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Tir-na-nOg | Discreet Phenomena

Tir-na-nOg

The birds have been singing all day. They come and sit on the telephone wires outside our window like notes on a stave, a score for some bizarre musical. I don't know how much longer I can stand it.
     It's the end of the season. There has been a frost already, and most of the things that were once green have surrendered themselves to the shades at the lower end of the spectrum in a wave of pinks and reds, russets and browns. You can imagine the colours go all the way off into invisibility, becoming pure radiant heat, soft and gentle and cosy like the glow of a log fire on a winter's evening.
     Nothing much seems to have changed here. The lawns still slope to the shingle; the hills, dark and stormy with heather, still shoulder out of the other side of the loch. The jetty is still here, just a jutting tongue of wood succumbing to entropy, pilings rotting and slick with weed and algae, wear and tear from plimsolled feet and careless canoeists accounting for the odd plank here and there that nobody bothers replacing. I think they're just tired of it, letting it scatter softly of its own accord.
     Disorder, Hey once told me, is the natural state of things. We measure the passage of time by the amount of change we see around us: a tree is taller, a rock is a little more weathered, a person is a little more wrinkled …
     Perhaps that's why the past seems closer here, sitting on the jetty watching the loch lap unhurriedly at the beach like an old man sucking a mint imperial. You can ignore the various abrasions of entropy, concentrate instead on the Big Picture, the picture in which only the colours change, in strict procession, to the long slow beat of the seasons. It could be any Autumn, any year …
     "I've been meaning to ask. Why do they call you Monkey?"
     Shit, the bitch has crept up on me again. How the hell does she do that? "I don't remember," I answer without looking at her. "It was a joke, I think."
     A polite snort, behind me. "A joke."
     "One of Hey's jokes. Some people have an odd sense of humour." I look over my shoulder. "How's yours?"
     Standing there, in her tweedy jacket and walking trews, hair pulled back in a painful-looking chignon, she tips her head to one side and regards me as if I'm a museum exhibit. Which from her point of view I may well be. At least twenty-five years separate us, and as usual I am on the wrong side of the equation.
     "He killed a man," she reminds me again.
     "Fine. I'll come to the trial." Which is actually quite amusing, because we both know there will be no trial. Benedict's masters - and, temporarily, mine - have no intention of seeing Hey in court. Apart from the fact it would be a dreadful breach of security and they would sooner kill Hey than have him walk into a British court, they're only interested in the things he took with him on the day he walked out of their corporate safe-house in Oxfordshire, the things he carries in his head, the truly wonderful and arcane talents he has been developing for them.
     She has taken every opportunity, in the weeks we've been chasing Hey, to remind me of the murder. She wheels it out every couple of days, typically when I show signs of flagging. On one memorably miserable drizzly day in Lincolnshire, she mentioned it seven times in one morning. She is trying to estrange me from him. Your old friend killed a man, Monkey. With his bare hands, Monkey. Does that sound like your old friend, Monkey?
     It's a little sad she relies on this litany. She's trying to tell me Hey has changed beyond recognition, that I owe him no loyalty. She doesn't seem to have realised that I already know all this. I haven't seen Hey for the past seven years; how do I know what he's like now? Only the hills and the loch stay the same.
     It must have irked Benedict's masters no end that Hey refused to work in America - from what she's told me about him, that much never changed. They would have liked to have flown him to their secure facility two kilometres beneath the Arizona desert, where escape is theoretically impossible, but he told them he couldn't work properly in the States. A sense of place was very important to him, he said; he wasn't averse to visiting America, touring other research facilities, pressing the flesh, putting his two pence-worth into various projects. He just wouldn't work there.
     So, because people have a phenomenal tolerance towards the kind of genius which is absolutely guaranteed to make them immense amounts of money, they bought Grantbridge House, just for Hey. They equipped it to his specifications, made it as secure as modern paranoia can make a large building, and for years Hey worked there quite contentedly, within sight of the White Horse at Uffington. He used to send me Christmas cards signed 'The Prisoner of Zenda' and 'Rudolph Hess.'
     Until, one day, he just walked out.
     Oh yes, Benedict, and he killed a man. I haven't forgotten.
     "You came here as children," she says, walking along the jetty until she's standing just behind me. Her feet make almost no sound at all on the creaky boards; it's like the trick the David Carradine character used to do in Kung Fu, walking along a sheet of rice paper without leaving a mark. Except Benedict can do it in walking boots. She does it to annoy me; she knows I can't stand being crept up on.
     To hide my irritation, I turn back to the loch, remember canoeing across it one day, a mile to the other side and a mile back, a hot heavy band of fatigue across my shoulders from paddling, while Hey trod foolishly about in the shallows like some awkward wading bird, examining the chunky quartz pebbles at the water's edge. When they were wet they were milkily translucent. Later, when he explained to me how a quartz crystal could be induced to vibrate as the heart of a clock, they had dried out and become almost opaque.
     "Is that why he came here?" Benedict presses gently. When she wants to be, she is a creature of almost surreal gentleness; her Carolingian accent softens and broadens. She doesn't fool me, though. "Is it because you came here when you were young? All those outward-bound holidays your school arranged?"
     Instead of reminding her we only have the slimmest evidence that Hey was here at all, I say, "Tigers always return to a place of remembered beauty," recalling - probably with no great accuracy - a line from an old Jack Lemmon movie. "It's how they catch them."
     "Is that how you think of Hey? As a tiger?"
     I put my head back and laugh. There is probably no place in Benedict's life for philosophy, or for dead film stars. I hear her sigh, and when she speaks again her voice is brittle. "I'm going to take the NES scanner up the hill a ways." I catch the tiny sounds of her moving away; a squeak of rotting planks, the dry snap of a piece of driftwood as she reaches the shingle. "I want you to come and help."
     I stand up. She's lying, of course. We both know that, and we both stopped caring weeks ago. She doesn't want my help; she would be far happier doing it on her own. What she really wants is to have me where she can see me.

"Ready?"
     "You're going to get us arrested," I said.
     "They won't know which one of us to chase," Hey told me, drizzle running from his tangerine fringe.
     "Terrific. So they'll only arrest one of us. I feel better already."
     He laughed. Comparatively late in life, Hey had decided to take care of his body. Four times a week, he took a bus up to a sports centre in Haringey and strapped himself into any number of chrome-and-leather, spring-and-cable Inquisition machines, lifting weights and twisting his body in directions mine would not move in. He had run in both the London and Boston Marathons, and turned in respectable times in each. And then some idiot had introduced him to acrobatics.
     Which set us down, at five past seven on a wet London morning in March, outside the old Public Records Office on Lincoln's Inn Fields. From the corner where we stood, I could see homeless people in the bushes of the little park, emerging from piles of soggy cardboard, newspaper and plastic bags. Walking here from Holborn station, one of them had tried to bum some money from us. Hey had smiled hugely and given him a fifty-thousand z?oty note, which he had picked up on holiday in Poland the year before and which you could only change for Sterling in Poland. Hey would do and say anything for a joke. I was often surprised that he had so many friends. Quite frequently, I was surprised that I was his friend.
     "If we don't do it right now, we'll never do it," he said, looking across the road at the gates of Lincoln's Inn.
     "That's all right by me," I said, wiping spots of rain from the plain-glass spectacles he'd made me wear as a disguise. His own camouflage, perversely, consisted of a bright orange wig and a huge false beard. He said he wanted to be as conspicuous as possible. He said he wanted people to remember this.
     "It might be all right by you," he said, taking my arm, "but you're coming with me." And he marched me across the road and through one of the pedestrian gates that led into Lincoln's Inn.
     The moment we set foot inside the Inn, I froze. Tall terraced barristers' chambers formed a square around a big lawn planted with trees and flower beds. Hundreds of windows looked down on us. It was very quiet; I could hear pigeons' wings clapping as they landed on the grass, hear the kettle boiling in the porters' lodge behind us as somebody brewed his morning cup of tea. I smelled the rain in the air, cigarette smoke on the breeze.
     "I can't do this," I said. "It's stupid."
     He regarded me sadly from behind his cushion of fake hair. "Monkey," he said. "I'm disappointed with you." And for one moment of unspeakable bliss the tone of his voice told me he'd given up his mad idea.
     Then he winked, gave me the same grin he'd given the down-and-out, turned away from me, and before I could open my mouth he had performed a perfect cartwheel along the pavement and sprung into a series of flickflacks.
     My jaw dropped. I'd never really thought that he would go through with it. I just stood watching like an idiot as he backflipped away from me down the side of the square.
     A shout from the porters' lodge broke the spell. I took off along the top of the square. I heard running feet behind me and didn't dare stop. As I reached the corner and skidded right I risked a glance across the grass and almost got myself caught.
     He was still flickflacking down the opposite side of the square, scattering people off the pavement, and he was beautiful. There was no sense of effort. He looked like a force of Nature.
     I was so struck by the image that, if the hand behind me hadn't slipped on the rain-damp leather of my jacket, I would have been caught. Lungs bursting, I put on a spurt and pulled away, heard someone swear and fall heavily in my wake.
     Hey had already reached the gateway at the bottom left-hand corner of the square, bouncing lightly to a stop on the balls of his feet and watching my approach with an expression of gentle unconcern. I pounded past him, fell over as I burst through the gateway and out onto Carey Street, rolled to my feet, glasses going flying into the road.
     He caught up with me in a few easy strides and side by side we ran down Bell Yard beside the Law Courts and out onto the Strand, Hey dumping wig and beard in a litter bin as we ran by towards Aldwych and the Underground.
     After subsequently spending many years trying to get around London by Tube, I have never understood how he managed to time it so perfectly. He must even have taken into account the timing of the traffic lights; we arrived at Aldwych station just as the bell rang to signal an incoming train. We were the last two into the lift. He was barely breathing hard; I could barely breathe at all.
     I managed to get my wind back enough, on the train to Holborn a couple of minutes later, to gasp, "They were chasing me, you bastard!"
     He shrugged.
     "You knew I'd hesitate," I said. "Didn't you. You knew I'd hesitate and they'd chase me rather than you."
     He smiled.
     At Holborn we hopped on a Piccadilly Line train as far as King's Cross, and a brisk trot along the tunnels to St Pancras brought us out to the main-line station just as the last few passengers were getting onto the 07:45 to Nottingham. I just had enough time to retrieve my bag from the locker where I'd left it an hour and a half before, and jog stiff-legged up the platform.
     "Just tell me you didn't enjoy that," he said, shaking my hand.
     "Don't ever drag me into anything like that again," I told him, closing the carriage door and leaning out of the window. "Never ever."
     Then the train gave a jerk and Hey and the station sailed away backwards as I was carried out into the morning rain. At that point I would have been particularly happy never to see Hey again.

