and raped. This was where Baha’i ended up, for the crime of believing in one prophet too many, or proselytising Christians for the crime of believing in one prophet too few. This was where student leaders, after the protests of 1999, had had their faces pushed into drains full of faeces until their bursting lungs had commanded them to inhale, and where ten years later those who’d marched against electoral fraud had been beaten into surreal confessions that the true source of their treasonous passions had been the meddling of foreign puppet-masters and excessive exposure to the BBC. But he couldn’t hold Evin’s obscenities at arm’s length as the aberrations of an alien culture. He had seen the American prison at Bagram, where innocent men had been battered to death; he had seen the detention camps in the Australian desert where refugees had lost their minds and slashed their bodies with razors. The toxic mixture of power and impunity was a universal human disease.

Martin turned to Behrouz, hoping they could exchange a few words that would puncture the solemnity, but the expression on his colleague’s face was so stricken that he looked away again, not wanting to embarrass him.

The watchtowers were deserted now; if anyone was training rifles on the crowd they were well hidden. Martin had read accounts of the prison’s layout by former inmates, but he hadn’t committed the architecture to memory; he could only assume that someone who knew the place inside out was leading them to one of the political wings.

Section 240 was a squat four-storey building with slits for windows. Apparently nobody had left a key under the mat, but Martin was too far from the doors to see exactly what was being done with crowbars, bolt-cutters and battery-powered tools in order to gain entrance.

When the main doors were opened the crowd surged forward, but not very far; inside the building there were more obstructions to be dealt with.

Behrouz said, ‘If every cell is this much work, it’s going to be a long day.’

Martin had read that there were about eight hundred. ‘Good practice for when you queue for your Metallica tickets.’

When they finally managed to squeeze into the building they found themselves in a kind of foyer between the main doors and a deserted checkpoint with a barred metal gate. There was a glowering portrait of Khomeini on the wall beside a scroll covered in dense writing; Martin sounded out and translated a few words, until Behrouz put him out of his misery. ‘It’s a kind of mission statement, committing everyone who works here to high ethical standards.’ His voice was thick with contempt. ‘It quotes some Quranic verses, but don’t ask me to repeat them, because in the context I’d consider that desecration.’

There was a sound of splintering wood. ‘Keleedha!’ someone shouted excitedly; Martin didn’t need that translated for him. People started passing jangling bunches of keys back through the crowd. A man in front of Martin offered him a bunch; Martin shook his head apologetically. ‘Ruznaame negaaram. Momken nist.’

Behrouz held out his hand and took them.

The protesters spread out, looking for the cells their keys would open. As Martin followed Behrouz to the crowded stairwell, he saw a woman ahead of them turn at the landing and he glimpsed Mahnoosh’s face in profile. He felt a sudden ache of panic in his chest; he wanted to call out to her, to plead with her to be careful, but he was afraid that might sound presumptuous.

On the third floor there were two more metal gates that needed power-tools to break through; it was another twenty minutes before they were standing before the cells themselves. Martin raised his phone and snapped the scene: a row of identical doors stretching away down the corridor ahead of them, with no windows, just thin slits that appeared to be bolted shut. The place was shabbily clean, with a strong smell of disinfectant not quite masking an undercurrent of excrement. Even now, Martin could hear only faint, muffled shouting from a few inmates; the cells were almost soundproof.

The first key was matched, the first door swung open. A middle-aged man limped out into the corridor; he seemed dazed, unsure of what was happening. He was dressed in loose white clothes, bare-foot; above his thick beard his face was covered in welts and bruises. He spoke with his liberators in a soft voice, with an air of puzzlement. Maybe he’d heard nothing of Jabari, of the strikes and marches. Perhaps he’d spoken to no one but his captors for years.

Martin held up his phone and started filming.

Behrouz said, ‘I’m going this way.’ He shook his keys and gestured at a second line of cells that started further to their right.

