Soul Purpose
Nick Marsh
Stafford, England
Soul Purpose
By Nick Marsh
© 2006
Smashwords edition 2009
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely coincidental.
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The right of Nick Marsh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Cover Art: Vincent Chong
Layout: Andy Lowe
Author Website: www.nick-marsh.co.uk
An Immanion Press Edition published through Smashwords
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For Beattie
Prologue
Four billion years ago…
It all comes back to here. It’s as good a place to start as any. Back here, things are different – not only a foreign country, but a foreign world. If you were here, there would be little from your world that would make sense. Of course, you wouldn’t be here. Or rather, if you were, you would be too busy asphyxiating, boiling, getting zapped by lightning, fried by lava and generally having too much of a rotten time of it to sit down and take in the local scenery. Not that you’d enjoy it much if you did. What isn’t red hot and melted is boiling hot and steaming. The ground is covered in black slag dissected by molten rivulets of the still-forming world. The air is filled with the crackle of lightning, and the mists and fogs of numerous unpleasant gases. Staring up into the primordial sky is like trying to watch an Andy Warhol film from the back row of a smoky auditorium. Barely visible through the gloom is the distant haze of a virgin sun, ancient beyond measure and yet long before its prime.
Still, this is your world. And this is where it begins.
When it starts, it starts with a simple chemical reaction – and to be honest, in all this chaos, chemical reactions are ten a penny. Acids forming proteins forming complex tertiary structures that become unstable and melt away, collapsing in upon themselves and dispersing, drifting away to do it all over again. This reaction, however, is different. Not in a flash-kerbamm-zoooom chemistry-set kind of way, but in a subtler, quieter and altogether more important way. Another protein is formed. It maintains its shape. It is not the first to do so, but there is something unique about it. This protein can make copies of itself. It can replicate and propagate and spread. It can recruit nearby unsuspecting proteins, rope them in, force them to conform. It knows nothing of its destiny, but its descendants will rule this world.
Proto-life has arrived on the young planet. And with it, something even more significant.
The first soul.
Chapter One
I
– Ring Ring –
At first, he didn’t have a clue where he was, or what his name was. Slowly it dawned upon him that he was in a bed, and the noise was the telephone ringing. Everything else remained a mystery. Instinct sent his arm scrabbling towards the phone, and when his outstretched fingers felt it he picked it up, studying the receiver with a puzzled look, as if it were an iguana that had unexpectedly been handed to him for lunch. Then he remembered what to do. As he placed the phone to his ear and his mouth began to form the first tentative syllable of a sleepy ‘Hello?’, his memory decided that he was awake enough to release some relevant information to him. He wished it hadn’t.
He was twenty-seven years old.
He was a vet.
He hated his job.
He was absolutely, completely bloody sick of being called out in the middle of the night.
He was being called out in the middle of the night.
There had been no response from the phone in his hand. He examined it, cursed, turned it the right way around and said ‘Hello’ again, praying that if it was a call out, it would be a nice, warm one. Perhaps the euthanasia of an elderly cat with kidney failure, peacefully passing away in front of a log fire. Or an epileptic dog. Even a collapsed hamster would do. Anything where he didn’t have to think. Anything that he could examine in the comfort of the surgery. Anything that wasn’t a cow.
II
‘Hello?’
‘Is that the vet?’
‘Erm… what?’
‘I said, is that the vet? I’m phoning for the vet.’
‘Erm… yeah. Yes, it’s Alan here. Who is it I’m speaking to?’
‘Hi, Alan. It’s Mike White here, out at Quayle’s farm. I’ve got a problem with a cow.’
‘What kind of problem?’
‘Buggered if I know, Alan. That’s why I’m calling you. Could you get out right away?’
III
One of the few things Alan Reece had learned since he had started practising was that it was entirely possible to go out in the night, see and treat an animal, discuss the case with the client and only wake up on the drive home. It was then, of course, impossible to get back to sleep, leading to him being wide awake for the rest of the night and half-asleep the following day. He was, therefore, only mildly surprised to find himself pulling the terminally ill Astra his practice had supplied him with into the yard of Quayle’s farm with no memory of the preceding fifteen minutes. He turned off the engine, which coughed and shuddered to a halt like a tuberculotic sprinter after a hundred-metre dash, and stared miserably out of the windscreen at the dismal rain, which was blattering everything that could be blattered into a soggy pulp. The rain stared miserably back at him, and then got on with the job of covering everything in cold muddy water, and basically making everything in the county as thoroughly unpleasant as possible, a job at which it was astonishingly good.
With a sigh as deep as an ocean trench, Alan opened the door, trudged round to the boot and manoeuvred his feet into his Wellies – managing, as he always did on nights like these, to get his socks soaked through before getting them in the boots, thus utterly defeating the point of putting them on. He was in the process of wrestling with his waterproof top, working out where his arms were and wishing he had washed the top at some point in the last month so that didn’t smell quite so much of rotting lamb, when Mr White arrived. Alan squirmed his way into the top (inside out, as usual, ensuring he would never again be able to wear his shirt in polite company, or even impolite company, come to that) and blinked as the farmer flashed his torch into Alan’s eyes. Alan tried to smile as the beam was lowered.
‘Hello, Mr…’
Something in Mike White’s face stopped Alan. His round cheeks were as white as his name and looked as if he’d just been diagnosed with the sort of thing that gets publishers of medical textbooks excited and reaching for their digital cameras.
‘Through ’ere,’ was all Mike said before turning to the barn.