All that was a long time ago, of course. Aldwych Station closed down a year or so later; a couple of years after that, the Council cleared all the homeless people out of Lincoln's Inn Fields and put up hurricane fencing to keep them out. These days, the zloty is gone, along with the franc and the mark and the peso and the guilder, and you can spend your euros from Barcelona to the borders of Ukraine. Lots of things have changed.
     Just over a month ago, my old friend Hey, genius, acrobat, co-conspirator in the first and only Lincoln's Inn Marathon, went absent without leave from the corporation which owns him. Festooned with electronic bafflers which lesser minds are still struggling to understand, he simply walked through one of the most sophisticated cybernetic security systems ever installed in a house in this country, and evaporated.
     Of the ten or fifteen staff on duty at the house that evening, only one was actually privileged enough to witness the Master Magician accomplishing his vanishing act. And, according to Benedict, Hey killed him.
     A lot of people were left looking very silly, and, as far as I can understand it, Benedict and I represent part of the effort to put things right. Of course, in this context right is a relative term.

The Nuclear Emission Spectrum scanner is like an intellectually-muscular Geiger counter. Not only does it detect the presence and intensity of radiation, it also draws a map of the surrounding area and shows you where the emission is. Benedict has a large brushed-titanium suitcase full of such toys, any one of which would have given James Bond's 'Q' a conniption fit of Biblical proportions.
     We walk the hills above the village all afternoon, Benedict carrying the scanner and hoping to pick up the nuclear battery we know Hey had with him in Lincolnshire, but all she finds is ancient background from the granite all around us.
     Emptying into the loch near the hotel is a little burn, a rushing little stream foaming over rocks. Further up the hillside the burn cuts its own channel in the floor of a little U-shaped valley that opens way above the treeline into a craggy-walled glen cupping a tiny lozenge-shaped lochan, a perfect, still, black mirror of the sheer rock walls all around it and the streaks of cloud far above.
     At the head of the glen I sit on a damp hummock of grass and light a small cigar. Benedict gives me a disapproving glare, but I flash her my best grin and carry on smoking and she drifts off holding the scanner in front of her like a charm against some very old and particularly British evil. A small group of sheep grazing near the lochan sees her heading their way and bolt, off-white blobs floating across the lumpy ground.
     Benedict is from South Carolina. I like to think that makes her a Carolingian; it's my little history-teacher joke. She says she was born on one of the Sea Islands. Her father was a shrimp fisherman until one of the first great algal blooms of the early 2000s wandered up from Florida and poisoned all the shrimp.
     After that, he sold what he owned of the island on which Benedict was born, and relocated the family to Savannah, where he found a job in some non-technical branch of component manufacture, retrained to navvy for what they were still calling the Sunrise Industries when I was a boy.
     The day after Benedict's tenth birthday, eighteen months or so after leaving the Sea Islands, one of her father's workmates tried to ask him a question and found the ex-shrimper dead at his bench. He'd been dead for at least forty minutes, and nobody had noticed.
     Benedict told me all this early on, when she was still interested in establishing a rapport. But I'm not very good at the kind of rapport she wants, the kind that amounts to betrayal.
     "We'll sweep another quadrant tomorrow." Good Christ, how long has she been standing there?
     "I don't think he's still here," I say nonchalantly, as if I haven't just had the wits scared out of me. "If he was here in the first place."
     "We'll sweep another quadrant tomorrow," she repeats, putting the scanner back into its fitted chamois cover. The scanner is just one of the things on this trip which have disappointed Benedict, myself being another. Properly calibrated, it should in theory be able to pick up the radiation from the remains of Sellafield, miles to the south and west, but Hey's battery is nowhere to be found.
     The scanner looks just like one of Mr Spock's tricorders. When I mentioned this to Benedict all she did was look at me with an expression of gentle pity, the kind of look I always imagine Nineteenth Century missionaries giving to South Sea Islanders. She's too young to remember the original Star Trek, of course. Too young to remember moving pictures in less than three dimensions, come to that. I shouldn't blame her.
     I look at the sky and say, "Beam me up, Scotty."
     "You're sick, Monkey," she says, shaking her head.
     We follow the burn back down the valley towards the loch. There's a tree up here, near the treeline, that I noticed on our last ramble. I call it The Cancer Tree. It seems to be dying a long and dreadful death. Huge granular cankers the size of fists are clustered on the trunk in a nearly symmetrical pattern; it has almost no leaves, even allowing for the lateness of the season, and it seems to be shedding branches as well because several have simply fallen off and splashed down into the burn. I pointed it out the first time I saw it, but Benedict only gave it a cursory glance and said something about pollution, said Oregon had been hit by it. I don't think Benedict likes trees. I'm not entirely sure she likes people. Certainly she doesn't like me.
     Just beyond The Cancer Tree, Benedict catches her toe on a stone half-buried in the grass and goes flying. It looks as if she bumps her knee quite painfully, but I just stand where I am and stare impassively, hoping to make her angry. I haven't seen Benedict angry yet; it ought to be quite instructive.
     All she does, however, is pick herself up and glare at me before stomping off down the hill path again. Or rather, she glares at the two-centimetre CD-ROM I wear, as my one concession to contemporary fashion, pinned to the breast-pocket flap of my combat jacket. I have not told her yet that the jacket is older than she is. I'm saving that for a special occasion.

I was doing the audiovisual thing with a fifth-year European History group when the creature with the surfer's tan arrived. It met me in the Head's office with sun-bleached hair, a suit from the Armani Revival, and the soft mid-Atlantic language of corporate law. It wanted my help.
     Or rather its employers wanted my help. An important piece of corporate research equipment had gone missing, and it was thought that I might be able to help get it back. The lawyer wouldn't tell me what the piece of equipment was, just then, but he said he was authorised to offer me a payment in return for my services, whether it was recovered or not. He offered me a choice of currencies. It worked out at eight or ten times my annual salary.
     Well, all kinds of moral considerations go through your mind in a situation like that. After you've checked out the corporation in question and found it isn't all some outlandish prank you start to weigh the cramped flat in Walthamstow against the previously-hypothetical three-bedroomed house in Hertfordshire. Improbably, the light at the end of the tunnel has begun to shine on you. So you sign where they tell you, in quintuplicate, because even if you can't see what possible use you can be, it doesn't matter. They're going to pay you anyway …
     And then of course they tell you what the missing piece of equipment is, that it has fair hair, a Midlands accent just like your own, and used to tell the worst Irishman jokes in London. And by then it's too late. You're a victim of your own greed.

The hotel's septic tank has a circular iron inspection cover, half a metre or so across and held down by two dozen hex-head bolts. It pokes up out of the ground in the back garden on top of a section of pipe about a foot high. Years ago, on those school trips, I used to like to come out here and sit on the cover and look down the valley. I came out here the afternoon Benedict and I arrived, when I was still fitting the place and my memories of it back together. Benedict was contemptuous of the fact that mains sanitation still hasn't got this far, sneered at the little methane converter bolted to the inspection pipe. I come out here a lot, which suits Benedict because she always knows where to find me.
     The hotel is so solidly granite-built that it looks as if it's been carved out of the hillside. As does the owner, Mrs Lamond. There is a Mr Lamond, a small dark-skinned creature, but he only appears after nightfall, when he can be found on a tall stool in the bar, nursing one glass of single malt all evening. His wife, however, sweeps through the rooms and along the dark flock-wallpapered corridors with all the top-heavy grandeur of a galleon under full sail. She speaks a dialect which Benedict cannot decipher. Neither can I, for that matter, but I'm not about to let Benedict know that. When Mrs Lamond speaks to me I nod in what seem to be the right places and hope for the best.
     There is still a little room called the Television Room, where in the evenings we sit with the four or five other guests around an out-of-date Panasonic Holostar which has pronounced z-axis creep, so that all the figures seem to be fading in from some higher dimension. Benedict insists we watch the news programmes in case I spot something which might offer a clue to Hey's whereabouts, but all we see are reports of restless children looting and burning the hearts of Northern towns.
     I phone my wife every evening after the news, and every evening she asks when I'm coming home. And every evening I give her the answer Benedict gives me when I ask the same question. I'll be home when we find Hey. And every evening, behind my wife's voice, I hear that hollow silence of abandonment.

