Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'How's it coming there?' he called.

'She's doing fine.'

Asshole.

'OK, I suppose. How about you?'

'Fine, ma'am, just fine. Looking forward to my beer.'

Dukes took hold of his liana, hauled himself carefully on to his feet and stared up. There was no more than eighty or ninety feet left. Boy, was he going to drink some beer when he got up there. The thought filled him with renewed enthusiasm. He was readying himself to launch his weight on to the liana when something caught his eye. A thin, clear plastic pipe running up the length of the tree. Closer scrutiny revealed tiny bubbles, and that the pipe was filled with liquid. Why had he not thought of it before? The tree had its own dedicated supply of water. He had only to break the tube to have a drink of water. Or better still, put his mouth to the tiny diffuser hole…

As his face neared the hole the air was suddenly filled with a puff of spray.

For a second Dukes felt a cool, almost peppermint-sharp sensation of freshness on his neck and hands. He looked again at the diffuser and encountered another puff of moisture.

Instinctively he stepped back from the tiny plastic pipe as he felt a burning pain in his eyes, as if he had been sprayed with Mace. Squeezing his eyes tight shut he cried out with pain and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve.

Insecticide. He had been sprayed with insecticide.

'Mr Dukes? Are you OK?'

Joan Richardson felt the spray, saw the tiny droplets on her own sunglasses and knew immediately what had happened. The synthetic contact poison in the pipe was a chlorinated hydrocarbon. On the skin it was irritating and unpleasant. In the eyes it caused blindness. She squealed as the insecticide burned her arms and legs. But behind her sunglasses her sight remained unharmed.

'It's insecticide,' she shouted. 'We've been hit with bug spray. Don't for Christ's sake get any in your eyes.'

But for Dukes her good advice came too late.

Whimpering with pain he opened his eyes to find that he could see nothing except the same red spots he had seen behind tightly shut eyelids; and, as the red spots grew in size, so did his agony.

'Fucking shit,' he yelled, rubbing his eyelids furiously with hands that were themselves impossibly contaminated. 'Help… I'm blind.'

'Joan?' yelled Richardson. 'Are you all right?'

'I'm OK,' she said, 'but Dukes got some in his eyes.'

'Dukes? Hang on. I'm coming.'

Dukes never heard Richardson. He groped blindly for the liana, missed it and then reached for the bough beneath him, to sit safely astride it again.

Then there was a new sensation, a wind on his face and a sudden rush of blood to his head, like the time he rode the Space Mountain at Disneyland. With a sudden sense of horror he realized that he had fallen out of the tree, and the fear of his discovery was followed by the understanding that the pain in his eyes would soon be gone.

'No. Stop,' Joan shouted. 'Wait.'

She reflected on the stupidity of saying that to a man falling two hundred feet through the air.

Richardson did not see Dukes fall, only heard his plummeting descent as a rush of sound and air behind him, and then the dramatic, sustained musical reverberation as the blinded security guard hit the lid of the piano on the atrium floor. For a brief moment he thought it had been Joan who had fallen and he almost fell himself. But looking up again he saw her ass still looming over him.

Joan,' he said, with relief.

'I'm OK.'

'I thought it was you.'

'Is he dead?'

Richardson looked back over his shoulder. It was hard to tell anything very much from that height. Dukes lay on top of the piano like some drunken bohemian. He did not move.

'I'd be very surprised if he wasn't.'

He heaved himself on to the branch beside her and took a deep, unsteady breath.

'It's too bad,' he added. 'He was carrying the walkie-talkie.'

'It was horrible. As he fell I saw his face. I don't think I'll ever forget it as long as I live. Poor Dukes.' She tried to ignore the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.

'Ray?' she said, taking hold of his hand and squeezing it. 'Do you think that Abraham means to kill us all?'

'I don't know, love.'

'Poor Dukes,' she repeated.

'This is down to that stupid bastard Aidan Kenny. This is all his fuckup. I'm sure of it." He coughed as some of the remaining hydrocarbon vapour found its way into his lungs. 'Try not to breathe any of this stuff. Keep your face turned away from the trunk as much as possible. Just in case it happens again.' He shook his head disgustedly. 'Damn you, Kenny. I hope you are dead, you bastard. If you were here now I'd push you off myself.'

'I don't see that would help much.' She stood up and stared up through the leaves. 'Jesus,' she moaned quietly.

'Are you all right to go on?'

Joan's legs were trembling. But she nodded and said, 'Only another hundred feet to go.'

Richardson squeezed her hand back.

'The height doesn't seem to bother you much,' he observed.

'Not as much as I thought it would.'

'That's the Native American in you. They say that Indians make the best spidermen. You want to see some of those guys, Joan. Walking on six-inch-wide steel beams, hundreds of feet in the air, like it was the edge of the sidewalk.'

'If that was the only job you could get then you'd have to get used to it too,' Joan said pointedly. 'Either that or starve.' Nerves were making her touchy.

Richardson shrugged. 'I guess you're right. But this is hardly the place for a lecture on political correctness, is it?'

'Maybe not. But what about Galileo's law of uniformly accelerated motion? A Native American would fall at just the same speed as a white man.'

She wondered when it would be her turn.