‘Okay.’ Martin didn’t follow him; he wanted to record what was happening, but he didn’t want to thrust his camera into the faces of these fragile people. Another door opened in the corridor ahead of him; a tall, skinny youth, shirtless, with long red weals on his back, stepped forward nervously. As he talked with the protesters he was as quiet as the first man, but much more anxious, blinking and flinching away from anyone who came too close. Then he sat down on the floor outside the cell and cradled his head in his arms.

When the third cell opened there were shouts of jubilation; Mahnoosh was among the liberators here, cheering the loudest. After a moment Martin recognised the freed prisoner as a young man who’d been arrested on the first day of the siege; his face was bruised and one eye was swollen shut, but he was still wearing torn street clothes rather than prison garb. Some of his friends lifted him up on their shoulders and carried him towards the stairs.

As Martin turned to keep them in view, he heard a gunshot, very close. One of the protesters staggered, bleeding from the shoulder. Martin swung around, his ears ringing in the silence. A man with a neatly trimmed beard, wearing a pale green shirt decorated with the prison authority insignia, was standing a few metres away, in front of an open utilities closet.

The guard turned to Martin, shouting angrily, gesturing with his pistol. Martin raised his hands in surrender, but the guard kept screaming insults or instructions. Martin had no idea what he was saying, and the only response he could string together was an apology for his incomprehension: ‘Ma’zerat mikham, agha. Farsi balad nistam.’

The guard aimed his gun directly at Martin’s head.

Mahnoosh called out urgently, ‘Put down the phone! He wants you to put down the phone!’

Martin tried to drop it, but his fingers wouldn’t unclench. He wished he’d taken the keys when he’d been offered them.

The guard grunted and sagged to the ground. Someone had hurled a fire-extinguisher and hit him in the back. People piled on top of him, grabbing the gun and restraining him. Martin felt lightheaded; he sat on the floor and watched, detached from everything. The guard was taken to a newly vacated cell; the wounded protester was given a makeshift bandage and helped to the stairs. There was a hospital in the prison complex, Martin recalled. He wondered if they’d be willing to treat the man.

‘Hey! Martin jan!’

Martin looked up to see Omar approaching, with Behrouz following behind him. His face was gaunt and he was walking with a limp, but he was beaming. Martin rose to his feet and stepped forward to embrace him, fighting back tears of relief.

‘What happened? It looks like you lost twenty kilos.’

‘I did a hunger strike,’ Omar replied. ‘Looks like it worked. Twenty kilos and the walls come down; ten more and they would have made me President.’

Omar wanted to phone Rana. The protesters had managed to force open two offices with working landlines, but there were already long queues for those, so they decided to try the floor below. As the three of them were walking down the stairs, Martin’s phone emitted a chime he’d never heard before. He checked the display, and after a moment he realised that it was now showing an icon for the radio mesh network that he’d seen used at the Majlis protest. Someone must have found the local jammer and disabled it.

He showed Omar, who tried a few numbers, but the network was still jammed across most of the city. On the second floor one of the landlines was free; while Omar was making his call, Martin’s phone managed another novel sound. Someone on the network was offering a streaming video feed.

He tapped the icon, and it expanded into a shaky camera shot of a TV screen tuned to an IRIB news broadcast. Martin gave the phone to Behrouz.

Other people around them were already cheering ecstatically. Behrouz scowled, struggling to hear more. Martin waited patiently; there was a loop of text running at the bottom of the screen, it would all be spelled out eventually.

Behrouz said, ‘The moderate clerics have won some kind of deal. There’s going to be a referendum on the Guardian Council veto powers within three months, followed by new elections for the President and the Majlis before the end of the year.’

That was it, that was the saving move. If the deal held, there would be no civil war, but no turning back to the status quo either.

Omar was sitting on the floor, the office phone in his hand, weeping with joy. Behind him was a huge grey filing cabinet that someone had tipped on its side, spilling VEVAK’s meticulous accounts of their interrogations all over the floor. Maybe there hadn’t been enough time to put everything through the shredders. Or maybe the fuckers had thought they’d be coming back.

Martin turned to Behrouz and held out his hand. ‘Mubaarak.’ Behrouz shook it, but even as his expression of disbelief slowly melted into a kind of stunned acceptance, he wasn’t ready to claim victory.