Even at sixteen, awkward and apparently composed entirely of right-angles, he had a menagerie of weird enthusiasms, anything from quartz clocks to Celtic legend. One night, in the very Television Room where Benedict and I now watch the news, he and I sat up late with our first cigarettes in the light of a Sony colour television whose horizontal hold kept flipping, and he told me the story of Cuchullainn.
     Cuchullainn was the greatest of the Celtic heroes. In his last battle, mortally-wounded, he strapped himself to a pillar so that he could die standing up, sword in hand. Nobody dared go near him until a raven landed on his shoulder, and Cuchullainn went to Tir-na-nOg.
     "Tee what?" I coughed.
     "Tir-na-nOg," he said. "The Land Of The Young. The Celtic Valhalla. Where the heroes go." He looked sad. "The only problem is that you have to be dead to go there." He stubbed out his cigarette, waved a hand absently through the smoke as he stared at the television. "I'm not sure I like that."

It was the interactives that led him into artificial intelligence in the first place. He was never satisfied with them. He was always saying the other characters in the programs weren't truly autonomous. They operated to a fixed set of logical rules, and anybody bright enough to figure out the rules could beat the game every time. In a true interactive, he said, the characters would be illogical, petty, greedy, fearful, plain stupid. Just like real people, in other words.
     At first he had this little Telefunken console that used an induction headset to broadcast the computer's neural impulses into his brain. Later, when the money started to come in, he flew to Basle and had a permanent neural tap installed at the base of his skull so he wouldn't have to use the induction set any more, but he still found even the most sophisticated interactive a little simpleminded. He was always going on about how he wanted to write the perfect interactive, something truly crafty.
     By that time, the gawky uncomfortable adolescent had experienced a late blossoming into a tall, good-looking, self-assured young man, famous at twenty-five for his thesis on machine intelligence. He'd been called 'the new Turing,' a polymath of outstanding ability, and it was all I could do to stop myself creeping up behind him and sticking an icepick into that bloody socket in the back of his head.
     He laughed. "That really lacks imagination."
     "Well of course it does," I said sourly into my beer.
     He laughed again. "That's what I like about you, Monkey. You're totally prosaic."
     "Would it actually do anything?" I asked, curious. "If I did stick something into that thing?"
     He looked thoughtful, put his hand to the back of his head and ran his fingers over the tap's tiny dustcover. "It would hurt," he admitted after a moment.
     I sniggered and took a swig of beer. "Totally prosaic, eh?"
     "You'd also be buried under writs and lawsuits from the company," he went on. "Did you know that the Mona Lisa and I are worth precisely the same as each other, for insurance purposes?"
     "How nice for you both."
     We were sitting in the lounge bar of a quite appalling pub off the Cromwell Road. Our positions had reversed; where once he had lived in London and I had come to visit him, now I lived in London and he came infrequently to visit me. He always chose the pub, and it was always a bad choice, as if he had access to some Bad Pub Guide or something.
     This particular one was very empty, a huge room with stained threadbare carpet and extremely distressed bentwood furniture, the chairs upholstered with scarred patched velour of an indeterminate fudge colour that might once have been red or gold, it was impossible to tell.
     It was also very dark in here, this being a season of brownouts. Things weren't helped by half the windows being broken, the holes filled in with badly-cut bits of plywood. Through one of the surviving panes I watched a police traffic team gather round the burned-out wreck of a VW methane conversion across the road.
     We were in this awful place for two reasons. The first reason was that it was Hey's thirty-eighth birthday (and, by extension, the day before my thirty-eighth birthday.)
     The second reason was that Hey had just become a father. Or rather the little Anglo-German corporation he worked for had just become a father. The child spoke four languages and liked to watch old Roadrunner cartoons. It was the size of a family car and it was named ALDERMAN.
     "I used to think AI was Artificial Insemination before I met ALDERMAN!" Hey guffawed, a gag which must already have grown old and died in the lab where he worked. The pub's horse-faced landlord watched us with no discernible sense of humour from behind his scarred bar.
     It was difficult for Hey not to talk shop, even though I understood less than a third of the things he told me. He was already talking about moving on. He had helped to break the ground on artificial intelligence. Anything that came afterwards would be Development, Utilisation, work for the busy half-bright people who think up uses for miracles.
     Now he was talking about some madness involving biotechnology. That was where the future lay, bacteria that excreted room-temperature superconductor, programmable polysaccharides that behaved like separate animal cells under some circumstances and like long-chain polymers under others, things that went up into orbit as packets of white powder and came back from the European Spacelab as semiorganic compounds Nature only considered in her worst nightmares.
     "I hear strange things from the Land of the Rising Sun," he said at one point.
     "What's new?" When we were young, Japan was the place the miracles came from. Now Hey was making miracles himself, and Japan was the Competitor, the Bogeyman.
     "The rumour is that the Nipponese have managed to copy the personality of an orang-utan onto a couple of thousand terabytes of read-only memory."
     "I didn't think orang-utans had personalities."
     He snorted. "You've never kept one, obviously. I'm reliably informed that they have more personality than some major soap-opera stars."
     "But why bother?"
     He looked round the bar, smiling. He was dressed for the street: baggy orange pantaloons tucked into calf-length chamois boots, an oxblood leather duster coat and a pointy little hat with a huge floppy brim. It was as if someone had slipped Gandalf a particularly potent designer drug.
     "It'd be cheap to keep," he said finally. "You could buy the ROM, plug it into your entertainment set, switch on the hologram projector, you'd have your very own orang-utan, live and direct."
     "I think I'll stick with my cat, thanks a lot."
     He grinned beatifically at me. "Prosaic, Monkey," he said. "No imagination."
     I took a drink of warm, flat beer. "Shall we talk about what I did at school today?"
     "Don't be silly, Monkey," he said. "It's my birthday and I've just kicked Turing into a cocked hat. Let's talk about me."
     Those, of course, were the days when his masters still let him walk free.

Once, when I was young and in my first teaching job, I took part in a car treasure hunt around the green and leafy lanes of Kent. That's how long ago it was; Kent still had lanes that were green and leafy. It was the sort of thing where you go to a village, solve a list of clues, and from the answers decipher the location of the next village in the chain. And so on. Alastair, my driver, demonstrated an almost cosmological calm when faced with my inept navigation and an ancient and continually-stalling Passat. We saw a lot of Kent that day, and by accident we also saw quite a lot of East Sussex.
     Whenever we ran into one of the other teams taking part, Alastair and I would try to throw them off the scent by examining some imaginary clue or by pretending to go off in entirely the wrong direction. Most of the time, we were going off in the wrong direction.
     Benedict and I have been on our own treasure hunt, following Hey's trail from Grantbridge House to a flat in the Barbican; from a squat near the Cromwell Road to a pirate chip factory high up in the Pennines; from a cottage in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where there was recent evidence of some kind of workshop and an empty delivery case which had once held a little nuclear battery … and so on. To here.
     We are, apparently, not alone in our search for Hey. Not only are there other search teams sent out by his masters, but the Competitors also want him, or at least what he knows.
     In order to throw other searchers off the trail, Benedict and I are booked into the hotel on the banks of the loch as Mr and Mrs Ramsay, which is certainly not my real name and probably isn't Benedict's either. It seems a pretty transparent piece of misdirection to me, but Benedict claims to know what she's doing.
     For appearances' sake, we have a double room. She sleeps in the bed, I sleep on the floor. It's an arrangement that suits us both. She thinks I'm an idiot; for my part, I have a wife and a fifteen-year-old daughter, the Aids vaccine is still over four thousand euros for a course of five shots, and I would much rather climb into bed with a dead shark than sleep with Benedict.
     "Monkey."
     I heard her coming that time, her walking boots swishing through the long grass. Either my hearing's improving, or she just isn't bothering to be quiet any more. I don't even look up, just sit where I am on the septic tank's inspection cover, flipping my little CD-ROM like a rainbow-plated coin.
     "Will you stop doing that?"
     "All right." I pin the ROM back on my jacket. For some reason it irritates Benedict hugely when I start flipping it. I don't know why. Maybe her mother was once frightened by a George Raft film.
     "News from home," she tells me. Meaning she's been on the satellite link with her masters in their underground Arizona complex, which is supposed to be able to withstand a groundburst nuclear explosion of a little over two megatons. "Hey's bank accounts are gone."
     "Maybe he needed some mad money," I theorise half-heartedly.
     "You would think so, wouldn't you," she says with a heavy edge of sarcasm in her voice. "Except under an arrangement made with his bankers before he went missing, the bulk of his money has been given to our major competitor."
     I know I'm making a mistake, but I burst out laughing anyway. "And I suppose they need the money, eh?"
     "I suppose." And, for the first time in days, we make eye contact. She has lovely eyes, a peculiar deep-sea green you only see, far away on the very edge of infinity, if you hold two mirrors up to each other. One or both could be implant-cameras, it's impossible to tell.
     She sighs and turns away. "Come upstairs, Monkey. I want to give you a geography lesson."
     "A what?" I ask, following.

