The time gene, p.27
The Time Gene, page 27
“I’m not at liberty to say,” returned the busker.
Cold, wet, and exhausted, Murdo wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve as he had lost his hanky, and he sneezed twice.
“Bless you. Here,” said the man. Fumbling in his pocket, he flicked out crumbs, fuzz, tobacco remnants and other debris; and handed Murdo a tattered handkerchief. Murdo glowered at it, but did not want to seem rude. “It’s clean,” the busker said touchily. “I haven’t used it.”
Murdo took it, but looked gingerly at it. It had the remains of a name sewn in the corner, but he couldn’t make it out.
“Look, Mister...er...whatever your name is...please. I am beggin’ you. If you have any information at all pointin’ to the Anchor’s identity, you must say it now.”
“Or forever hold my peace?” he laughed, strumming an air so foul it sounded like a hundred musical saws. Murdo yelled at the man to stop the infernal din.
The busker looked piqued. “That’s me song what I wrote.”
“Look. You’ve simply got tae understand. The Anchor is vital tae us. If we can unmask the Anchor, we can save our planet. We can return tae an era o’ peace an’ prosperity. An’ freedom.”
The busker strummed on, a paradoxical smirk on his face. It appeared that malice was the only pleasure left to him.
Murdo’s tone was imploring. “Intelligence cannae be sure where’s next up for nuclear attack,” he sniffed, tears pouring down his cheeks. “They’re sayin’ it’s either Washington DC or London.”
“I never much liked London,” the busker mused, blowing smoke rings that glowed blue in the dim light. “Southerners are awfully up themselves.”
“For God’s sake!” Murdo ranted. “Have you no bloody conscience? This is an atomic bomb we’re talkin’ aboot. Do you suppose the shockwaves willnae go north o’ the M25?”
“Search me.”
“Do you want me tae beg on my knees?”
“Save your knobblies,” he returned, inhaling peevishly on his pipe. “I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to.”
“Cat got your tongue or somethin’?”
“It is forbidden.”
“Forbidden by whom? If someone is threatenin’ you, the League...er...my colleagues can protect you. An’ if it’s money you’re after, we can get it for you. After the war, obviously. Any sum you want. Name your price.”
The busker cackled like an old drunk. “No-one’s threatening me,” he replied in a barbed tone. I just...can’t. It’s against my nature.”
Murdo was increasingly finding speech an impossibility himself.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I’m tuning my guitar. Good evening to you,” said the busker shortly.
Murdo gave him a venomous look, and assured him he wouldn’t be fobbed off that easily. But the inscrutable guitarist insisted there was nothing more to say. Murdo moved to go, but something pulled him back. “You cannae stay here. You ken that if you get caught on security camera, or spotted, you’ll be shot without warning?”
“So...let them shoot me.”
Murdo felt a rush of sympathy for the mulish street musician. He had lost count of the number of times he had doubted whether life was worth living. First dad, then mum gone, then Megan’s leukaemia; and her ghostly, hairless, wraithlike form lying on that bed on that final night, begging him to pursue music. And now this terrible war. Doubtlessly the busker’s sullenness too had its roots in loss. “Dinnae give up,” Murdo said. “Love hopeth all things. There’s always a spark. Or, at least, there will be, when we find the Anchor.” The busker shrugged. Murdo asked him where he was sleeping.
“Tonight? Probably here. I like the boats,” he croaked.
“What? You sleep on one o’ they rottin’ old shipwrecks? Jeepers! Mighty dangerous, that. You’re no’ wearin’ a rainsuit, and it’s gonnae bucket tonight. An’ if you’re seen...Look, you cannae linger...”
“Linger? I can’t linger anywhere. ‘Cept Baker Street tube station. That’s my home.”
Murdo cocked an eye. Baker Street tube station was a burnt-out hole. Only rats roamed the platforms now.
“But I come up here sometimes. There’s nothing like lying on your back, on the deck of the old warships, staring up at the Milky Way ribbon, imagining you’re a pirate, sailing the ocean blue.”
“Milky Way ribbon?” said Murdo, perplexed, and sweetly nostalgic. “We havenae been able to see the stars for years.”