Alan was normally worried when on call. He hated it. The stress of it was almost too much for him to bear. It was certainly too much for his digestive system to bear. You could always tell a weekend when Alan was on call, his ex-fiancée had told friends, because he got through at least two and sometimes three double-quilted toilet rolls. The expression on Mike White’s face got Alan wondering whether this weekend was going to be a treble-roller. He followed Mike towards the barn, his Wellies squidging mournfully with every step.
IV
The barn was an old building, rickety and wind-blown and, at this time of year, ankle deep in cow shit. It had a thin scattering of straw on the ground as if in an attempt to disguise the dirt. It didn’t work. The beam from the nervous farmer’s torch bounced around the room as if it would rather be at an all-night rave. The acrobatic lighting added to Alan’s feeling of discomfort and displacement. It should have been a relief to be out of the driving rain but at this moment Alan would have gladly stood out in it naked until sunrise if it meant he could avoid seeing what had turned Mike White, who had calmly held prolapsed uteruses up on his knees and sawn rotten heads off stinking lambs to get them out of the ewe, as pale as his cows’ milk.
‘What… er… what have you got for me, Mr White?’ Alan asked nervously.
Mr White turned to Alan. He had been a farmer all his life. He had seen just about everything nature could throw at a person, most of it before he was twelve. The horrible pulsatings and hideous smells of nature gone wrong held no fear for him. Alan wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to know what it was that had shaken him, but thought he should at least have some warning about what he was approaching.
‘It’s the damnedest thing, Alan. Never seen anything like it in all me born days.’
‘What is it, exactly?’
‘I was ’opin you could tell me. Maiden heifer, just calved. See for yerself.’
Mike turned back again, and trudged forwards, his torchlight illuminating a cow-shaped form in the corner of the barn. Alan followed, squinting, trying to make it out. It was a Friesian-Holstein heifer, slightly on the thin side, and as Mike had pointed out, obviously just calved. She was standing and licking forlornly at a small pale object lying in the straw. Alan’s mouth formed the ‘W’ of ‘what’ but whatever else he was planning to say was lost to posterity because at that moment Mike shone his torch directly onto the object. The word retreated from Alan’s mouth and hid, quivering, down by his diaphragm.
The thing the cow was licking was a calf. Of sorts. Alan had seen foetal monsters before, strange furry blobs of flesh with the odd foot, tail or even head protruding. Accidents of nature, never meant to live. This was different. Externally, it looked normal. Four legs, head, tail, everything seemed in place. At least, Alan thought so. It was hard to make out, because the torchlight shone right through the calf, illuminating the bloodstained straw beneath, which reflected the light right through the calf again as if it wasn’t there. The calf was transparent.
Alan’s brain didn’t quite grasp the concept as it zapped through his neurones the first time, so he tried thinking it again, more clearly this time.
The calf was transparent.
He could see its ribs, its beating heart, its lungs, which were twitching and contracting as the neonate fought for breath. Alan watched in astonishment as the calf gave a feeble cough and a blob of pleural fluid travelled out of the lungs, up the trachea, and into the mouth, where the calf swallowed it.
The mother briefly glanced at the two intruders and then turned back to licking her miraculous calf.
V
Alan’s heart skipped a beat. A moment later, it skipped another one. It was preparing to skip a third when it received an urgent communiqué from his brain, suggesting that if it did so, there would be trouble. Reluctantly, it started up again, but decided to make up for lost time by hammering away at double speed.
Alan took a cautious step towards the calf. Mike stayed where he was.
‘What d’you reckon, then?’ the farmer asked.
Alan couldn’t tear his eyes away from the creature in front of him. He wondered if he was still asleep. Half of his brain was gibbering with sheer incomprehension. The other half was running through his notes, searching for the section headed ‘photo-transparent idiopathies’. Either he had forgotten all about them, or no such section existed.
The heifer looked up at him again. Alan had never been very good at reading bovine expressions, but as far as he recognised that a cow could look reproachful, this is what she did.
‘Did she calve all right?’ he asked automatically, buying time so that his brain could stop gibbering and start working.
‘Reckon so,’ said Mike. ‘We didn’t help her out or nothin’, anyway.’
Alan was at a loss for what to do. Surely he should be gathering evidence, taking photos, something. This was obviously a whole new disease. He switched himself onto autopilot, clinical exam mode while he wondered what the bloody hell he was going to do.
The cow herself seemed fine. Normal heart rate, normal temperature. A little bruised, but nothing out of the ordinary. She had cleansed quickly. The shrivelled mess of placenta lay on the floor next to the calf. It was normal.
‘Er… aren’t you going to look at the calf?’ Mike asked from his safe distance.
‘Oh… erm… sure,’ mumbled Alan. He moved back around to the front of the cow and looked down.
It didn’t make any sense. How could it be alive? Weren’t there… reactions and things that had to happen in the skin? Didn’t it need to absorb light or something? Alan wasn’t clear on the specifics. Biochemistry was not his favourite subject.
Slowly, he knelt down beside the creature. It turned its head to him, making a weak mewling sound. Alan could see its larynx vibrate as it did so. It was clearly dying. The calf’s heart had slowed its beat since he had first looked at it, and the wretched thing was almost too weak to hold its head up.
Alan felt strangely reluctant to touch it. At the back of his mind a quiet but insistent voice suggested that it would be a really bad idea. The cow nuzzled her calf again. Slowly, trying to shake the feeling that this was all a dream, Alan reached his hand out to it.