Up in our room, Benedict heaves her big metal suitcase out from under the bed and wipes a cardkey down the slot in the side. Then she dumps it on the duvet, spins the combination locks, snaps up the catches, lifts the lid.
     "A geography lesson, Monkey," she says. "I want to show you where you are."
     "I know where I am," I tell her.
     Looking down into the case, she says, "You have no idea where you are. Come here."
     I step over beside her. Inside the case, nested in foam, are decks and sets, consoles, palmtops, satcoms, edge connectors, alphanumeric tapboards, umbrella dishes, paper-thin polycarbonate flatscreens rolled up like posters, brightly-coloured braids of optic ribbon. Designer tech; the collective unconscious of our age.
     She lifts out one of the devices, a thing the size of an old-style portable typewriter and the thickness of a paperback novel. It seems by far the least-complicated of all her toys: a touch-sensitive keyboard, some little LCD panels, tiny integral screen, input-output jacks.
     "Know what this is?"
     "It is not logical, Captain," I deadpan, trying to ignore the itchy feeling down my backbone.
     She doesn't even bother to look at me. "It's a portable cracking deck."
     "Oh." Then, "Why did you bring that?"
     "Hey took one of these out of Grantbridge with him, among other things," she says, which doesn't answer my question.
     "What for?"
     "Well if we knew that …" She puts the cracking device back in its nest in the case, takes out another object, a matt-black thing shaped like an old-fashioned peppermill with a pistol grip grafted onto it. Even I know what that is. She takes a step back and points it at me. "I'm not playing, Monkey."
     The wide end of the pistol is dotted with hundreds of little holes. I shrug. "Me neither."
     Benedict smiles and takes a cassette from the case. "It isn't loaded, Monkey." She snaps the cassette into the side of the pistol, twists the barrel until it clicks. "Now it's loaded." And she points it at my head. "On full automatic," she says, sighting down the fat barrel, "this thing will empty a cassette of two thousand flechettes in just over a second. At this range that's more than enough to completely vaporise your head."
     "When I was young, little girls played with dolls," I say, unable to tear my eyes away from all those little holes.
     "Well thank God those days are gone. Where is he, Monkey?"
     "I don't know."
     "Of course you know. You're his best friend. He was always talking about you."
     "I'm flattered."
     She gives a thin smile. "You're old, Monkey. Hey's old. Old men stick together."
     "You can't blame them if the world's being run by people like you."
     She twists the barrel again. "On single-shot," she says, "it fires a dart tipped with batrachotoxin. You know? From the skin of poisonous frogs?"
     "Only you could make a joke like that, Benedict."
     "Some people have an odd sense of humour," she says with a little smile. "How's yours?"
     "Oh, fine. I've always found this kind of thing hilarious."
     She leans forward and puts the muzzle of the gun against my throat. "Like hitting your heart with a pickaxe, Monkey," she murmurs, watching my face.
     And for a moment an awful feeling comes over me. An obscene feeling. I stare into those depthless oceanic eyes again, and for a moment I know I could fall in love with her, even though she is threatening me with poison distilled from the skin of frogs, even though she despises me for being everything she is not, for being old, broken, British. I could fall in love with this beautiful child of a younger culture, this witch of dark technologies, build my love into an edifice, a mighty wheel, and break myself on it.
     I feel a bead of sweat collect itself up in my receded hairline, begin to travel down my forehead. She is quite lovely in her ease with hardware. Alluring. I could tell her my feelings, and she would shoot me right here and now, out of surprise alone, out of disgust …
     "Benedict," I say with an effort, "will you get it into your head that I don't have what you want? I'm a teacher, that's all. I teach the syllabus and along the way I try to teach the kids how to be better people. That's all."
     She favours me with one of her cold toneless looks. "It's a pity no one ever took the trouble to teach you how to be a better person."
     "Pardon me?"
     "Hey tried to call you twice in the year before he walked and both times you just told him to fuck off. We've got recordings. Not a nice way to treat a friend, Monkey."
     Which, I suppose, is why they came to me. "It's not very polite to listen to other people's telephone conversations."
     She laughs at such a quaint concept as politeness, unsnaps the ammo cassette from the pistol. "There are lots of people looking for Hey." She puts gun and cassette back into the case and shuts the lid. "Not all of them have my sense of humour."
     I suddenly realise I'm shaking. "Well let's hope we find him first."
     "You'd better hope so. Hey hasn't defected; we'd know about it if he turned up in someone else's facility. He's gone rogue. Like a mad elephant, you know? Like a tiger. We have to stop him before he does something silly."
     "Who's going to stop you before you do something silly?"
     She gives me that thin smile again as she slides the case back under the bed. "Nobody at all. Beautiful, isn't it?"

That's progress for you, I suppose. Twenty years ago, when the Japanese first recorded the personality of an orang-utan onto a thousand or so terabytes of ROM, the device they used was the size of a small car. Now you can put it in a suitcase. I presume one day you'll be able to carry it around in your pocket.
     There is, apparently, still no way round the trauma of the procedure. The electrochemical stimulation involved either kills the subject outright or leaves them severely brain-damaged. For this reason the technique is either used on people who are going to die anyway, or - in the case of a number of States in America - as a penalty for capital crimes. Personality distillation. Cracking. Instead of electrocuting people, now they just record their personalities and file them.
     We had a cracker at school once, brought in on loan as part of a science project. Being the curious type I took the advantage of a free period and popped down to the lab for a look.
     The hardware was uninteresting, just an everyday hologram console plugged into a couple of featureless little boxes, and it produced the image of a ten-year-old Danish girl who had been dying of leukaemia. Her father was a rich industrialist, and, rather than lose his little girl altogether, he had had her cracked.
     It was impossible to tell that this was, in effect, a monstrously-sophisticated recording. To all intents and purposes, I was speaking to a real little girl, as if we were having a viewphone conversation. The girl's English was excellent but accented; she hadn't been able to speak English originally, but a secondary language program had been added to the cracker.
     We talked for a long time. So long that I missed my next teaching period. I can't, however, remember exactly what we talked about, only that it was one of the more compelling and upsetting experiences of my life. If I had been the little girl's father, I think I would rather have let her die naturally.

"It's the Holy Grail, sort of. Biology and technology combined."
     We were sitting in the lobby at the Barbican Centre. There was a concert of English folk music on in the big auditorium, and Vaughan Williams' Fantasia On Greensleeves was coming from the speakers distributed around the room. Hey had ceased to talk technology or biology. Now he was talking necromancy, stuff from a faery-land ruled entirely by intelligences that were neither wholly organic nor wholly inorganic.
     "I was in Arizona last week," he said. "They've developed this little robot about the size of a speck of dust. You can't even see it without a microscope. Powers itself by tapping into the electrical potential of muscle fibres. They use free-electron lasers to sculpt them out of bits of silicon-chitin hybrid."
     "Sounds terrific." I gazed around the empty lobby. One of the Centre's staff was moving between the tables clearing coffee-cups and glasses left by concertgoers during the interval.
     "Only about a gigabyte of onboard memory, of course, but it doesn't have to be very bright. You could inject a few thousand into a bloke's bloodstream and they'd just go round and round unplaquing his arteries."
     "What about rejection?"
     He waved rejection away. "You give them coats of mimetic protein and the body thinks they belong there."
     "Of course." I lit a cigar.
     "I really hate London," he said, squinting about him.
     "What?"
     "London. It's fucking horrible. I don't know how you can live here."
     I thought about it. "No," I said finally. "No, neither do I."
     He looked to his left. A few metres away, Michael, his bodyguard, was reading a Barbican events programme while at the same time watching the waiter clearing up. He'd balked at letting us sit out by the Lakeside - all those balconies and windows overlooking us, perfect for sniper fire. Michael took his job very seriously.
     "Look at that wanker," Hey said. "Company man from the chromosomes up. They clone them, you know. Grow them in vats. Hasn't a fucking free-thinking cell in his body."
     I looked at Hey, but it was impossible to tell if he was kidding or not.
     "Nice to know they care about you," I said nonchalantly.
     He snorted. He had changed since I'd last seen him, just before taking up employment with his new masters. He had become … I don't know, colourless. Insipid. It might just have been the unobtrusive charcoal cord trousers, black turtleneck and nondescript Navy surplus overcoat the security man had persuaded him to wear in order to be inconspicuous, but the life seemed to have gone out of him. His face was thinner, more pinched; he was going bald in an amiable mad-professor sort of way and he wore John Lennon spectacles rather than have an op to correct a worsening astigmatism.
     "You look tired."
     He shrugged. "So much to do, so little time to do it in." He looked thoughtfully at Michael. "So many people to do it to."
     "Not that I look much better, I suppose."
     He smiled wanly at me. "Look at us, Monkey. Two old men sitting wondering why the world's so bloody awful. My old granddad used to do the same thing with his mates down at the working men's club."
     "I don't know what you were wondering, but I wasn't wondering why the world's so bloody awful." Which made a change.
     "Too many young people," he said, nodding to himself. "They all want a bit of the action. And every year there's more of them."
     "We're not old," I said.
     "Sorry, Monkey, but we are."
     "If you start to cry, I'm leaving."
     He grinned. "Good old Monkey, always ready to stand by his mates."
     "That's me."
     He looked at my cigar. "Ever wonder what it's like to be dead?"
     "It's like teaching at a comprehensive in Outer London. Less opportunities to be beaten up, perhaps."
     "People could get tired of your smart mouth, Monkey, you know?"
     "I know."
     "Really, though. Do you think there's a Heaven? An afterlife?"
     "A Tir-na-nOg?" I said, and I was glad to see him laugh finally. "Oh my Christ, I hope not."
     "When I die," he said as if he'd only just that moment decided, "I'm going to give all my money to charity."
     I was about to ask what he meant, but all of a sudden he took off into a description of how plants have a rudimentary nervous system, how various programmable biotech components could now assemble themselves into what amounted to molecular computers, how it should soon be feasible to implant them into people. Then Michael came over and Hey's trip to London was finished, and that was the last time I ever saw him, pushing the Barbican's glass doors open against the early evening drizzle, one day in October.

