Parallax View (7 page)

“Something’s going on,” she said. The Gargoyles were strapping great belts of twisted liana around the mounds of blubber. Soon, every one of them was harnessed and teams of Gargoyles lined up to haul on the straps.

Instantly, a chorus of wails broke through the air,

The things started to move, slithering across the gravel, lubricated by their own seeping body juices.

“How long before they invent the wheel?” Tanya muttered darkly, at Corrie’s shoulder.

They followed them. There was something gruesomely compelling about the spectacle.

They had to find out what was happening, Corrie told herself. They had to understand this world if they were to survive.

The first of the haulage teams reached the river. They waded through, and soon their harnessed charge followed, half-floating in the thick water.

They emerged on the near side, and set out at a grindingly slow pace along the trail Corrie and her companions had followed the previous day.

The journey took most of the day. Deneb hung low and red in the evening sky by the time the first team of Gargoyles entered the clearing of standing stones.

They stopped by one of the stones, and suddenly it was a free-for-all, with Gargoyles swarming over their stupefied charges.

“It’s not cannibalism,” said Corrie, slowly, as the women looked on in horror. “They’re fucking the things.”

“You mean...”

“This is how they treat their females,” Corrie said, and it all started to fall into place. “The males are migratory, the things we’ve been calling Gargoyles. Every winter they head south, and every spring they return to the northern breeding grounds.”

“And the females,” Rachel said, “spend the winter underground. The males dig them up, fatten them up–”

“They must give birth some time,” Tanya said. “We saw children at the last colony.”

“Then they bring them back to the burial grounds, impregnate them and bury them again for the winter. The females pupate underground and then, when it’s time to go through the breeding cycle, they emerge again.”

“And that’s why they took us in!” said Tanya. “When they came back to their burial ground, instead of the reincarnated females they had expected, they found strange-looking humans around the empty pits – just as if we’d hatched out! We looked weird, but we were about the right size and we had the right number of limbs...”

Corrie looked at her companions. “And if they’ve reached this stage here, then this is what’s going to happen further south, too,” she said. “Up here we’re further through the cycle, but soon...” She stopped, staring at the others.

“We have to go back and get the men out,” Rachel said.

Tanya shook her head. “They made their choice,” she said. “They chose to stay there, even if it meant turning us away for fear that we’d threaten their pampered existence. It was them who cast us out, every bit as much as the Gargoyles had. And now they have to pay the consequences.”

“But we can’t just leave them to... to
that
,” Corrie said.

“We’ve seen that you were right about conditions further north,” said Tanya. “Already there’s more water available, the oils in the fruits are less intense. The storms are milder, too. If we stay up here we have every chance of surviving until the
Darwinian
returns. I say we go on.”

A vote. After all this time of unspoken consensus between the four women, Tanya was calling a vote.

“We have to go back,” said Corrie.

Rachel nodded quickly.

They turned to Sue who, in turn, looked at Tanya.

Tanya slumped. “Okay,” she conceded. “I bow to the consensus. We go back, and if we get there in time we rescue the sons of bitches.”

They pushed themselves hard, knowing that every hour gained might be the hour before the Gargoyles went into rut and dragged their breeding stock out to the standing stones.

They reached the second Gargoyle colony in step with the advancing season: as they approached, they heard the anguished wails of bloated females being hauled from their growing chambers for their final journeys.

The women didn’t pause. They kept going, trying to put the awful sound as far behind them as possible.

“We have to speed up,” said Corrie, over and over, mostly to herself.

She tried and tried, but couldn’t work out how they might rescue the men, who would almost certainly be too drugged and bloated to move.

She was realistic enough to know that they could never hope to rescue all nine. But even if they only managed to rescue one or two, that would be something. The expedition had been a complete disaster, but five or six survivors was better than four.

How would they decide who to rescue, she pondered over and again? It would almost certainly be dictated by chance, she knew. Even if chance dictated it to be Rube, though?

They would have made it, if it hadn’t been for the storm.

Almost delirious with fatigue, hunger and thirst, the four women marched south into the territory of the first Gargoyle colony.