‘Nothing’s certain yet,’ he insisted.

‘No,’ Martin conceded.

Behrouz smiled. ‘But it starts today. It might take us another ten years to be free – but it starts today.’

10

Nasim stared glumly across the sea of dinner jackets and evening gowns, trying to think of a way to escape to her hotel room before someone made yet another hypocritical speech in praise of Kourosh Ansari, President-elect of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

She turned to her mother. ‘I can’t believe I let you drag me down here. Half these people spent the last thirty years trying to get America to bomb their own country, just so they could go back and turn it into their own cosy little kleptocracy.’

‘That’s unfair!’ her mother replied. ‘A quarter of them at most. Anyway, that’s just the old men; you should be thinking about their sons.’

Nasim grimaced. ‘My idea of a romantic evening does not include a speech by Donald Rumsfeld at the Heritage Foundation.’

‘How many people have you actually spoken to tonight?’

‘Am I allowed to count waiters?’

‘Go and mingle.’ Her mother made a shooing gesture. ‘I didn’t buy you that dress so you could spend the night whining in my ear.’

Nasim left her and headed for the canapés. Amazingly enough, there’d been a vegetarian option, but it had been a quarter of the size of the other main courses and she was still famished.

As she stood at the buffet table trying to determine whether there was anything left that she could eat – other than garnishes – a voice beside her said, ‘Congratulations on your new President.’

‘Thank you.’ Nasim resisted the urge to add acerbically, ‘I do hope you’ll let us keep this one.’ She turned to face the speaker; the painfully thin young man looked familiar, but it took her a few seconds to place him. ‘Are you stalking me?’ she demanded. ‘Did you follow me to Washington?’

Caplan looked affronted. ‘Would you like to see my invitation? I’m a major donor to the Iranian-American Friendship Council.’

‘Since when? Three days ago?’

‘Six, actually.’

‘Six? A real futurologist.’ Nasim looked around for hotel security, but there was no honest complaint she could make that wouldn’t sound deranged and paranoid. ‘What exactly is it that you think I can do for you? Haven’t you heard the news about the HCP?’

‘Congress decided not to fund it.’ Caplan was stoical. ‘That’s sad, but it’s not unexpected. So there’ll be no big, coordinated federal project, but I’m sure you’ll still find grants here and there. I’ll be setting up my own foundation to help with that, though of course I can’t replace someone like Churchland.’

Zachary Churchland had died three weeks before and descended into the frosty limbo of an Alcor cryonic vault. He had left the bulk of his estate to the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project, having finally concluded that he couldn’t trust his immortal soul to human hands.

‘I heard someone’s contesting his will,’ Nasim recalled. ‘Not just his widow; his first wife, too-’

‘Third wife. Actually I’m helping her fund the case,’ Caplan explained smoothly.

Nasim stared at him. ‘How does someone get to marry Zachary Churchland, then end up needing help to fund anything?’

‘A party in Las Vegas, a truckload of cocaine, and several professional athletes.’

‘I’m sorry I asked. But if she got nothing in the divorce, why would she be any luckier at the graveside? Or freezer-side.’

Caplan smiled. ‘She won’t be. But I found a lawyer who’s convinced her otherwise, based in part on the Leona Helmsley case – you know, the woman who was ruled mentally unfit after leaving twelve million to her dog. The ongoing litigation should help keep the bequest out of the Superintelligence Project’s hands for quite a while.’

Pet dog, pet god; maybe the precedent would actually fly for a dyslexic judge. Still, Nasim was baffled. ‘Why should you care who gets Churchland’s money? It’s either Bullshit Squared, or the wives. It’s lost to the HCP.’

‘No doubt it is,’ Caplan conceded, ‘but I don’t want the superintelligence to come into existence before I’m uploaded. It’s very important to me that I’m the first transcendent being in this stellar system. I can’t risk having to compete with another resource-hungry entity; I have personal plans that require at least one Jovian mass of computronium.’

‘Really? I have “personal plans” that require Naveen Andrews and a bottle of coconut oil, but I don’t expect they’re going to happen either.’