"That was seven years ago. And you've had him locked up ever since."
     "He shouldn't have told you a lot of those things," Benedict says. "That stuff about nanotech was still in R&D seven years ago."
     "And of course I went straight to your competitors and told them everything he told me, which is why I'm so wealthy now."
     We are sitting in our room at the hotel. She's sitting on the bed, I'm sitting on my sleeping bag on the floor, looking up at her, which nicely sums up our relationship.
     "He was naked, you know," she says, looking over to the window.
     "Excuse me?"
     She looks at me. "Hey. He knocked out the video system at Grantbridge but we had some still cameras set up as well and he couldn't interfere with them, so we got one photo of him when he walked out. He was stark naked except for an orange wig."
     I stare at her.
     She cocks her head at me. "Any thoughts on that?"
     I find myself smiling. "He was embarrassed about going bald."
     Benedict sighs. Idiot Monkey. Clown Monkey. Not worth taking seriously. "That's how we know about the bafflers. We could have worked it out from what happened, constructed a synthesis of events, but the photo clinched it. He was covered in wires and little boxes and Christ only knows what. We found them later in the trees two miles from the house."
     "So he wasn't naked." I hug my knees to my chest. "Wig, wires, little boxes. Sounds a bit overdressed, now you mention it."
     She looks at me a moment longer, then examines the back of her hand and says nonchalantly, "Why did you keep hanging up on him? When he rang you?"
     I get up, walk to the corner of the room and switch on the little kettle. "Lots of reasons."
     "He sounded desperate."
     "He was drunk, Benedict. He was drunk, he hadn't bothered to get in touch with me for seven years, Louise and I were going through a bad patch, I was having a really shitty time at school." I shrug. "I kept hoping he'd call back, but he never did."
     "And you didn't try to get in touch with him yourself."
     "I didn't have a number."
     She shakes her head. "And you call yourselves friends."
     "I seem to remember something about your security men not letting him give out his phone number."
     "Hey never struck me as someone who did as he was told."
     Hands in pockets, I perch on the windowsill. Outside, just beyond the glass, the birds are arrayed on the telephone wires, singing their tiny hearts out into the evening. I wonder briefly if Benedict would lend me her flechette pistol so I can blow the little sods away.
     "You know he was drinking heavily?" she says.
     "He's always drunk heavily, even when he was doing the keep-fit stuff. And don't tell me he's just gone bonkers. He's always been a bit manic-depressive." To my consternation, she puts her head back and howls with laughter. She has an astoundingly dirty laugh. I'm amazed and irritated in roughly equal measures. "I'm glad you find it so funny."
     "Manic?" she laughs. "Your friend isn't manic-depressive. He's maniac-depressive."
     I look at her until she stops laughing. When the kettle boils, I unplug it.
     "You really have no idea about what happened to Hey after you last saw him, have you, Monkey?"
     "I've been trying to tell you that for weeks."
     "Do you know what bioROM is?"
     I close my eyes. "Oh bastard."
     "Programmable memory-RNA analogues in conjunction with direct neural input," she explains unnecessarily. "You can learn a whole language in an evening. Hey was doing bioROM very heavily, whole bodies of technique. The doctors at Grantbridge warned him, but he wouldn't stop, just kept ordering them one after the other, eight hours a day plugged into a teaching deck."
     "And you let him." Oh you bitch, you let him drive himself mad …
     "He said it was in the interests of his work," she says, innocent surprise in her voice that I should think anything else.
     A great tiredness sweeps over me. I pop teabags into two mugs. Into Benedict's mug I also drop half a dozen sleeping tablets which I've been keeping in my pocket for just this eventuality. They hit the teabag without rattling. Theoretically it ought to be impossible to overdose on these particular pills, but right now I don't care whether she dies or not. I pour water into the mugs and the pills dissolve almost at once. Colourless, odourless, tasteless. Sleight of hand. I wonder if Benedict knows how much I was interested in amateur magic when I was a boy.
     "Nobody could understand half the things he said or did," she says, gently complaining. "He ordered five hundred rubber plants once. Infected them with superconductor bacteria. Most of them died, of course."
     "It's the technology, Benedict," I say, trying to fight my anger back and think clearly. I pour milk into the tea. "Hey's just into the hardware." And then I stand there appalled as the dissolved pills curdle the milk in Benedict's tea.
     "There was no logic to it, though," she says.
     "What do you mean?" Stirring does no good; the milk just breaks into little white lumps. Dear God, I can't even poison somebody properly …
     "The stuff he was learning. Some of it wasn't even technical. Fairytales. The Mabinogion. Do you know that one?"
     "No," I say, stirring desperately, hopelessly.
     "Celtic poetry. Welsh poetry. This was after the Celtic and Welsh language shots." She shakes her head.
     Oh, bugger it. I fish out the teabags, dump them in the bin, pick up the mugs and carry them over to the bed. "There's something wrong with the milk."
     "Surprise me. Half-assed country, can't even get real milk." She takes her mug, looks at the tea a moment, then sips. "No, it's okay. Forget it. I like my tea chewy." She raises an eyebrow, just in case I've missed the sarcasm.
     I stay on my feet so she can't see that my milk is uncurdled. "Hey's always been interested in Celtic legends."
     "Being interested is one thing, Monkey." She takes a big drink of tea. "Mainlining the shit is something else altogether."
     I go back to the window, watch dusk gather on the face of the loch and start to rise up the hillsides. My reflection starts to form in the glass, a plump, short, balding man of late middle-age, weak-mouthed and inoffensive. I'm surprised to realise, so late in my life, how much I look like my father. "He couldn't have known I'd help you," I tell my reflection.
     I hear her take another big gulp of tea. "You've got a price, just like everyone else."
     "Yes," I say. "Yes, you're probably right." And I wave my hands, and all the birds on the telephone lines, startled by the sudden movement, take flight into the darkening sky.

Hours later I unzip my sleeping bag and crawl over to the bed. Benedict is curled under the duvet, a deeply-breathing question mark. I shake her gently, then harder, but her breathing doesn't change. Fine.
     Downstairs, behind the little counter at which Mrs Lamond receives her guests, is a white-painted toolbox containing all kinds of battered, worn and dirty handyman's tools. By the flame of my lighter I locate a rubber-cased torch and an adjustable wrench. Then I find the control panel for the hotel's alarms. None of the switches make any sense to me, so I turn them all off and let myself out.
     Stumbling along the path around the building following the torch's bobbing oval of light, all kinds of things go through my mind, ridiculous things. When I get to the septic tank's inspection cover, I kneel beside it and shine the torch on the fresh, barely-rusted scars on the bolts that hold it down.
     It takes a long time. The wrench keeps slipping, putting new scars on the metal. I have to stop again and again to tighten the jaws on the bolts, but they come up slowly, slowly, one by one. Finally I have them all out, and I heave the heavy iron disc off the tank. A dreadful hot smell of rotting shit mushrooms into the night air, turning my stomach over.
     Lying in the grass nearby is an old broken clothes-prop. I pick it up and, holding my breath, use it to poke about inside the tank. At the first attempt I make contact with something solid.
     "Monkey."
     This time I don't jump; I've been half-expecting it. You hear all kinds of stories; Hey once told me that his bodyguard's blood chemistry had been altered so drugs wouldn't affect him. No wonder she wasn't worried about drinking her tea.
     "It's here," I tell her.