Corrie didn’t recognise it, but her comms decal told her that they were close. Over and over, she tried to comm the men, but there was no response. Either they were too late already, or the men were simply too blitzed to respond.

And now another dry storm was kicking up, and her decal was snowstorming with static, making any communication impossible.

The sky was alive with sheets of blue lightning, the air fizzing with electricity. There was a sudden blast, and Corrie staggered, somehow stayed on her feet.

She smelt smoke.

The lightning had struck a nearby tree and now its oily sap was sizzling, small flames lapping around its trunk, fingering their way into its oily crevices, finding sustenance, spreading, leaping higher.

“Come on,” Corrie gasped, her dry throat aching. Rachel and Sue looked ready to collapse. Their faces were hollowed with hunger, their eyes shadowed and sunken. Corrie and Tanya exchanged glances, then each took hold of one of their companions and half-supported, half-dragged them away from the spreading fire.

They managed, but a short distance ahead another wall of flames cut across the trail.

Fire ahead, fire behind. They were trapped.

Tanya was smacking the back of her wrist, as if that would free her comms decal of interference from the storm.

Suddenly, Corrie recognised their surroundings. She put a hand on Tanya’s arm, and gestured through the trees to her left.

“A river,” she mouthed. She remembered Rube’s invitation:
Come on, Corrie. What have you got to hide?
She remembered him stripping off, the obscene growths of plaques cut off in a neat line where the waistband of his pants had been. The lily-white flesh below, the bulbous lumps of his genitalia waving about, half-engorged, below, as he advanced on her.
Come on, babe. We’re just two humans together.
Meaty hands reaching out towards her as Corrie found herself rooted to the spot. Fingers hooked inside the fastening at the front of her shirt, pulling downwards, scaly skin brushing her flesh.
What have you got to lose, babe?
And then it was over. She’d backed away, cried something at him, and he’d laughed and backed into the river.

Fucking dyke
, he’d called her, then, and side-stroked out into the open water.

Now, Tanya and Corrie dragged their two companions through the trees to the river and plunged in. The water revived Rachel and Sue, and the four women waded farther out. Corrie leaned forward into the water’s oily embrace, gave herself to it, breaststroked out into the middle and turned to watch the forest burn.

They found the abandoned settlement in the early hours of the next day. The Gargoyle males must have either perished in the inferno, or set off, already, on their southward migration.

What, then, of their honorary ‘females’?

The others were too exhausted to go on, but Corrie had to see. She forced herself along the trail. One foot, then the other, then the first again. Every step a victory over weariness and starvation.

Suddenly there were standing stones all around her. She must have been on autopilot, just one step, then another.

She looked around.

No sign of the Gargoyles. No sign that anything had happened here. She made her way to the nearest stone.

The pit wasn’t there.

Or rather ... it had been filled, covered over.

She turned through 360 degrees, bewildered, trying to get her bearings. Took one staggering step, and suddenly the ground gave way beneath her foot and she was plunging downwards.

But her landing was soft, yielding.

She was lying perhaps two metres below ground level, the dim sunlight picking out the chamber’s walls, glistening viscously.

She tried to move, but she was enfolded in the same soft, yielding substance that comprised the walls of the pit. She sank back into its sticky embrace, laughing feebly.

Something caught her eye, then, glinting in the morning light. She reached out, hooked a finger round a sliver of metal, a chain. A necklace, with a horn of plenty pendant suspended from it. Rube’s chain...

She sank back in the gloop.

She didn’t know what they did to their females to liquefy them like this; it must be part of the preservation process, she supposed. Rube would have had an explanation.

Her stomach was grumbling, digestive juices burning deep in her belly. At least, she thought, Rube still had a useful part to play in the expedition, after all.

She raised her comm to her lips. “Rachel...” she began.

Weakly, Tanya replied, “Corrie, where are you?”

Corrie smiled to herself, said, “Tanya, I think we’re going to be okay.”

And then she opened her mouth and let the first of the sweet, bloody meat seep in...