VI
It was mainly the noise that Alan remembered when he thought back on it; a tremendous burst of screaming noise, like an out-of-tune television on full volume. It filled his world, so loud it seemed to leave no room for anything else. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t feel, he couldn’t think. He simply stopped as the tidal wave hit him, waiting for it to pass. He was aware of a feeling of enormous pressure, and for a moment the small part of him that could still think was terrified that he was going to burst. He had a brief mental image of himself popping like a balloon in front of the mystified farmer. Then, the pressure eased, as if something has just passed through him and popped out on the other side. The noise stopped instantly.
Slowly, he came back to himself. He was still kneeling in the straw, on the ground, behind the cow. His arm was still outstretched.
Sitting in front of him, coughing and mewing softly, was a perfectly normal Friesian-Holstein calf.
Chapter Two
I
Kate leaned back and rubbed her eyes as the shapes spun and danced crazily in front of her, and came back to herself. She hadn’t realised it, but she had entered into the weird trance of the habitual computer-junkie. She must have been staring at the screen for ten minutes. She blinked several times and rubbed her eyes again but the dull ache behind them remained. Time for a break.
She reached out for the cup of coffee that had been standing on her workbench and peered into it. An unpleasant brown skin had grown over the surface of the drink, and it wrinkled as the cup rocked in her grip. She took a sip anyway, swilled it around her mouth, swallowed it thoughtfully, and took another one. Yep, she thought. Undrinkable.
Standing up, she rolled her head from side to side. Her neck made several disturbing cracks, so she stopped and peered back at the computer screen.
No progress. The algorithm must have been flawed. It always seemed to get stuck at this point. What the bloody hell time was it anyway? She must have been up all night fiddling with the thing, trying to figure out what she had done wrong. It was frustrating work, frustration that was always compounded for Kate whenever she worked with computers by the knowledge that computers only do what you tell them to, and so if anything was going wrong it was basically her fault.
Crap, she thought. They don’t always do what you tell them, anyway. Hadn’t she spent about twenty minutes screaming ‘Oh come on, you bastard!’ at it a few hours ago. It didn’t do what she had told it then.
She looked at her watch, but her monitor-frazzled eyes couldn’t make out the tiny digits on its face. It must be pretty late, though. It felt late. In fact, it felt so late it was probably early.
She sighed, running her fingers over her head, slightly surprised, as always, to find the short spiky strands that sat there, instead of the long flowing Rapunzel-style of her previous life, and looked at the computer again, in case it had done anything in the few milliseconds between now and her last glance. It hadn’t.
What was wrong with the bloody thing? It should be a relatively simple program. Simple for her, anyway. It had seemed an ideal problem too, combining her studentship in particle physics with her degree in computer programming. Ideal, simple, and completely bloody impossible.
She was trying to use her computer system to model the effects of the new particle accelerator being built in Kent, designed to model heavy ion impacts at high speeds. The accelerator had little fanfare surrounding it. It was a massive machine, an impressive feat of engineering, but because it neither had exciting flashing lights on it, nor could anti-abortionists try and complain about it, it had interested the general press not at all. Even New Scientist hadn’t been all that interested. Kate had. Not because of the accelerator itself, but because the way it was set up was exactly what she was looking for to test out the new modelling system she had designed. She had researched, worked for months to get her model of the accelerator just right. Everything that conventional physics (if you could use that word when dealing with objects smaller than most people could comfortably imagine and still get a decent night’s sleep afterwards) accepted was there. She had got it right, she knew it. She had spent all night debugging, rerouting, retesting, but could find nothing wrong.
So why wasn’t the bloody thing working?
She shook her head. Time for a break.
‘Time for a break,’ she said out loud, hoping that this would somehow make it sound more professional. Strangely enough, it worked. Of course, there was no one in her flat to say it to at this time in the morning. The fact that there wasn’t, of course, was largely why she had spent the whole evening fiddling with her computer. If there was, she doubted very much she would be sitting up all night with her silicon chum. Then she thought of Trevor, and decided that maybe Windows XP wasn’t such bad company after all.
She turned from the computer and headed through the bomb-site of a lounge to the kitchen, where she turned on the cold tap, letting it run for a moment before she cupped her hands under the stream and plunged her face into the water. By the time her sleepy hands had informed her that she had actually turned on the hot tap rather than the cold, she had already covered her face with it. Cursing, she grabbed for the tea towel that hung from the hook nearby, and rubbed her stinging face with it. The tea towel had been bought by her mother and was inexplicably covered in pictures of small smiling teddy bears, due to her mother’s mistaken belief that Kate had the mental maturity level of a three-year-old.
She turned off the tap, dropped the towel on the floor, flicked the kettle on and stared at the wall in front of her, blinking and trying to focus. The shapes from the computer screen still danced across her vision, and her mind felt cloudy and dull. Why wasn’t it working?
She rubbed her eyes again roughly with her knuckles, feeling the first ominous thuds of a headache deep in her skull. She sighed. She had no painkillers in the flat, of course. That would be too simple. She didn’t get a lot of headaches, not any more, at least. She had used to get a lot, in her old life. But that had been years ago.
She stared at the wall as the kettle hissed and bubbled, and thought about her old life, because it was that sort of time in the morning. Had she been happy? She supposed so. She had never really thought about it back then. It wasn’t a profitable vocation, being a medium, but she had felt like she was providing a service. Certainly she had been popular, in her way, with the more open-minded or gullible people of Bristol. She had an ad in the paper: her face, looking as serene and peaceful as a Buddhist, with the words ‘I see dead people,’ written underneath. She had thought of that herself, and had been proud of it, until that bloody Bruce Willis film had come out and stolen her catchphrase. People even started accusing her of stealing it from the makers of the film, so that she was forced to change it to the less catchy, in her opinion, ‘I see souls’. This was made worse by the misprint that meant she had to spend a week being phoned up by marine mammal enthusiasts asking where she kept the seals.