I am a spy, a sleeper. A mole in one of the Global Village's few remaining lawns, biding my time, waiting for the signal. Hey's mole.
     He never said anything out loud, but that was Hey. Half his communication came in the form of allusion, double entendre, suggestion, and it was up to everyone else to decode it. I didn't have to worry; he'd written the world's greatest interactive, loaded it up with real people, and waited until he needed it. Everything was arranged to give him the best chance of doing what he wanted to do, and all I had to do was play my role when the time came.
     I didn't even have to worry about getting my role right; Hey knew how I'd react in a certain situation. He'd figured out my role that drizzly morning in Lincoln's Inn, when he ran one way and I ran the other, and everybody had chased me. He had filed me away for future use. Monkey: decoy.
     Except I seem to have done little apart from trail around Britain with Benedict. I can't have slowed her down by much, but maybe it was enough.
     Benedict certainly seems to think it was enough. In response to her summons, a team of three eager, almost identical young men helicopters in out of the dawn fifteen minutes later to fish Hey's machine out of the septic tank. It's bigger than the one Benedict showed me, and it seems to have had modular attachments plugged into it, but it must be the cracking deck that Hey took out of Grantbridge with him.
     A few hours later, after the enthusiastic young men have helicoptered out again, locals start coming into the hotel to tell Mrs Lamond of all kinds of strange things, of two taciturn Americans who have taken over the local telephone exchange and plugged peculiar equipment into it, of teams of strangers calling at isolated crofts testing the telephones and landlines.
     Benedict passes through the hotel in an access of rage spectacular for its absolute silence, all pretence of tourism gone now. She's absolutely exquisite. She's furious with me, but not for trying to drug her; we both know she would have been disappointed if I hadn't at least tried. I sit in the lounge, listen to the locals' stories, read a two-week-old magazine.
     At one point Benedict comes into the lounge and says, "You knew that thing with the bank accounts was a signal." She sits down on the coffee-table and fixes me with those gorgeous eyes. "You knew all along."
     "So did you," I say reasonably.
     "You saw those marks on the bolts the first day we came here. You knew someone had put something in the tank."
     "I knew someone had had the cover off in the past few months. It could have been a routine inspection, but I knew Hey would have put the cracking deck somewhere I'd notice."
     "You knew about the cracking deck?"
     "No," I say with exaggerated patience, disappointed that she needs it all explained to her like this. "I thought something had been put in the tank. When you told me about the cracking deck, I guessed that might have been it."
     "Why didn't you say anything?"
     She has to ask, of course. "I don't like your friends, I don't like what they stand for, and I don't like you, Benedict. What other reason could I need?"
     She blinks impassively at me. "You really are a fucking creep, Monkey," she says, standing up and walking away.
     "At least I'm still a fucking human being!" I yell after her, but she doesn't stop.

After breakfast I try an experiment: I put on my boots and take a walk up alongside the burn. I really do it to annoy Benedict, but she gives no sign of even noticing that I've gone. I wonder briefly what she would do if I just kept going, before I realise that she probably has the whole valley surrounded.
     Up near the floor of the glen, I stop and stand, hands in pockets, looking at The Cancer Tree. Then I sit on a rock and try to think.
     There is an indefinable feeling, now, that the game is over. Hey has eluded us, gone where we can't follow him. All the subsidiary players are being brought in to tidy up, the eager boys in the helicopter, the quiet men in the telephone exchange, all here to wrap up the loose ends.
     From what the invading technicians have been doing, I can make a guess at what has happened. Benedict's people have taken every scrap of data they possess regarding Hey, and they have produced a construction, a synthesis of what happened here. They believe that their synthesis has allowed them to second-guess Hey. But it hasn't, not really.
     I rub my face and try to concentrate. He would have needed an accomplice, a final mole, someone to operate the cracking deck, then dispose of the body and the equipment when it was all over. Maybe someone local, maybe not. We might never find out who it was. In Benedict's synthesis, the accomplice then somehow transmitted Hey's ROM personality structure into the telephone network. The technicians are looking for signs of this transmission, clues to where Hey's personality has gone. These are technical people, and they have synthesised a technical solution.
     I sit there for a long long time, thinking about programmable polysaccharides, bacterial superconductor, molecular computers, plants with rudimentary nervous systems. He once infected five hundred rubber plants with superconductor bacteria, and most of them died. But not all of them. I smile at The Cancer Tree. They think they know, but they don't.

Benedict is sitting on the shingle beach, knees hugged to her chest, staring out over the water. She's probably been listening to my approach for fifteen minutes or so, but it doesn't matter. Not now. I walk down the beach and sit next to her, and together we watch the little waves lap at the shoreline.
     "Did you know," I say finally, "that the Celts believed that mountains and rivers and trees all contained deities?"
     She looks at me as if she thinks I'm mad. And who's to say she's not right? And where does that leave her?
     "What were you planning to do this morning?" she asks.
     "I'm not sure," I tell her truthfully. "I think he wanted me to take the machine and run away with it once I was sure he was dead. I think I was supposed to keep you running around a bit longer."
     "And you were sure he was dead when I told you about the bank accounts."
     "He said something once about giving his money to charity."
     She sighs. "You know what we think he did?"
     "He had himself cracked and transmitted into the phone network. Yes, I worked it out."
     "And you've no idea who helped him with it."
     "Even if I did, I wouldn't tell you."
     "I could make you."
     I have no doubt that she could, or that she would enjoy herself immensely while she did it. But I just sit there and smile at her. She can't harm me any longer, not in any meaningful way. Hey has gone, and without him the game has lost any meaning.
     "Jesus," shaking her head at a plan Hey must have been preparing for ever since he first heard about cracking. She is also, for the first time, having to countenance the possibility that I might be a good deal brighter than she has been giving me credit for. That hurts. I can tell.
     "He might not have been successful," I say after a while. "It might just have been an elaborate suicide."
     "We can't afford to believe that," she says almost inaudibly, as if the day's rage has simply exhausted her. "Even if the chips in the machine were erased, we might still be able to pull some of his personality out of it. And we have to find him. Talk to him somehow."
     Talk to him. I smile at the loch, the hills, the trees. "Can we go home now?"
     "I'm booked on the midnight flight out of Glasgow. I guess you can go whenever you want."
     "Will your people be angry with you?"
     She shrugs. "I guess. They might even want to send me after him." And she manages a faint little smile.
     I unpin the CD-ROM from my jacket, take her hand, and place the little disc in her palm. For the first time, I'm close enough to smell her perfume, faint and fragile and papery. "It's the story of Cuchullainn," I say. "About a hundred kilobytes of text." She looks at me, then at the disc, then back at me. "He posted it to me," I tell her. "It was in my pigeonhole at school the day after I signed your contract." Benedict and her masters are so intent on the electronic arts that they've forgotten there's still a postal service in this country. "I've known all along that he planned to kill himself, you see. Cuchullainn dies and goes to Tir-na-nOg. It's an in-joke. A signal, if you like. He was probably dead by the time I received that."
     She looks at the ROM again. "And I thought you were just a fashion victim."
     "Not me. Too prosaic."
     Outsmarted by two old Brits with a plan thought up before she was born. Poor Benedict.
         "He'd never have got out of here alive," she says.
     "I know. That's why you brought a cracking deck with you. You were going to crack him yourself, make sure he never got away from you again."
     She looks levelly at me. "No, you don't understand. The man he killed was my husband."
     Well, just when you think you're getting to know someone … I get to my feet. "I don't think you're the murdering kind, Benedict."
     She stares out across the loch to the hills on the other side. "Why did he do it, Monkey?"
     "I don't know. I'm sorry, Benedict; I suppose your husband just got in his way."
     "No." She shakes her head. "This. He had everything with us, Monkey. Money, power, prestige, all the bioROM he could pump into his stupid head. Why do this?"
     "He was going to grow old and die," I say.
     She's silent a moment. Then she murmurs, "Fuck."
     "There's always a simple explanation for these things," I say. I bend down and kiss the crown of her head. Then I walk away.

On my last morning at the hotel by the loch, the morning after Benedict leaves, I take one final walk up the burn and stand smiling at The Cancer Tree. Up in the glen I can hear helicopters coming and going, bringing teams to drag the little lochan for Hey's body and the rest of his equipment.
     On impulse I walk across the burn, boots slipping on slimy rocks so that one foot splashes into icy water. On the other bank I reach up and touch the cankers on the trunk. The tree does appear to be dying from whatever witches' brew of outlandish technology he injected it with, but maybe it lasted long enough for him to take the next step, from flesh to augmented tree to the force of Nature he always believed existed.
     Maybe one day Benedict's people will assemble the clues in the right way and make the correct guess about what Hey attempted up here. Maybe then they'll come for me again, but for Hey - if he succeeded, if I have guessed correctly - it's already over.
     On the other hand, it could have been suicide; a typically Hey sort of suicide, designed to cause the maximum amount of inconvenience for the maximum number of people. He was certainly capable of a gesture like that.
     But I don't think so. I choose not to think so. He went where he wanted to go, and he would have known that if he left enough clues I would eventually work it out.
     There should always be time for a last goodbye. I put my arms round The Cancer Tree and hug it. If I put my ear to the trunk, I might even be able to hear Hey singing as he takes that final step, leaping exulting from tree to tree, bush to bush, a virus program copying and recopying itself across the face of Nature; Heaven, Valhalla, Tir-na-nOg …