Bob Beech was drinking a beer and eating a packet of potato chips. His bare feet were on the boardroom table and he was watching the digital clock on the terminal, almost as if he still hoped that the GABRIEL disassembly program might start to take effect.

He heard Mitch out and thought for a moment. 'It would be a lot easier if I was in verbal contact with Abraham,' he said. 'Having a keyboard in the middle makes things difficult. Besides, I'm not much of a philosopher and I'm not much of a logician. I'm not even sure that logic has anything to do with morals. Because that seems to be what you're suggesting: that somehow we should try to appeal to something higher than Abraham's own logic. Logic can't handle that, Mitch.'

'Look. First we just try to understand what's going through Abraham's memory,' said Mitch. 'If we can understand that then we can act upon that understanding, but not until then. Let's just leave morality or whatever out of it for now, OK?'

Beech swung his legs off the table and pushed himself up to the computer. 'Whatever you say. But it's the ability to perceive moral truths and necessary truths that makes us what we are.' He started to type.

'Let's just wait and see what develops, shall we?'

'Sure, sure. You know, just about the only thing I've been able to work out so far is that whatever has gone wrong with this heap of silicon shit must have happened outside the building management systems, in the program utilities. Because that's where I parked the GABRIEL disassembly program. And since that's not working I have to assume that's where the fuck-up is. Not that I have much choice anyway. I can't access the BMS from up here even if I wanted to. Not without Kenny's fat paw on the screen. Not to mention the fact that he had his own superuser codes and passwords to sidestep things in general.'

'So did you, Bob,' said Mitch. 'I mean, isn't that what GABRIEL was about?'

'True.' He pressed some keys, paused and swigged some beer. 'Kick a man when he was down, would you?'

'Why GABRIEL, anyway?'

'Why anything? Program's got to have a name, hasn't it?'

'Yeah, but why that one?'

'Gabriel is the angel of death. At least, he ought to have been for Abraham.'

'Very biblical.'

'Isn't everything?' Beech sighed and shook his head at the screen.

'Nope. We're not getting anywhere here. I tell you, Mitch, it's like Abraham isn't even there any more.'

Mitch frowned. 'What did you say?'

Beech shrugged.

'Like he wasn't there any more?' Mitch pressed his head to the cool of the windowpane. The sensation seemed to help him to focus.

'Maybe that's it, Bob,' he said, turning back to Beech. 'Maybe he's not there any more. The SRS. D'you remember? What did you call it? Isaac?'

Beech shook his head. 'Not me. Isaac was Abraham's idea. Besides, I'm ahead of you. I had the same idea — that we didn't erase Isaac at all, but that we rendered Abraham impotent instead? I already experimented with Isaac just in case there was something, but no dice. That particular closet is empty. Funny thing, though. Within the standard-user interface there are a lot of things in the wrong places. Nothing's missing, but it's like you opened your desk drawer and saw that someone else had been in there, y'know? Things have been shifted around. And there's a lot of new stuff too. Stuff that really doesn't mean a fuck of a lot.'

'Who might have done that?' Mitch asked Beech. 'Kenny? Yojo?'

'There would be no reason to do it at all,' said Beech. 'You would just be making a lot of extra work for yourself for no real reason.'

'What about Abraham?'

'Impossible. It would be like me trying to rearrange my own genetic makeup.'

Mitch thought for a moment.

'I was never much of churchgoer,' he said ruminatively, 'but didn't Isaac have a brother?'

Beech sat up straight. 'Jesus.'

'Actually, he had a half-brother,' said Marty Birnbaum, from the sofa where he lay. 'The elder son of Abraham by his bond-servant Hagar. Isaac's mother Sarah insisted that the older brother be disinherited and cast out into the wilderness. But there are some people who believe that this elder son founded the Arab nation.'

'What was the kid's name, Marty?' said an exasperated Mitch.

'Gracious me, I am among the ill-educated, am I not? Ishmael, of course.'

Mitch exchanged a look with Beech, who started to nod.

'Could be, Mitch. Could be.'

'The name is commonly used to mean an exile or an outcast,' added Birnbaum. 'Why? Do you think it might be relevant?'

Bob Beech was already typing furiously.

Thanks, Marty,' said Mitch. 'You did good.'

'Glad to be useful.' Birnbaum turned to Arnon, smiled broadly and gave him the finger.

Gradually everyone who was in the boardroom started to close in on the terminal screen, as if willing something to happen. Suddenly, and without warning, the screen was filled with a colourful but strangely surreal shape, a three-dimensional picture of an alien-looking object.

'What the hell's that?' said Mitch.

'Looks like a goddamned skull,' said David Arnon. 'Or, at least, one designed by Escher. You know? The impossible staircase guy?'

'I think it's a quaternion,' said Beech. That's a kind of fractal to you.'

'To me?' said Arnon. 'I don't even know what a fractal is.'

'A computer-generated picture of a mathematical formula. Only this is about the most complicated fractal I've ever seen. Which is hardly surprising since the Yu-5 computer created it. It's not like we can even see it properly with our three-dimensional eyes. Or on a screen. Strictly speaking, this is a 4-D object. In other words, a quaternion.'

Beech moved the mouse, pulled down a square and enhanced a section of the fractal to reveal a detail of the strange-looking image that, close up, looked almost identical to the whole.