By then she had already started to lose her faith anyway. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, particularly. How could she not? She had seen the things. At least, she thought that she had. It all seemed so long ago now. It wasn’t that, anyway. No, it was that she slowly began to realise that perhaps whatever it was she had been able to see, it wasn’t what people thought it was. It just seemed… wrong. It seemed… oh, she didn’t know.
Anyway, as if they could sense that she had lost her faith, Kate found it harder and harder to see the… whatever they were. Eventually she couldn’t see them at all. It didn’t matter by then. At least she didn’t get the headaches any more. She had decided she wanted to spend her life doing something useful, something concrete. Something that didn’t involve sitting in a darkened room lying to old dears and grieving mothers. She decided to become a scientist.
Still, that had all been a long time ago. The click of the kettle brought her back to her senses. Distantly, Kate watched herself make a coffee, her mind on the problem. She wondered if she should give up, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep until she had sorted it out.
Down on the kitchen floor, Roger the cat shrugged off the tea towel which had landed on his head, and rubbed up against Kate’s legs, purring hopefully, and looking pointedly at the fridge, where it knew several lumps of chicken and sliced pig were crying out to be eaten before the mould that was invading the fridge from its beachhead in the vegetable tray overpowered them. He received no response. Oh, he thought, she’s in one of those moods. Fair enough.
Slowly, with the air of a professional at work, he stalked off toward the office to piss on the speakers.
‘One more try,’ Kate muttered to herself as she headed back to the computer.
II
She knew something had changed even before she looked at the monitor. The room felt different, expectant. Either that, or the shapes on the screen had stopped moving and reflecting off the window. It was a good sign, whichever.
As she settled back down into the chair she could see she was right; the calculations had stopped. The equation had either got somewhere, or it had crashed. Well, at least it was something. Kate put the coffee on top of the computer’s tower case, and clicked the mouse a few times. She frowned and clicked it again. Then she tapped at the keyboard for a few seconds, frowning even more. Her next action had the most positive effect, on herself at least.
‘Shit,’ she said, loudly, but not quite shouting. Not yet.
The simulation was working. Or at least, it had been, but something in the way the accelerator had been set up created some kind of chain reaction in the program she had written to model its behaviour. The chain reaction rapidly gobbled up all her computer’s spare processing power without actually telling her what was going on, so that now the program was locked, unable to continue.
She tapped away at the keyboard a few more times, then moved the mouse in a circle, watching the little hourglass shape on the screen whirl as she tried to think. Not enough processing power. Any more options? The computer was stuck. So was she. Surely there could be some way to…
She stopped moving the mouse as the answer came to her. Why not try the new routines she had been working on? Part of a completely different project, but this was exactly the sort of thing she had designed them for. They could boost a program’s power by giving the processor numerous back doors; ways of looking around the equations for areas where it could fudge and cheat its way through. The routines used fuzzy logic as their starting point, giving the computer choices. She didn’t like to say it to anyone, even herself, because it sounded so dramatic, but the routines basically gave the computer a very limited degree of intelligence and independent thought. Nothing much, of course, certainly nothing approaching HAL-9000. Not even approaching Roger, come to that, but they may be just the thing she was looking for.
She minimised the current program and hunted around her directory for the routines. They weren’t quite finished yet. What the hell? What did she have to lose? It was do or die at this point. Well… do or bugger off to bed, anyway. If it didn’t work, she would simply have to try on the computer at work. Give it a go, she told herself. She hunted around for the icon that started them up, which for reasons she could no longer remember resembled a large strawberry, and pointed them in the direction of the accelerator model.
The effect was instantaneous, or at least as instantaneous as Windows got. The model began working again, and a few seconds after that Kate saw what had gone wrong. It was nothing to do with her programming. It had to do with the reaction itself.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said. She felt her heart rattle in her chest, and the back of her throat seemed to have swelled. There was that horrible sinking feeling in her stomach, familiar to her from years of exams. She couldn’t believe it. There had to be a flaw somewhere. She had to show this to someone, maybe Professor Lattman. She had to get it checked.
Eyes on the screen, she reached down to the case to open the CD drive. There was a clunk of metal on porcelain, a hot sensation on her hand, a yowl and a terrible fizzing noise. The smell of hot coffee mingled with the odour of cat urine and that peculiar burning smell only an electrical component that has had something terminal happen to it can make, and the monitor blinked off.
‘Shit,’ she said again.
Chapter Three
I
The storm clouds were gathering. Alan floated amongst them, flew and spiralled like a bird. He could feel electricity in the air, could feel the clouds heavy with potential. There was a dull buzz at the back of his mind, the kind that a light gives off before it explodes. The clouds were ready to burst.
Alan knew he was dreaming; at least, he knew it on some level. It was the strangest dream he had ever had. It had no structure, no form except for the clouds, the clouds that were waiting for… for what?