Discreet Phenomena

The little blue car was moving so slowly that it barely made it over the top of the hill. I saw it edge up over the crest and half-expected it to stop and then roll backward out of view, like a sight-gag from a silent movie.
     But it didn't stop. Somehow, it kept moving.
     I was standing on the forecourt, topping Jim Dawes's Jeep Cherokee up with unleaded. Jim was standing beside me, recounting the last grouse shoot he'd been to, but I wasn't really listening. I was watching the little blue car. Finally Jim fell silent and watched it with me.
     "That'll be another one, then," he said, putting his hands in his pockets.
     I removed the nozzle from the Cherokee's tank, closed the filler cap, hung up the hose, and went back to stand beside Jim. The car had made it over the crest of the hill and was starting to gain speed down the long gentle slope. Its offside indicator was winking.
     Domino came out of the office and stood beside us. "Another one?" he said.
     "Looks like it," said Jim.
     "How many's that?"
     Jim shrugged. "Six?"
     "Five," I said. "This is the fifth."
     The car reached the bottom of the hill and rolled sedately past us with only the sound of its tyres on the road. There was no one in the driver's seat. Or in the passenger seat. Or in the back seat.
     "Well," said Domino, and he set off at a quick jog.
     "New lad?" asked Jim as we watched Domino running after the empty car.
     "He's been here about a fortnight," I said.
     "Never seen him before."
     "He's not local."
     "Student, is he? Summer job?"
     "I suppose so. Something like that."
     Jim thought about it for a minute or so, while Domino caught up with the empty car, ran beside it, and in one graceful motion opened the driver's door and hopped inside.
     "Good runner, for a hunchback," Jim said finally. He was one of those big bluff Yorkshiremen who think that a reputation for plain-speaking gives them carte blanche to be rude.
     The little blue car stopped, performed a neat three-point turn, and came back to us. Domino steered it onto the forecourt behind Jim's Cherokee and stopped it with the handbrake. The indicator was still blinking.
     "Same thing," Domino told us as he got out of the car. He held up one of those little cardboard Christmas trees that are supposed to smell like pine forests. He reached back inside and pulled the bonnet catch.
     I lifted the bonnet. The engine compartment was empty.
     "How do they do that?" Jim said, shaking his head.

Jim shook his head over the car for another twenty minutes or so, then he paid for his petrol and drove off. Domino and I pushed the blue car out of the way behind the office. I phoned Nigel, but he was out on a job, so I left Domino working on the accounts and went back outside and sat on my stool beside the pumps.
     It was one of those extraordinary days you get on Salisbury Plain in summer, when the sky goes a kind of blue-white colour and seems to hum with the heat. We had only had two cars in all morning, not counting the little blue one.
     I lifted the lid from the blue-and-white cooler-box beside my stool, took out a bottle of Budweiser, and levered the cap off with my Swiss Army penknife.
     Across the road, in the window of Mavis Burton's knitwear shop, the headless, armless torso of her one and only mannequin was wearing the same green tank-top it had been wearing the first time I had seen it, almost six years ago, when I decided to buy the garage. I'd sat here so many hours over the years, looking at that mannequin, that I occasionally considered buying the tank-top myself, just to change the view, but I always caught myself just in time.
     I slurped beer, scratched my armpit, looked at my watch.
     Eventually, a little police car came along the road from the centre of the village and parked outside Mavis's shop. An enormous man shrink-wrapped in a uniform a size too small for him got out and stretched. Even from across the road I could hear seams popping. I checked my watch.
     Nigel finished his callisthenics, put on his cap, looked both ways along the road, and crossed over to where I was sitting.
     "I make that an hour and forty minutes," I told him. "I'm going to write to the Daily Mail and make a complaint about the standard of rural policing."
     "Afternoon, Geoff," said Nigel, touching the brim of his cap and smiling.
     I got down off the stool. "It's back here."
     On the way past the office, I called through the open window and told Domino to keep an eye on the pumps.
     "So," said Nigel, looking at the little blue car and scratching his head. "How many's this, then? Six?"
     "Five."
     He opened the bonnet and regarded the empty engine space with the same kind of gravity he would have accorded a murder or a lost kitten. "Well," he said finally, "if nobody claims them in six months, I suppose they're yours." He looked at me and smiled sunnily. "Make yourself a fortune, I expect."

The first engineless car had rolled past the garage about a fortnight before, a couple of days after Domino turned up. It had come to a stop, that one indicator flashing, a few yards down the road, completely innocent of driver, passengers or motive power, and we had pushed it back into the yard and called the police. Nobody would drive it, and Nigel was leery about towing it, so we cleared out one of the sheds at the back of the yard and put it in there.
     The next day, Nigel returned with the news that the car seemed not to exist. Its vehicle identification number wasn't on record anywhere, and its number plates weren't registered to any known vehicle. Nigel had a feeling that something not quite legal was going on, but he admitted to not having a clue what it was, and in lieu of further evidence he decided to leave the car with me for the time being.
     Three days later, the next one arrived. We put that one in the shed too. And the next. And the next. Now, every time I went out to the pumps to serve a customer, I found myself glancing up the road, just in case I saw another slow-moving vehicle cresting the hill.

Nigel watched Domino and me push the blue car into one of the sheds. Then he watched me padlock the door, just in case someone decided to steal it.
     Walking back to his car, Nigel looked through the window of one of the other sheds and said, "I don't remember this one."
     I stopped beside him and looked into the shed. "It's my car," I told him.
     "Thought you drove a VW."
     We stood side by side looking at my Peugeot on the other side of the glass. I said, "The Volkswagen's Karen's car. We don't have off-road parking, and Laura Gibbs complained when we parked both the cars outside the house."
     "Laura lives on your street."
     I nodded.
     Nigel shook his head. "She always was a cow, even at school. Never understood it, pretty girl like that." He looked at me. "Want me to have a word with her?"
     "No," I said, suddenly alarmed. "Jesus, Nigel. I'm a big enough laughing-stock around here without you fighting my fights for me."
     "You're not a laughing-stock, Geoff," he said.
     "No?"
     He shook his head again. "But you are the subject of a lot of intense gossip, I will admit that."
     "Thank you, Nigel," I said. "Thanks a lot."

After Nigel drove off, I left Domino in charge of the garage and I walked back down the High Street into the village.
     Seldon comprised about three dozen houses, one pub, two newsagents, a butcher, a greengrocer, Mavis's knitwear shop, Baxter's Garage, a shoe shop, Vickers & Sons Estate Agents, and a sort of pocket branch of Argos, all of them baking slowly in the afternoon heat. The village's population, including toddlers, couldn't have been more than two hundred, but just recently the place had started to look like the car-park of an out-of-town superstore.
     The big green BBC Outside Broadcast van was still parked outside the Black Bull. Beside it were cars with foreign number plates and Press stickers on the insides of their windscreens. In the field behind the pub were a couple more vans. One of them had a huge satellite dish mounted on its roof. Beside it was a ragged collection of tents, teepees and benders.
     I carried on past the Bull. On the opposite pavement, Jane Wallace was being vox-popped by a CNN news team who looked as if they had all been die-cast from the same perfect mould. Jane was answering their questions with the easy professional grace of someone who has given many many interviews and has already made inquiries about getting an agent.
     Outside Argos, the lone representative of a Ukrainian news service was standing, wild-eyed and festooned with cameras, looking for someone to interview. I crossed the road to avoid him, turned left up the next street, walked up my garden path, opened my door, closed it behind me, locked it, bolted it, put the chain on.
     I went into the living room, closed the curtains, half-filled a glass with vodka, and lay down on the settee.
     "Another one?" asked Karen from the shadows around the armchair.
     I nodded and took a big swallow of vodka.
     "That's six now, yes?"
     I closed my eyes.

That night, it rained frogs.

2

"You look awful," said Domino.
     "That's the effect I was aiming for." I sorted through the papers on my desk. "So, how does it look?"
     He watched me a moment longer, then he looked down at the company books and said, "Do you want the good news or the bad news?"
     "Let's work on the assumption that I only want to hear good news today."
     "There isn't any," he said. "You'll be bankrupt by this time next year."
     "You gave me a choice," I protested. "Good news or bad news. Give me my good news."
     He shook his head. "Grow up, Geoff."
     I sat back in the threadbare swivel chair I'd rescued from a fire-damage sale the year I'd bought the business.
     "Would you like to hear my opinion?" Domino asked.
     "No, thank you."
     "Whoever sold this place to you must have walked away jumping into the air, clicking their heels together and shouting yippee."
     I looked at him. He had a fresh, unworried, open face and long ash-blond hair. If he hadn't been so tall and hunched-over, he could easily have been taken for a young teenager. I rubbed my eyes.
     "It's a petrol station outside a village two miles from a major A-road," he went on. "Be honest with me; how many people charging down the A303 pull off and stop here for petrol?"
     There were signs on the Seldon turnoff that pointed to 'Local Services' - me, in other words - but most drivers expect their services to be at the end of a fairly short slip-road. People turning off the A303 just sort of drove around for a couple of minutes looking puzzled before getting back onto the main road and going in search of a real service station. I'd put up a sign of my own that read 'Seldon Services - 2 miles,' but the Highways Agency had told me to take it down.
     "Your prices are too high, too," Domino went on. "The last few weeks should have quadrupled your takings, at least, but everybody's going to the big service station up the road."
     "I can't afford to cut prices," I said.
     "It's not your fault." He looked at me with what appeared to be a real expression of sympathy. "This place was dying on its feet years before you came along." He looked at the books again. "I give you another six months. A year, perhaps."
     "Do you want a drink?" I said.