Caplan was bemused. ‘Why are you so hostile?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nasim confessed. ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve had enough experience of deluded fundamentalists to last a lifetime.’

‘Well, you’re wasting your energy,’ Caplan replied loftily. ‘One way or another, everything I speak of will come to pass. You can either join us, or be left behind.’

Nasim said, ‘Don’t go crazy with those mushroom-stuffed vol-auvents; I heard they can slash three per cent off the lifespan of nematode worms.’

Back in their hotel room, Nasim’s mother said, ‘I received an interesting job offer tonight.’

‘Someone wants to poach you?’ Nasim was excited; it would have to be a big step up the ladder if they expected to lure her away from Harvard. ‘Who? Georgetown?’

‘Kourosh Ansari.’ Her mother smiled at Nasim’s expression. ‘He’s looking for advisers to help plan the restructuring of the economy. In fact, his representative told me that he’d read After Oil as soon as it came out.’

‘Congratulations.’ Nasim was stunned. She’d certainly expected that parts of the diaspora would start trickling back to Iran, but even in those abstract terms she’d been thinking of a much longer time frame. ‘Have you decided what you’ll do?’

‘I think I’m going to accept the offer,’ her mother said. ‘There are no guarantees that they’ll really follow through on my advice, but if I missed this chance to have some input into the reconstruction process I’d never forgive myself.’

Nasim sat down on her bed; she picked up a pillow and held it against her chest.

She said, ‘I want to go with you.’

‘You mean come for a holiday? Of course!’ Her mother beamed. ‘That would be wonderful!’

Nasim shook her head. ‘Not just a holiday. I want to go home. I want to live in Iran again.’

Her mother sat beside her. ‘What about your work?’

‘I don’t know. That’s all so uncertain now.’ The fact was, for a long time she’d been tacitly assuming that the HCP would go ahead. That would have meant a mountain of paperwork at the start, but the payoff would have been at least four or five years to focus on the science without further interruptions. Now it would be back to business as usual: begging for one small grant after another, never really being able to make plans that stretched beyond the next six months. ‘Maybe there’s something just as challenging that I can do in Iran. Everything will be changing; there’ll be a thousand opportunities.’

‘I’d come back and visit you, you know,’ her mother said. ‘If you stayed here. It’s not as if we’d be apart all the time.’

‘I know.’ Nasim put an arm around her. ‘And I’d visit you too. Together we’d burn up all the oil in the world.’

‘So would that be so bad?’ Her mother smiled. ‘I’m not trying to run away from you. But I don’t want you destroying your whole career just because you don’t want to be left alone here.’

Nasim said sternly, ‘I’m not a child. This is a chance to rethink my plans. I spent so long hoping I’d be part of the HCP that I ended up with tunnel vision. Why shouldn’t I think about trying something new?’

‘All right,’ her mother agreed. ‘You can always come with me and take a look around before you make up your mind. Just don’t burn your bridges straight away.’

‘I won’t.’ Nasim embraced her. ‘So let’s stop talking about me. We should be celebrating your new job!’

‘What did you have in mind?’

Nasim looked around for the room service menu. ‘Just because the kitchen’s officially closed, that doesn’t mean they’ve run out of cake.’

Later, lying awake in the dark, Nasim turned the decision over in her mind. The prospect of walking away from her brain-mapping work was wrenching, but it wasn’t as if she was trashing her files and erasing herself from history. She’d already made some contributions to the field, and other people would build on them. She didn’t have to chain herself to one project for the rest of her life just to keep the time she’d spent on it from being wasted.

She had always wanted to return to Iran. Now that her country was finally being reborn, she had to grab the chance to witness that with her own eyes, instead of watching everything unfold from a distance. All the frustration she’d felt at not being part of the uprising would be assuaged if she could at least be a part of the rebuilding.

She began drifting towards sleep. Her mind was still in turmoil, but she was going to have to get used to that. Going back would not be easy, but this was her time, this was her chance to reclaim the life that had been stolen from her. Going back would not be easy, but she knew now that she could not stay away.