The buzz intensified, until all the clouds were throbbing with the noise. Alan thought he could hear voices under the hum. He tried to close his eyes, to cut out some of the sensory overload, but he had no eyes to close. He opened his mouth to cry out, but he had no mouth. He could do nothing but float and try and scream. The buzzing got louder, and then louder still. This time Alan did scream. He screamed and opened his eyes and…
II
The noise of the alarm clock filled his bedroom. Within seconds the dream vanished from his memory, and he found himself for the second time in only a few hours lying confused in his bed. His hand slapped the top of the alarm clock automatically while he struggled to think, but the clock continued to buzz. Alan had become so adept at turning off his alarm clock in a semi-conscious state that he had been forced to buy a novelty one from a catalogue – the novelty being that the clock had a small jigsaw puzzle on top of it that ejected its pieces all over the room when it rang. The thing would only shut up when the jigsaw had been correctly reconstructed on top of it. Unfortunately one of the pieces had fired itself right out of Alan’s open window on the second day he had used it, and so he was now forced to climb out of bed and rip the batteries out of the wretched thing every morning. This seemed to work just as well as the jigsaw idea, though, so Alan had never bothered to find the missing piece.
Alan pulled the curtains open a crack as he sat up in the bed. The weary light from a flaming ball of hydrogen seventy million miles away ended its long journey on his purple carpet, wondering if it had been worth all the effort. Alan ignored it as he fumbled with the back panel of the howling alarm clock and ripped the batteries out. One of them fell from his hands and rolled under the bed. The alarm clock shut up. Ah! Sweet relief. He sat with his eyes closed for a moment, then opened them again, looking at the clock. The buzz had not stopped, at least, not entirely. Puzzled, he looked into the battery cavity at the bottom. Empty. He brought the clock up to his ear but the buzz got no louder. It was not coming from the clock. Great. Now he had tinnitus to add to his troubles.
Alan had been wide awake by the time he returned to his house in the early hours of the morning. Sleep had been impossible, so he had spent an hour looking through his notes and trawling the Internet for anything like what he had just experienced. Nothing. In fact, the sites he started discovering even when using seemingly innocuous words such as ‘transparent’ in his search engine put him off the whole exercise. Deciding to leave any more thought of the cow and its calf until the morning, he had gone to bed in the hope of getting some rest before his morning’s work.
He had eventually got to sleep forty-seven minutes before his alarm clock woke him up. Sleep was a mystery to Alan. It always seemed to be in reverse. How come he always woke up in the morning feeling like he couldn’t keep his eyes open for another second, yet he could never get to sleep in the evening?
Muttering to himself without realising that he was doing it, Alan staggered into the shower to face another day at work, hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as all the other days at work thus far.
He was right. It was going to be worse.
III
George was already up and eating breakfast by the time Alan had arranged himself, with shirt and tie, so that he looked, if not every inch a professional, then at least three-feet’s worth. That was good enough for him.
‘Morning, George,’ Alan mumbled as he shuffled in the kitchen and switched the kettle on, then leaned by the sink staring out of the window into the grey morning. He was actually feeling much better after the shower, despite the buzzing in his ears, but it was his natural instinct to act more tired than he was. It had been a hell of a night. He deserved sympathy.
‘Busy night?’ George asked through a mouthful of Cinnamon Grahams.
‘Hn,’ said Alan.
‘Want to talk about it?’
Alan shook his head, rubbing his eyes.
‘Working all day, then?’ George said.
Alan turned from the window, yawning. ‘Till seven,’ he said. George scrunched his face up in what would have been a sympathetic wince if he hadn’t had milk dribbling down his chin.
‘You working today, then?’ Alan asked. George worked roughly one day in seven, his parents being wealthy enough to indulge him in whatever hopeless dreams he was currently chasing. George classed himself as a ‘seeker of truth’ whenever anybody asked him, but did it with such a glint in his blue eyes that most people assumed he wasn’t serious. Whether he was or not was something Alan had yet to work out. George had been staying with him for just over three months. Alan had originally lived in the house with his fiancée, but she had left him six months ago. She couldn’t stand the strain of being a partner to a vet. Alan couldn’t find it in himself to blame her. He just wished she had taken him with her when she left.
George was in his mid-twenties, and handsome in a laid-back, surfer-dude kind of way, except that his hair was a mousy brown instead of blond. The house belonged to Alan’s boss, and he had rented a room in it to George, whose parents were friends of his. It was a beneficial arrangement for everyone. George got the independence he craved without the stress of actually having to live for himself, while he indulged his current career craze of working as a journalist for some Fortean Times-wannabe magazine, and his parents got to keep an eye on him through Alan’s boss. Alan’s boss got the rent money. Everyone was happy. Everyone except Alan.
It wasn’t that he disliked George. He was weird and annoying but as roommates go there were a lot worse traits to have. It was just that Alan felt he had done it all at university. It felt like a step backwards.
‘What are you doing today, then?’ he asked George, more out of politeness than any real interest.
‘Got a text this morning,’ George said, ejecting a fair portion of his breakfast on to the table in front of him as he did so. ‘Hector has got me a few jobs lined up today, few people to interview.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Lots of weird things happening in Bristol today,’ he said, enigmatically.
Alan sighed. Weird things, as far as George was concerned, generally meant that someone thought their kettle had been possessed by aliens, or that they had seen the face of Liberace in a baked potato. Then he remembered the calf from last night. He cleared his throat.
‘Erm… what sort of things?’ Alan asked, as disinterestedly as he could, but George shrugged, wiping his mouth. ‘Ah, y’know. Usual.’
For a second Alan thought of sharing the night’s experience with George, but as he watched his flatmate noisily consume the rest of the cereal he thought of himself on the cover of next month’s ‘World of Mystery’ magazine, or whatever it was called, and decided against it. He looked at the toaster, but his stomach protested that it didn’t think it could cope with much before midday. George was already heading for the door, mumbling a muffled ‘G’bye’ over his shoulder. Alan shook his head, and poked his little finger in his ear for the seventeenth time this morning, but the buzzing noise persisted.