Appassionata

Mae Chang brought her hands down on the last chord of “Appassionata” and hung her head over the keyboard – drained, as ever, by the sonata which had become most closely identified with her playing. As the notes died in the vast auditorium the silence was replaced by the nebulous roar of applause.

Moving on autopilot, Mae stood, stepped forward and dropped a bow to the faceless audience, her arms hanging loose like those of a marionette. A blonde girl, only a few years younger than Mae herself, pranced forward, primly erect, with a bouquet of red roses. The ovation increased.

Trying to ignore the facial perfection of the girl – a mere fourteen or fifteen and already she had been surgically beautified – Mae hoisted the bouquet like a trophy and performed another bow.

She could take no more.

She rushed off-stage, holding back the tears. The crowd would think she was being modest: lovely Mae Chang, refusing to bask in the glory. She hated them all.

Anton Selig was waiting in the wings. She let him hug her, ignoring his gush of superlatives. When she tried to pull free, his hands moved to her shoulders, turned her. “They want you, Mae, darling,” he said. “They need you.”

She let him propel her back on-stage to receive her ovation.

She dropped her head and waited for it to end. After the sublimity of the Beethoven, she must confront this charade, this mindless adulation of her so-called genius. She knew the audience did not, as Anton claimed, love her: what they loved was their own appreciation of what they were told was great music. This specious love – from the audience, from her manager, from the media and all the attendant sycophants – served only to point up the fact of her loneliness.

This time when she hurried off she brushed past Anton, past the gawping stagehands, the groupies and the snapping paparazzi. By the time she reached her dressing room she was running.

She slammed the door behind her, exhausted and, at the same time, curiously excited. Now she could look forward to a reprieve of three weeks before Paris, Milan and New York. She would practise as it suited her and, for the first time in eighteen months, she would take a holiday.

Three weeks’ respite.

Her tears had dried by the time a tentative rap sounded on the door.

“Yes?”

Anton edged in, burdened with flowers. Two men, one a cameraman, accompanied him. She let them record her removing her make-up, going through the cards attached to the flowers. After a short, non-penetrative interview, the cameraman left.

The other man remained. She had assumed he was with the cameraman. She studied him more closely now: small and grey-suited, a trim moustache at odds with a long grey pony-tail, he stood confidently before her.

“Mae,” said Anton. “I’d like you to meet Conrad Ventori.”

“Ms Chang. An exhilarating performance.” Ventori took her hand, kissed it. Mae squirmed at the intimacy.

Anton opened a carton of Moët et Chandon, then one of Diet Coke for Mae. “Signor Ventori has a fascinating business proposition to put to you – one which I feel we should consider quite closely.”

Ventori leaned casually against the wall, although Mae realised that there was little about this man which could be described as “casual”.

“I represent the multimedia arm of PK Syntronics. Our labels include Galaxy, Romulus, Beatle, Indotron – I expect you are aware of us?”

Mae was careful to keep a blank expression on her face, standard camouflage. The unthinkingly racist newsgroups liked to describe her cultivated blank responses as “inscrutable”.

“I am already under contract,” she told him. Why was Anton wasting her time like this?

“Please, Mae,” said her manager. “Give Signor Ventori a few minutes of your time.”

Ventori continued, untroubled by Mae’s attempted rudeness. “I understand from your manager that you have a break before you next perform in Paris. PKS would like to extend our hospitality by proposing that you take a week’s working holiday at our facility near Périgueux in the Dordogne. Your manager confirms that it does not contravene your arrangement with Sony-EMI.”

Mae looked from Ventori to her manager. “A ‘working holiday’?” She loaded the phrase with all the sarcasm she could muster. In the mirror she saw that, without make-up, she looked like a petulant child.

“Many of our artistes use the Chateau d’Arouet. It is well-equipped and secluded. I guarantee that in your time there you will not be hounded by the paparazzi and other filth of today’s sorry world. Indeed, one of our artistes – something of a prodigy – will be sharing the facilities with you. We would be very interested in seeing the two of you working together.”

Anton leaned forward. “Two hundred thousand Euros just for your time,” he said.