“I know where they ought to be,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must find me toothbrush.”
“Suit yoursel’,” said Murdo. He moved to go, but something compelled him to make one last effort.
“Even if you cannae say the name, just give us a clue? Please!”
“Mine not to interfere. Sorry.”
Murdo tried a different tactic. “You say you met him. How did this come about?”
“It was fleeting.”
“Where?”
“The London Underground.”
“How long ago?” Murdo’s heart began to thud. He felt as if the Earth would soon be rent in two.
“Couldn’t say exactly. But I were wearin’ this.” He heaved with a bony hand at the frayed cloth of his long coat.
Murdo considered. He vividly recalled Prometheus say that the Anchor, active in the 1990s, could not have seen thirty. How long could a winter coat last? Five years? Since the war, with all the make-do-and-mend, possibly ten. At any rate this man had seen the Anchor sometime in the last decade. “Is he alive today?”
“Depends on your point of view.”
Murdo emitted an anguished cry. It was like talking to a Sphinx.
“Is he as great an’ powerful as they say?”
The busker’s glib smarm deserted him. He raised his eyes heavenward, as though envisioning an angelic host. “Never saw so much power emanate from a human being. Felt like an electric storm to be in the same room.”
“Righ’,” said Murdo. “Have it your way. You dinnae have tae say the Anchor’s name, but we’ll play Hangman.”
Murdo drew a gallows on the ground with some twigs. The busker paced up and down, giddy as a relapsed alcoholic, as though an army of ants were charging through his body. Meanwhile, Murdo took up a stick and started to draw dashes in the ground beneath their feet. “How many letters?”
The busker looked gaunt and ill. “E...eight. No. Seven,” he stuttered.
“Seven,” Murdo nodded, a cheerful façade masking the butterflies in his stomach, and completed his dashes. “That’s no’ many. All right. ‘A’?”
“Sorry...what...?” The busker looked hunched, and contorted, as though a plague of locusts were eating him from the inside out.
“Is there an ‘A’?” Murdo repeated. The man was silent, and merely gaped at the dashes, cold terror emanating from his eyes. “Come on,” he goaded. “It’s no’ you who’s gettin’ hung.”
The busker slung his guitar over his arm, and slinked away into the murky mists.
“Wait!” Murdo yelled in frustration. “You cannae just go!”
Murdo called him back again and again. But the busker’s silhouette dissolved. Strangely no searchlights came on, so he was untraceable. In his wretched despair, Murdo buckled, keeled over and hit his head on the ground.
“Murdo? Murdo, wake up!”
Prometheus was shaking him, and slapping his cheeks. A faint light trickled down from outside the bunker.
Murdo blinked. “But I thought…”
“We have to get out of here. It’s late,” Prometheus chided.
Murdo rubbed his pounding head. “How long have I been out?”
“No idea.”
In the dim light Murdo saw that a lump had sprouted on Prometheus’ forehead. And he was sporting a black eye. “You were knocked out too?”
Prometheus nodded. “The bunker door fell on us.” As they clambered out, Murdo searched the ruined buildings for a shadowy figure, and pricked his ears lest he heard a guitar strum. But thank God it hadn’t been real!
A coughing fit coming over him, Murdo reached for the handkerchief he’d lost. But from his pocket he pulled out a mottled, disintegrating hanky. With the remains of a name sewn into the corner.
Will I burn, evaporate, or liquefy? No-one’s ever broken the code before.
Time will tell what horrors await me. But I see, clear as day, the horrors that await them. Flies trapped in honey, they crawl along a thread they think leads to salvation. But it runs into the heart of the spider’s web. They ride a Trojan horse to doom. I wish I could tell them who steers them onto the rocks. But I cannot. I am crippled. I am a leper. I am a spent force.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Undead
Makomanai Indoor Stadium, Sapporo, Japan, February 1972
Perun floated in the shadows, as a swanlike figure glided onto the ice. A feather-white dress hugged her slender frame, accentuating her glossy black hair and caramel skin. As the opening chords of Chopin’s Nocturne skimmed the air, the crowd rose in adulation, sky high with euphoria. Min Jee was a myth; a legend; a prodigy. Nay, a deity. Graceful as the moon, supple as a leaf. Majestic splendour indwelt the divine blades of the North Korean ice queen. Min Jee was a sculptor, an artist, a poet. But she was more than that. She was a time-traveller.