IV
Thoughts of the previous night were temporarily forced from Alan’s mind as he walked through the doors of Chestnut Vale surgery and was deluged with messages from clients, and notes from nurses about inpatients that he needed to check. He waded his way through them on autopilot, putting off whatever he could until tomorrow, phoning the people who needing phoning, and smiling at the people who needed smiling at.
It was his ops day, so he only had to do a few consultations in the morning. After five years as a vet, he couldn’t work out why speaking to people about their animals was called ‘morning surgery’, while actually doing surgery on animals in the morning wasn’t. At university, like every other vet student, he’d been terrified at the thought of consulting, of actually meeting the public and having to tell them what was wrong with their animal. He wasn’t long into his career when he realised successful consults mainly consisted of smiling, frowning and sounding either stern or reassuring at the appropriate moments. This morning was much like any other.
It wasn’t that Alan didn’t care about the people, or their animals. In fact, he was quite proud of himself that he still cared quite a lot what happened to his patients. It was just difficult to vaccinate animals with the same degree of enthusiasm every day without resorting to faking it.
Three boosters and a cat bite abscess later, Alan managed to escape to the prep room. Cameron was there, just arriving from an early morning call to take over consults from Alan, while he got on with the morning’s operations.
‘Morning, mate,’ said Cameron, a huge smile on his face. He was washing blood off his arms in the sink. It was also all over his face.
‘Hi,’ Alan said.
Cameron frowned. ‘You look like crap,’ he said to Alan. He wasn’t one to mince his words. Cameron was a large Australian vet, frustratingly cheerful and effortlessly handsome. Even washing blood off his hands in a sink, wearing waterproof trousers covered in God-knew-what, he looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of the Freeman’s catalogue. Alan liked Cameron, mainly because it would have taken a great deal of effort not to like him. He had a kind of inner glow about him that reassured you that everything would be all right. He got a lot of calls from young, female horse-owners who made sure they put their make-up on before he arrived. The inner glow also seemed to affect his body temperature because he wore shorts every day of the year.
He finished washing his hands and stripped off his waterproofs. Sure enough, he was wearing shorts today, even though it was December, and cold with it. However much he liked Cameron, Alan always found him depressing company, because he seemed to enjoy the job so much. There was no calving too horrible for Cameron, no rotting lamb too rotten.
‘Crappy night?’ he asked Alan.
‘Erm…’ said Alan, as the bizarre incident on Quayle’s farm replayed itself again in his head. ‘Erm… not too bad, no. Just a late night, that’s all.’
‘No worries,’ said Cameron, and for a moment Alan almost believed him. Cameron headed to the cloakroom where he picked up the largest consulting top, and put it on. It was still too small for him. For all his charm, Cameron was not designed for small animal work. He didn’t look comfortable in a green top, and he managed to loom in a consulting room, however big it was, and however much he smiled. A hamster, in Cameron’s hands, looked like a tiny speck, an inconvenience that Cameron might swat at a second’s notice. He tended to frighten the old dears. Still, it was his turn. He wriggled his shoulders in the top, trying and failing to get comfortable, then headed to the consulting room for morning surgery while Alan relaxed with a few gentle cat spays.
His mind wandered while he worked down the board, as he tried to make sense of what he’d seen last night. He was finishing off his third cat spay when Mike White called him.
V
‘Morning, Mr White. Sorry about the wait there, just stitching up a…’
‘Never mind about that, Alan.’ Mike’s voice was quiet, with the same subdued quality that it had last night. ‘I’m just ringin’ about that calf you came to see.’
Alan’s mouth went dry quicker than a man with a mouthful of crackers.
‘All fine. Wouldn’t know there had been a thing wrong with it,’ Mike said.
‘Oh,’ said Alan. He struggled for something else to say. ‘Oh,’ he said again, and gave up.
‘Thing is,’ said Mike, slowly, ‘thing is… I’d rather not go through all that paperwork, have the ministry round or anything. You know how it is.’
It suddenly struck Alan that he probably should have notified the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about the calf. Why hadn’t he thought of that already? Probably because he was still coming to terms with it himself.
‘Alan? You there?’
Alan thought about it, and found that he agreed with the farmer. He didn’t really want the hassle, particularly not when it would involve talking quite slowly to one of DEFRA’s phone-an-idiots. He didn’t really want the conversation. And besides, what could he tell them, really? What, exactly, had he seen last night? How could he prove it? Better just to do some research on the quiet, and mention it if it seemed important later.
‘Yes,’ he heard himself saying, ‘I think you’re right.’
‘OK. Good,’ Mike replied. ‘You all right, Alan?’ he said, after a pause. The farmer didn’t really want to ask, and Alan didn’t really want to answer, but you couldn’t see something like they both had without at least saying something. As Mike spoke, Alan felt the buzzing in his head again. He didn’t know if it had got louder or if he had simply noticed it again.
‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘You?’
‘Fine,’ said the farmer. Another pause. There was nothing else to say. ‘OK,’ said Mike. ‘Well, see you then, Alan,’ he said, suddenly trying to sound cheerful.
‘Yeah, bye, Mr White.’
VI
Alan hated doing bitch spays almost more than he hated being on call. The dog booked in today was a particularly fine specimen; a great fat Rottweiler, being spayed so that it could have no more puppies to expand its already massive brood, and only then because the last two times the bitch had whelped it had needed caesareans, cutting into the owner’s profit margin.
Alan sighed as he looked into the brown eyes buried in the rolls of skin. Poor bloody dog, he thought, just an innocent in all this. But it’s you and me stuck with the difficult part.