Mae was aware of Anton’s restraint. He would say no more – he knew just how far to push her – but he wanted that money. Two hundred thousand Euros meant nothing to Mae, but the seclusion Ventori offered was seductive.

“Okay,” she said, and turned away, determined to retain her cool facade. “I need a break – I will do it.”

It was only later that she asked herself,
Do
what,
exactly?

She woke in her room, secure in the heart of the Chateau d’Arouet.

As soon as PKS’s Corsair had landed at Limoges the previous evening she had felt a sense of peace – of safety – descending. She had spent the flight from Helsinki cocooned under a headset, playing Sectrix, listening to various music stations – they were all playing tracks from the new Lennon album at the moment – and, just to remind herself of the awfulness of the world, watching the various news channels. Famine in China and most of Africa; human rights groups protesting in Brussels about the introduction of a new law sanctioning the “psychological adjustment” of the criminally insane; civil war in any number of cities that all looked alike in their ruination; the Pacific states panicking about the rising seas.

A polite young French woman had greeted her and led her through the airport building – no cameras, no armed guards, only a few sudden looks of recognition – and into an unmarked company car which was to take her the remaining seventy kilometres to the chateau.

The Dordogne was beautiful in a way that the most beautiful places, with their souvenir shops and cafeterias, their holiday parks and congestion, had long ceased to be. The wooded hills were cloaked in the sun’s gold as they drove to the chateau that evening, a sight she would treasure, so untainted by modernity.

The chateau itself was an ugly mix of the new and the old, but its clearly visible security was reassuring: the guards at the gate, the high wall patrolled by dogs with sensor-packs mounted across their shoulders. In a world as volatile as today’s, the rich took such protection for granted.

She slept well that night, and woke ready for whatever the day would bring.

She was surprised to see Ventori when she was shown down to the breakfast room. Her facade must have slipped, for he smiled and said, “I am on a working holiday also.” He paused, then went on. “You have complete freedom of the chateau, although I caution you not to go too close to the perimeter wall: the dogs are programmed to stay within ten metres of it, and to apprehend any human who enters that zone. It gives us peace of mind.

“If you wish to explore – the cathedral at Périgueux might interest you, or perhaps the caves at Lascaux – then a car will take you. All we require is that you work for two hours of each day.”

She nodded, then sipped at the lapsang souchong she had requested. “What work is it that you ‘require’?” she asked. “Am I to teach your prodigy?” She suspected she had been brought here to teach the marginally talented child of one of PKS’s directors. The rich seemed unable to put aside the naive belief that talent was a commodity to be bought and sold.

She wanted to ask more, but she held back, as ever; any betrayal that she was interested or curious was a sign of weakness, one that would always be seized by those around her.

Ventori finished wiping his mouth on a napkin, then said, “When you are ready, Ms Chang, I will introduce you to Jonathan Graves. He has a phenomenal gift for composition and he has reached the stage where his current work should be performed by a virtuoso. If it is satisfactory, and if you are in agreement, then I am certain that it can be arranged for you to record this work.”

Mae said nothing. She sipped at her tea, then meticulously stripped the flesh from a segment of cantaloupe melon. Let them wait. If she must spend two hours a day with some gauche, talentless composer – far worse than mere tutoring – then they could damn well wait.

Ventori paused in the corridor by a pair of doors. “Ms Chang,” he said. “Jonathan is a genius. But he has been... rather
confused
of late. His behaviour can sometimes be a little erratic.”

He released her arm and pushed ahead of her through the door on the left. The sound of a piano – hesitant and somehow constrained – rose up as Mae followed Ventori into the room.

It was furnished in the style of an old-fashioned drawing room, with over-stuffed settees and armchairs, dark oil paintings, dowdy statues of Greek gods. At the far end of the room, before full-length picture windows overlooking the lawn, was a grand piano. A man in his late thirties or early forties sat before the keyboard. From time to time he turned to a small table at his side to scribble notes on a big pad.

Mae shook her head. The term “prodigy” had implied someone younger, perhaps even younger than herself.

They stood for several minutes while Jonathan Graves ignored them.