He slid through the darkness amid the overhanging beams, sinuous as an adder. She twirled, twisted, darted, pirouetted across the ice, spread her wings, opened like a rosebud, and span like a hummingbird. As she flew across the ice, this lotus unfurled her petals and swirled in homage to the light that birthed her. She shone like a sword plunged into the sun’s core. Rapturous applause greeted her spiralling crescendo. But this shimmering sylph stirred no passions in Perun’s soul. He was impregnable. Yet he needed Min like his own lungs.
The stadium erupted, a caldera of joy. The crowd decked her in white roses. Delirious fans begged for autographs. The judges regaled her with 6.0s. She mounted a podium, a gold medal emblazoned on her chest. As the cheers subsided, Perun drifted across ceilings and melted through walls. He ghosted from room to room until he reached a narrow corridor where florets in brightly coloured tutus darted from room to room, preening, weeping, and consoling as they relived their moment of destiny. But none of these hot-headed nymphs saw his wafer-thin form shrink to a pinprick and slither under the door marked ‘Min Jee’.
Jee sat alone on a stool by her mirror, wiping the make-up from her face as nimbly as she had skirted the ice. Behind her lay a frayed carpet and a dusty sofa, its cushions ruffled and out of shape. Scattered on a low coffee table were several large photographs of a young man, bookended by two of Jee as a child with a middle-aged woman and a girl a few years older than herself. Perun slipped into her mirror and watched her shrink back when she saw him where her reflection should have been.
She screamed as though he had been a psychopathic killer. Even if he was hardly a beautification, did she have to be so theatrical?
“Silence,” he said in flawless Korean. “Firstly, I could not kill you if I wanted to, for I am not yet born. Secondly, every scream you utter is ten lashes to your beloved Iseul.”
Jee’s skin turned pale. Her mouth quivered. Yet not a sound escaped her convulsing body. Fear smouldered from her charcoal eyes. He met her gaze like a hammer on the nail. Tears could not soften John Perun.
Her eyes bulged wide as snooker balls. “They have Iseul?”
Perun nodded, neither gloating nor sympathising. “Your sister will come running in in ten minutes to break the news. North Korea cannot have her skating golden girl carousing with a banker from the South. He must die, and violently, alongside his entire family. Otherwise the serene order the President has so valiantly fought for risks crumbling to dust.”
Jee crashed to the floor, writhing as though overcome by a hive of bees. Even Perun was struck by the contrast between her wild thrashings and her elegant twizzles just minutes ago on the ice.
Perun glided through the glass and hovered above her struggling form. “You charlatan! You deserve the same. You are guilty of crimes against sport more contemptible than doping. You are a fraud, Miss Jee. You are no better than a hundred other girls. It is time-travel that has given you the edge.”
Jee shrivelled into the floor. “You lie! Oh, you brute. It’s not true. I could never do that…not now.”
His eyes drilled into hers. “Not now? So you used your ‘talent’ in the past?”
Tears smudged her pristine make-up. She looked like a necrosing corpse. He continued to blast her. “This is not your first Olympics. You won gold four years ago. Come now, Min, was that legit? As a child, how did you win, win and win again? You needed to win, because losing meant disgrace, didn’t it, Min? Food deprivation, confinement, and a beating from your father. Did you never resort to unorthodox methods?”
She choked on her wails. “N…no. Yes…maybe once. Twice…two or three times. Not recently. When I was a kid. B…but that was when I thought everyone could. I haven’t done it for years, I swear.”
“The transgression is the same, woman, no matter when it was committed,” Perun barked. Each accusation begat another flood of tears. “But there is yet a way you can save yourself, Miss Jee. And win a pardon for Iseul. Just what would you give to save him?”