His sympathy for ‘Athena’ lasted until he tried to anaesthetise the animal. It was wriggly, fat, and vicious. It took Alan and three nurses to hold it down, even after its hefty pre-med, and when it was finally asleep he failed several attempts at placing the ET tube. On the fourth attempt at peering into the fleshy mass of the throat he finally visualised the larynx. Great, he thought, as the tube slotted down into the cavernous trachea. Easy bit over. Now for the spay.
He was, as he got older, becoming increasingly of the opinion that owners of fat dogs should have to come in to spay their own animals. It made the surgery ten times more difficult – harder to see anything, much harder to tie any ligatures as fingers slipped on the slimy catgut, and fat had a tendency to ooze blood and a horrid milky fluid throughout such operations, making the surgical drape look like the wrapping from a vampires’ fast food shop.
He sighed deeply as he began to scrub up, watching Sam and Alice manoeuvre the dog between them onto its back and start to clip its massive belly. He wasn’t up to this. He wasn’t in the mood. He’d been putting it off all morning hoping Cameron would come through and do it with his usual fearless enthusiasm for surgery. It wasn’t that much different from operating on a cow, after all. Unfortunately, Cameron had been called to an unspecified horse emergency only ten minutes before (Alan was willing to bet it wasn’t such an emergency that the owner had forgotten to put her eyeliner on) and there were now no other ops on the board.
Alan rubbed his hand under the chlorhexidine wash and sighed once more. He’d been feeling strange all morning, and the buzzing had only been part of it. At first he had thought it was due to lack of sleep but it seemed now to be something more, something stranger. He remembered the way one of the owners had looked at him this morning. It was a young woman who had somehow managed to pour coffee all over her cat while simultaneously frying her computer. The cat was not badly burned. Alan had given out some anti-inflammatory cream and told her to come back in a few days for a check, but the woman had been acting very strangely, avoiding his gaze. When he turned back from his computer after booking the consult, she had been staring directly at him, her face a mixture of puzzlement and concern.
He shook his head as he opened the brush. What a weirdo. He’d make sure he wasn’t around when she came back in a few days. Still, something about the way she’d been looking at him…
The thoughts vanished from his mind as the mammoth task ahead came back to him. Shaking his hands, he stepped into theatre, looking dejectedly at the enormous beast on the table.
‘It’ll be all right,’ said Sam, cheerfully, but Alan knew she was trying to convince herself as well as him. The last one like this had taken nearly two hours, and Alan must have broken the world record for profanity during that time. Still, he nodded back and tried to smile. She opened his kit for him and he placed the drape over the rottie’s abdomen, then clipped a fresh scalpel blade into place.
He was feeling stranger than ever. Maybe it was the heat in here – the giant surgical light, and the poor ventilation, with him in his gown and gloves. It didn’t usually get to him this much, though.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
He made the first incision. Blood welled up immediately, not stopping despite Alan holding a swab on the wound for over a minute. Great, he thought. Von Willebrands, knowing my luck.
Laboriously he cut his way down through the fat to the external abdominal oblique muscle. The buzzing was stronger now. As he cut through the muscle and opened the abdomen he thought he felt the scalpel blade wobbling in the holder. He opened his mouth to ask Sam what size blade it was when the scalpel suddenly leaped forwards, out of his hand. As he watched with his mouth open, the blade hovered above the wound in the giant dog’s abdomen for a heartbeat, then plunged its way forward into Athena’s spleen.
Chapter Four
I
Somewhere else...
There is a vast sea in another place, a vast and terrible sea. It is a place you have seen before, and it is a place you will see again, although no one alive would recognise it.
It ebbs and flows as if with a tide, although there is no moon above it, and it bubbles like a cheap prop in a student production of Macbeth.
Above the bubbling sea, storm clouds are gathering. There is a feeling of immense pressure, like a valve that is about to blow. Energies are building up here, second by second. The sea begins to froth with frenzy. The energies need to be released, but there is nowhere for them to go. Something is stopping them. A balance that is as old as life itself has been upset.
The souls are trapped.
II
Kate swore as the bus cut in front of her little Metro and headed off down Union Street. The traffic was getting worse, of course. It always was. Bristol was going the way of all the cities. Kate had decided several times to get a bike for work. It was cheaper, greener, healthier, just better in so many ways, but she never did. She knew deep down that whatever arguments she could muster up for biking to work, they always came up against one that she would probably never surmount. She simply couldn’t be bothered. She’d actually rather spend her mornings swearing at bus drivers and gripping the steering wheel, so long as it meant she could spend it in her own private little world, with her own music, shut off from humanity, happily burning sticky bits of long-dead animals and plants and converting them into a gas that would turn the planet into a gigantic storage heater.
As she thumped the steering wheel in annoyance and anger, a cooler, more reflective part of her despaired at the nature of humanity.
‘Use your mirrors, you stupid twat!’ she yelled.
She didn’t know why she was getting stressed anyway. It wasn’t as if she was in a hurry. She had all afternoon to get to work. No one was expecting her to be there, after all. The only reason she had to go in was to try and recreate her experiment of last night. The computer was completely ruined. Not only that, she had also managed to pour coffee all over Roger and had to rush him to the vets. Now the car had the odour of a vehicle that has contained an unhappy cat, which made Kate unhappy as well.
It was probably that making her impatient. That and the headache, which still hadn’t left her since the early hours of this morning.
Oh… and the end of the world, of course. Mustn’t forget that.