The lounge bar of The Black Bull was full of journalists and technicians and support staff and scientists. We looked into the snug, and it was more of the same. We went into the public bar, and found a couple of locals neatly corralled along with the fruit machines and the pool table and the Space Invaders machine.
     I sat at a corner table, thinking about Domino's assessment of my business future, while he went to buy drinks. I remembered Andy Hayward's little smile when we finalised the sale of the garage. I wondered what I was going to do, and I discovered that I didn't care very much.
     Seven years ago, Karen and I had been living on the top floor of an Islington townhouse that had been converted, not very expertly, into three flats. The couple immediately below us had been going through the world's noisiest divorce, and the ground floor flat belonged to a young woman who had mentioned, just in passing, that she was a practicing Satanist. I was working late shifts at Reuter's, and Karen was just making a name for herself illustrating children's books. We saw each other, if we were lucky, one evening in four.
     And one Bank Holiday we drove down to Exeter to visit some friends of Karen's, and on the way back she noticed we were getting a bit light on petrol, so she pulled off the A303 and followed the 'Local Services' sign, and eventually we found ourselves on the forecourt of a little garage with a For Sale notice in the office window.
     And while Andy Hayward topped up the car I got out to stretch my legs and was confronted by one of the most peaceful, idyllic village scenes I had ever encountered.
     And I lost my mind.
     "I hate to see a man drink alone," said Harvey, standing at the other side of the table and grinning down at me.
     "I'm not drinking yet."
     "I hate to see a man not drinking yet alone," he said.
     I smiled. "Everyone says that about you." I watched him pull up a chair and sprawl into it. "How are you?"
     "Wonderful," he said with some irony, searching his pockets and finally coming up with a lighter and a tin of small cigars. "I spent this morning shovelling frogs."
     "You too?" My part of the village had only caught the edge of the squall, but I'd still had to hose the front path clear of burst little bodies.
     He lit a cigar and sat back in his chair. "Still, beats snow, I guess." Harvey was from a little town outside Oshkosh, in Northern Wisconsin, and if he'd had enough beer to get nostalgic he would wax lyrical about his late father having to use a snow-blower just to reach his garage during the Winter.
     "Or cats and dogs," I reminded him
     His eyes widened. "Yeah," he said. "That was bad, wasn't it?"
     "It was an unusual couple of days," I admitted.
     "Had that guy on the roof again last night, too," he told me.
     I shrugged. Springheel Jack was, quite frankly, getting boring. By now most of the village had experienced the joy of being woken abruptly by the sound of long fingernails rattling on their slates in the wee small hours.
     "At least he's harmless," I said. "People have started leaving a bottle of beer and a plate of sandwiches out for him at night."
     "Yes. Right." Harvey pulled a sour face. "That's just what this place needs. A drunken paranormal phenomenon scrambling around on the rooftops scarfing down cheese and pickle sandwiches. That's really going to do wonders for property prices."
     "Property prices are going through the roof," I told him. "I was talking to Barry Vickers the other day; he says people are queuing up to buy property here."
     "Yes, but those people all believe that the Mayans colonised Mars and that aliens are abducting loggers in the Pacific Northwest and sticking silicon chips up their noses. I don't want people like that for neighbours, no thank you."
     "Barry reckons he could get half a million quid for my house."
     He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?"
     "Yeah." I couldn't believe he hadn't heard any of this.
     "Something's going on," Domino said, coming back from the bar empty-handed. "Hello, Harvey."
     "Hi," Harvey said.
     "Where's my drink?" I asked.
     "The journalists are leaving," said Domino.
     Harvey and I looked at each other. Now Domino mentioned it, I could hear cars and vans starting up outside. Harvey raised an eyebrow.
     "Oh no," I groaned. "It's much too nice a day."
     He leaned forward and plucked at my sleeve. "C'mon, Geoffrey. You look like a man who needs an adventure."
     "I have all the adventure I need in my front room."
     He pulled my sleeve again, grinning. "C'mon."

The convoy wound its way slowly out of the village and into the sweltering countryside, a line of about fifteen vehicles headed by a converted double-decker bus spray-painted with huge dahlias.
     "Who the hell are they?" Harvey asked, pointing up ahead at the bus.
     "Druids," said Domino.
     Harvey glanced in the rear-view mirror to see if Domino was keeping a straight face.
     "They've been coming over here from Stonehenge since last Wednesday," I said. "The fields between here and there are full of them."
     Harvey looked bemused. "My goodness," he said. "Has there been any action at Stonehenge?"
     "Not a peep," Domino said.
     I closed my eyes and leaned back until my head was against the seat's rest. "Imagine their disappointment."
     "It's a very localised phenomenon," said Domino.
     "It's starting to get on my tits," Harvey said. "You know, this morning, while we were clearing frogs, this Space Cruiser pulled up with all these guys with video cameras in it."
     I nodded. Space Cruisers containing guys with video cameras had become about as unusual in Seldon as Springheel Jack.
     "None of them spoke more than a couple of words of English," Harvey went on. "Turned out they were Uzbeks. Uzbeks. I mean, do Uzbeks even have television?"
     "Of course they do," said Domino.
     "Yeah, other people's television. I meant television of their own."
     "Uzbekistan has quite a muscular little press association these days, actually," Domino told him.
     I opened my eyes. In front of us, the thirteen-strong Polish television contingent had somehow crammed themselves and all their equipment into their rented Espace. Through their rear window, I could see what appeared to be a heated argument going on.
     "They wanted rooms," Harvey said, voice rising indignantly. "They thought the House was a hotel. Imagine that."
     There was a brief silence in the Range Rover, while we all imagined it. Finally, Domino said, "It does look a little like an hotel, you have to admit."
     "Yeah," Harvey grumped. "Well." He honked the horn a couple of times, and the Poles in the back seat of the Espace turned round and flipped us the finger. Harvey shook his head. "That's the Polacks, right?" Harvey had inherited, from the Czech side of his family, a congenital dislike of Poles.
     At Three-Mile Post we left Seldon territory and briefly found ourselves driving across Jim Dawes's land. On either side of the road Jim's cornfields dipped and rose towards a shimmering tree-and-hedge-lined horizon arched over by a white-hot sky.
     At the crest of Sefton Hill a small riot of people was spilling out across the road. Harvey drove us past the dozens of parked vehicles and down the other side of the hill until there was space to park. Then we walked back up to the crowd.
     Sefton Hill was said to command the most aesthetic vista in the area, a great even expanse of gently rolling fields and hills that vanished into an uncertain and vaguely mystical heat-distorted distance peppered with tumuli and standing stones and the occasional long barrow. It was so popular with tourists that every Summer Jim Dawes strategically positioned a little van in the lay-by selling strawberries and pots of honey.
     "I love this," said Harvey when we reached the top of the hill, looking at the view he had inherited from the English side of his family.
     All around us, the World's Press were aiming their cameras into the middle distance. In the middle of one of Jim's cornfields the crop had been crushed down to form a complex geometrical shape, like a deformed star.
     "It wasn't here last night," I heard one of the CNN team say behind us. "We were out here till ten, eleven o'clock shooting the Evening Show, and I swear it wasn't there then."
     Harvey was looking at the star-shape and shaking his head. "That's amazing, you have to admit," he said.
     "It's a fake," someone said beside me.
     I turned my head and saw that, without my noticing, a short young woman with very long brown hair had moved in between Domino and me. "Beg pardon?"
     "It's a hoax," she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a baggy washed-out Harlequins rugby shirt. She wasn't a villager because I'd never seen her before, which these days would have suggested she was either a journalist or a sightseer, but she didn't seem to be carrying any journalistic equipment and she didn't have the blissed-out look of so many sightseers. "Some students from the London School of Economics came down here last night and did it with some bits of wood and a couple of lengths of clothesline."
     Domino looked down at her and frowned. "Why would they do that?" he asked politely.
     "Because I paid them to," she said without looking at either of us.
     "That's very interesting," Domino said gravely.
     She nodded. "Any idiot can make those things." She looked up at me. "I'm Pauline Niven. You're Karen Baxter's husband, aren't you?"

"I wanted to prove that you can't believe everything you see," she said. "You can't look at a crop circle and just assume it was made by little green men."
     "We have Green Men here too," Domino put in. I nudged him to be quiet.
     I said to Pauline, "Unless you really want to be lynched by a couple of hundred journalists and scientists and assorted sightseers, I wouldn't mention this to anybody else."
     "That's the problem, you see?" she said. "Everybody's just gone completely crazy over this place."
     Crop circles - real and fake - were two a penny around Seldon; we had left Sefton Hill before the press pack got bored and caused a mini rush-hour, and Harvey had driven us back to The Black Bull, where we had been able to get a table and something to eat in the snug. Pauline was sitting opposite me, virtually vibrating with nervous energy, a glass of orange juice clasped in her fist.
     "The food in here's getting real strange," Harvey commented, returning from the food counter and sitting down at our table. He put down his plate of chicken tikka and wild rice and poked it suspiciously with his fork. "When I first came here, the only thing Betty served was steak sandwiches and fries - sorry," he added for our benefit. "Chips." He thought about it for a moment. "And fried onion rings." He looked at us. "You know, I miss fried onion rings." I glanced at Pauline. She was staring at Harvey with a bemused expression on her face.
     "It's the journalists," Domino said. "Betty thinks she should have something a bit more exotic than chips and steak sandwiches and onion rings for her new clientele."
     Harvey nodded sadly. "These do not appear to be people who would be impressed by a Ploughman's Lunch, it is true. And your apology is accepted," he added to me.
     "What apology?"
&nbs