Jee dashed herself a score of times against the wall, as if trying to bulldoze a prison with her bare hands. She slit her throat with her fingernail, so hard a thin red welt grazed her sinewy neck.
“I thought so,” he nodded, unshocked. “Miss Jee, since you began your affair with a capitalist enemy, the Government have been watching you. What if I have told them all your other dirty secrets, Miss Jee? What if I told them not all your skating medals were fair play? They will not forgive you. You will be beheaded. How the public will revile you!”
She fell to her knees. “You didn’t…please say you didn’t…”
“Hush. I have the power to obtain a pardon for you, and to secure the release of Iseul.”
She flung herself onto the stool by the dressing table, her hands clasped, sobbing her lover’s name.
“You must beam yourself to my time. Here, we can hone your talents. But, be warned, in the 21st Century you cannot use your talent to exalt yourself. You must give sacrificially, to save our doomed planet. And remember: it is the vine we must conserve, not the branches. You are valuable only so long as you remain fruitful.”
Jee pirouetted on her stool, wailing like a mourner. “There is no other way? If I do not consent, Iseul and his family will be tortured and killed?”
Perun nodded. For a full five minutes, she wailed an acute, ear-splitting lament. At length her screams fizzled out. A coolness swathed her. The cloak of serenity she’d worn on the ice once more enveloped her. “What must I do?”
Perun pulled out from his coat a blueprint, and told her to copy it speedily. The lithe nymph flitted from corner to corner, graceful as a butterfly, seeking pencil and paper. She copied the blueprint with such flawless exactitude that it might have been a facsimile.
Her chronoportation would take place on Leap Day – Tuesday 29th February 1972. Perun told her to take leave of her family, and to set her finances in order, as beamup was mere weeks away. At least, for her. At Perun’s end, it would be six years before they could receive her. Chronoportations depended on the favourable alignment of an exoplanet. The closest Opposition sadly precluded any transfer before September 2053.
“I cannot build this,” she shrieked, panic seizing her tortured limbs.
“Hush. Call your brother. He will help you,” Perun said in a low voice.
Her eyes widened. “Jung-Nam? He hates me.” Dark bitterness jaded her words. “He’s wanted my blood ever since I ‘defiled myself’ with a man from the South. He builds weapons for the North Korean State. He’d sell our grandmother to win favour from Kim Il-Sung.”
“Exactly,” Perun murmured. “Don’t you think he will be glad to see you ‘disappear’? Better than suffering the ignimony of a family member executed.”
Her gaze flitted across the ceiling, and fell to the floor. Perchance, just perchance, Perun and she had more in common than they’d realised. He had come to break a will o’ the wisp who cared only for tiaras and jacuzzis. But he’d found a Boudicca who hurled spears from chariots of fire. Her eyes, like his own, had imbibed blood. But whilst his had absorbed it like jet, hers poured it out in every glint.
She fell to her knees, and threw him her most winning stare. “Will I still be able to skate?”
Perun withdrew into the shadows. He watched a girl run in and clasp Jee’s hands, an imploring look on her face. She was almost Jee’s mirror image, yet just a little older. After a few moments the two embraced. Jee fell backwards onto the sofa, weeping onto her sister’s skirt. Perun could not comprehend her zeal. Why risk all for a lover when your wealth and status could win you many? He powered down the tachyophone and watched the sorrowing sisters fade. He took off the ‘phones, hung up the headset and stepped down from the booth.
A sharp grimace from Skegness greeted him. “Was that really necessary?”
Perun’s corpselike eyes chilled. “I saved her life.” In her own timeline, she was shot trying to break Iseul Kim from prison. Disguised herself as a warden. Suicidal stupidity.”
“I did not mean that,” Skegness berated. “I meant telling her that you and the North Korean government were in cahoots. That…if she chronoported…he would be safe. That, my friend, was just not cricket.”
Their eyes locked. The coldness he oozed trapped the room in an icy cage. “I was weaned on bloodsports. Gladiators, not cricket.”
“But you will keep your promise to let her skate?” Skegness said, raising an eyebrow.
“I made no such pledge,” Perun returned. “She must never set foot on ice again.”