III
There weren’t many students around this time of year. Most of them were back home, revising for exams in the New Year, but a few lost souls still made the trip to the library every day, even this close to Christmas.
There was a security card system in place at the physics building, a new introduction, presumably in case terrorists felt the pressing need to hijack a mass spectrometer, or to get up to date with the more obscure aspects of superstring theory. Kate was not, in any sense, in favour of the new identity cards the present Home Secretary seemed so keen on pushing forwards. Not only was she unsure of how a small strip of plastic could prevent some lunatic leaving a bomb in a bin, but she also knew that she didn’t want a card that identified her down to her dental records and DNA, because she would lose it almost immediately. She knew this because she had lost her security card for the physics building three times already, and consequently had to go through the same charade with the security guard on the door as she had to every morning, even though it was the same guard on the same door.
‘Good morning,’ she said, smiling to the besuited man standing in front of the doors, as she had done one hundred and thirty-seven times before. The man showed not a glimmer of recognition when he looked at Kate.
‘Can I help you, Miss?’ said the guard, not smiling.
‘Erm, yes… it’s me, again, Kate Schekter,’ Kate said. There was no response from the guard. ‘I was here yesterday, you see, I’ve lost my…’
The man interrupted her. ‘Have you got a card, Miss?’ he said, painfully slowly.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Kate replied.
‘Visitor, are you?’
‘No,’ Kate said, hearing the echo of this much-repeated conversation in her mind’s ear. ‘I’m not a visitor.’
‘Could I see your security card, please?’
‘I’m trying to tell you. I haven’t got one. Look, you let me in yesterday. Can you just…’
‘I thought you said you weren’t a visitor?’ the guard said. Lines of suspicion were creeping across his face, very, very slowly.
‘I’m not. Look, yesterday, remember, I showed you my picture, just behind the desk. If you’ll just…’
‘Can’t let just anyone in,’ the guard was saying, ignoring her. ‘Can’t be too careful, nowadays.’
‘Yes,’ said Kate, impatiently. ‘You can. I have lost my card. I lost it three weeks ago, and I’m still waiting for a replacement. If you remember…’
‘If you lost your card,’ the guard said, glacially, ‘you should ’ave a temporary one.’
Kate was quiet for a moment. She looked at the floor and muttered something.
‘Pardon?’
‘I said I lost it!’ said Kate. ‘I work here! My picture is on the board not ten feet behind you! I showed you it yesterday, and the God knows how many yesterdays before that! Let me in!’
The guard was silent for a long time. Kate wondered what help this brain-donor would be if a terrorist actually did turn up. The whole world had gone crazy since that terrible day in September, but it was going crazier still if it thought anything like this would stop some lunatic doing whatever they liked whenever they wanted. The ones who had taken over the planes had used pottery knives, for God’s sake! Anyone with the strength of conviction to destroy the most famous buildings in the world with pottery knives was unlikely to be stopped by this lemon in a suit.
‘Hmm,’ said the guard, then there was another pause. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, with a this-may-lose-me-my-job-but-just-for-you sigh, ‘let’s have a look at this picture then.’
IV
Kate’s office was a mess, of course, as all of them were. The professors and their students took great pride in the amount of clutter. The messier the office, the unwritten rule went, the greater the science being carried out in the office must be. Kate’s office was of intermediate mess, somewhere in between untidy and chaotic. She knew if she worked hard her office could be chaotic within a year or two, and she would be able to hold her head up with the greatest clutterers in the university.
It wasn’t the clutter that was on her mind today, though. She had to rerun the experiment. She had to check the results. She found herself hoping that it was true – how exciting would that be? Then she remembered what it would mean if they were, and decided a little sadly it would probably be better if the simulation was flawed. She sat down in front of her PC. The disk with the back-up copies of her algorithms on it had been a coffee casualty along with the computer and the cat. She couldn’t remember if she had had the presence of mind to back them up on her computer at work. She could remember thinking that she needed to, but that didn’t guarantee it. She drummed her fingers impatiently on her desk as the machine went through its interminable start-up sequence, which seemed to get a little longer every time she did it. It always took just exactly long enough for Kate to think the whole thing had crashed. In fact, the act of her saying the ‘Oh…’ or ‘Oh, bloody hell’ always seemed to be the trigger it needed to spring into action.
It seemed to be taking an extremely long time today, even by its own poor standards. The screen went black. Nothing happened. Kate drummed her fingers again. Still nothing. Surely it didn’t normally take this long. Again her fingers tapped the desk. The computer did nothing.
‘Oh, bl…’ Kate said. The computer sprang into life.
V
She hadn’t saved it, of course. The hard disk was empty of her algorithms, and of the simulation. She’d known it, of course, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it until she could see for certain. All gone. Two months’ work completely wasted. It was possible that something could be recovered from the hard disk of her espresso computer at home, but most of it had been on the CD, which had simultaneously been electrified, melted, and sprayed with cat urine. Kate wasn’t sure, but she thought that might invalidate the warranty.
She leaned her head against the cool, bright monitor, and closed her eyes. What now? She still needed to tell someone, but she had no evidence. Was there time to write it all again, to confirm the result? She thought about sitting, starting over, typing and fiddling and staring at the monitor for hours and hours, while her brain pounded as if it was trying to escape via her eye sockets. Not a happy thought. What, then?
She had no choice.
VI
The faded legend ‘Professor Lattman’ was just about readable on the grimy smoked glass of Will’s office. Through it, Kate could just about see a figure hunched over the desk inside. She knocked on the door and the figure jumped.
‘Kom,’ came the voice from inside. Kate opened the door slowly and entered.