Mae watched as his large fingers found the notes with the lazy ease of a natural – if somewhat limited – player. He worried at a particular phrase over and over, as if he was not happy with it.

If that was the case, then at least his judgement was sound, Mae decided. He should be writing tracks for shampoo commercials.

When he was ready, he placed his pen with a flourish and twisted to appraise his visitors with a fierce look. “Yes?” he snapped.

There was something peculiar about him, but Mae could not quite place it. His face was long, his dark hair greying at the temples. It was his eyes, she realised: their watery, slightly glazed look, his rapid blinking – almost a tic – serving to betray his facade of hostility. Mae smiled. She knew all about hiding behind facades.

Ventori was not perturbed by Jonathan’s response. “Mr Graves,” he said. “I’d like to introduce Mae Chang. Ms Chang wishes to learn your music. Mae, this is Jonathan Graves.”

From his sitting position, Graves stared up at Mae. Finally, he nodded. His peculiar mixture of aggression and confusion gave him the air of someone suffering some kind of mental illness. “You...” He stopped himself, seeming to change his mind. “I am pleased to meet you,” he said. “Dr Ventori tells me that you play the piano.”

She had been right: only a psychiatric patient could not have heard of Mae Chang.

“A little,” she said, and smiled again. This week might prove diverting after all, she decided.

“In that case... I am in the process of putting the finishing touches to a piano sonata. Perhaps you would care to try it out?”

“I’ll leave you in peace,” said Ventori. He opened the full-length window and stepped outside.

Mae watched his retreating figure as he headed across the lawns. She turned as Graves started to fuss through a stack of manuscript pages torn from the large pad.

“It’s here, it’s
here
,” he said, getting increasingly irate when he failed to find a particular sheet. “Ha!” He waved a page in the air, then placed the complete manuscript on the piano. He shuffled along the piano stool, then patted the space he had created. “Sit down,” he said. “Let me hear how good you are.”

There was barely room for the two of them, but Graves made no sign of moving any farther. Mae sat, her thigh pressed against the Englishman’s. She stared at the manuscript, trying to decipher the haphazard scrawl.

She struck the first chord and instantly felt the recoil in Graves’s body next to hers. “No!” he cried. “
Pianissimo
. Can you not read manuscript?”

She said nothing, simply started again, more softly. Graves shook his head but allowed her to continue.

“No, no!” he cried again, barely two bars in. He turned to her, his face so close she could feel the breath on her cheeks. “Your wrists, your hands – you’re too stiff. Here–” he took one of her hands and caressed it between both of his “–your fingers should be loose and relaxed, not stiff like a donkey’s dick!”

She snatched her hand away, stared down at the keyboard.

He was chuckling. “Good,” he said. “Very good. Passion. Now play my sonata!”

This time he sat back and let her play it all the way through. When she had finished she sat quietly, like an academy schoolgirl waiting for her next lesson.

“You play it quite well,” Graves acknowledged at last. He seemed less sure of himself now. “Can I beg your professional opinion?”

She smiled. “It ... resonates,” she said. She was relieved when he interpreted this as approval. She had been promised a prodigy, a man blessed with a phenomenal gift. Jonathan Graves’ only gift was for imitation, pastiche. Elements of Haydn, of Mozart and, more than anything, of Beethoven. His only originality was to be probably the only composer producing early Romantic music in the twenty-first century. Jonathan was skilful – at times astonishingly so – and demonstrably passionate about his music, but he was little more than a copyist, a hack.

She wondered why PK Syntronics should spend their time and money on a man who was little better than a plagiarist?

She left him staring out of the windows.

In the corridor she hesitated, then opened the door next to Jonathan’s. The room it revealed was painted white. Set into the facing wall was a large picture-screen on which Mae could see the drawing room, Jonathan seated at the piano, playing a simple three-note phrase over and over, over and over.

Ventori was alone in the viewing room, seated in a recliner, staring out at Graves over steepled fingers. He looked up in surprise, then opened his mouth to speak. Before he could utter a sound, Mae shut the door and headed for her room.