Tomorrow’s World (22 page)

“Can I swap your father's copy for mine?” I asked. I'd read
the
book from cover to cover without finding any answers, but I hadn't read
Doug's
book. None of the words or pictures had jumped out at me, but maybe there was something in Doug's copy that wasn't in mine: dog-earing that marked out the last section he'd read, a well-thumbed page indicating a passage he kept coming back to, or even some notes scribbled in a margin.

Annie looked puzzled by my request. But, after I explained, she nodded and said, “We can go up to my apartment and pick it up now.”

When we got there Annie used her deformed hand to steady the pile of books stacked in the corner of her living room, and her good hand to extricate the volume that matched mine. “No marker or dog-eared pages,” she said, examining the book as she came over to join me on the sofa.

“That would be too much to hope for,” I said.

The only unprinted marks on the first few pages were those left by time and dampness. However Annie, who was sitting to my right, stopped with the next page half turned. I gently finished turning it for her so I could see what had grabbed her attention. I spotted it right away: a sentence in the second paragraph was underlined with a pencil mark that looked like it had been drawn days rather than decades ago.

We both leaned over the table to read the sentence, but it just described the association between fungal hyphae, whatever that was, and cells that facilitated photosynthesis. I couldn't imagine it was anything to get too excited about, even if lichens were the sort of thing you found exciting. “Turn the page,” I said, filled with a horrible premonition of what I was about to see.

Sure enough: more underlined sentences.

Annie flicked through a couple of dozen pages, and there were sentences underlined on almost every one. Her excitement replaced by disappointment, she said, “The underscoring hardly narrows it down at all—there's way too much of it. Dad was probably picking out key points for his thesis.”

“He always did a thesis when he read a book?”

She nodded. “And he scanned the book in to the database. He needed all the credit he could get to buy water for his plants.”

Something occurred to me, and I said, “Can I see the book, please?”

“Help yourself.”

I took the slender volume from her and opened it at the centrefold. There were underscores on virtually every page. I raised a hand to my jaw and rubbed my goatee, like I often do when I'm trying to work something out.

“What is it?” Annie asked.

“Your dad had obviously read at least half the book, and yet there was no record of any chapters on the Ecosystem database. I don't know about you, but I find it tedious sitting at my computer, turning page after page and holding it up to the screen to scan it in, so I never wait until I've finished reading the whole book; I scan each chapter in after I've read it. Everyone I know does pretty much the same thing. If your dad did likewise, I'd expect to find at least a couple of chapters in the database.”

“I'm afraid I was never around when Dad was doing stuff like that, so I don't know how he went about it.”

I made a mental note to check how Doug had input his previous books. There would be a record of whether each was entered in one continuous period, or in the normal fashion of one or two chapters at a time. If Doug had worked the same way as everyone else, the opening chapters of
Lichens and Mosses of the World
would have been added to the Ecosystem database—and their absence from it might mean someone had deleted them. I had absolutely no idea who would want to do such thing, and even less idea why they'd want to do it. It was hard to believe the moldy old botanical book contained something that anyone found remotely threatening… But it wasn't impossible to believe, the way it would have been if the first few chapters of the book had been on the database, and if Doug MacDougall had been standing behind the counter of The Plant Place rather than pushing up the daisies, as they used to say. All of this was making me keener than ever to discover the last thing he'd read.

Then I had an idea of how I might find it. I flicked through the pages again, this time beginning at the back. There were no pencil marks on the last six or eight pages. Picking up on my mounting excitement, Annie said, “What are you looking for?”

“I'm just hoping your dad hadn't finished reading the book.”

“Why?”

“Because if he hadn't, there's a good chance the last underline will show us the final thing he read.”

“Whatever it was he was so excited about, in other words.”

I nodded.

Annie drew closer to me. I used the pad of my left thumb to hold the bulk of the pages back, and the tip of my right thumb to pull them loose one at a time. My excitement grew with every page that didn't have a pencil mark on it, and I sensed Annie's did, too.

Finally, about two-thirds of the way through the book, I came to a couple of underlined sentences—the last passage Doug MacDougall had marked out. The words were below a photograph of a rock covered in some sort of bright yellow growth which, given the title of the book, was presumably a lichen or moss. If I had any doubt these were the words which made such an impact on Doug, it was dispelled by the three exclamation marks penciled at the end of the underscored passage.

Annie must have been a little short-sighted because she asked, “What does it say?”

I read out the passage: “Immaculata solaris, pictured above, has no common name because it is not commonly known, living only in the most extreme of alpine environments. Studies show it to be remarkable due to more than its vivid color and hardiness, for it is not part of any food chain—it does not feed on anything but sunlight, and nothing feeds on it.”

“That's it?” Annie said, her bafflement matching my own.

I answered with a nod after looking at the next page; there was a photo of something else, and no more underscoring.

I turned back to the photo of
immaculata solaris,
and re-read the words beneath it. If they had any great significance, I couldn't see what it was.

“Does that mean any more to you than it does to me?” Annie asked.

I shook my head and said, “I'm sorry.”

“Where do we go from here?”

I couldn't bring myself to tell her I was at a dead end, that this was my only lead and I couldn't follow it any further. So I said, “I'm not sure, Annie.”

She glanced at her i-band and said, “I better get back—I've got a class in five minutes.” She stood up and I did likewise. “Do you want to take Dad's copy of the book with you?” she asked.

I didn't see the point, but returning it to her would be an admission I was giving up. Annie MacDougall deserved better than that, as did her father. So I took the book back to the station house with me.

Paula looked at her i-band pointedly. My lunch hour had probably lasted 61 minutes. “You're late, Travis,” she said.

That was it: all my frustration at the lead having petered out, and my bewilderment at the change in Paula's behavior between yesterday and today, boiled over. “How come I'm back to being ‘Travis'?” I asked. “What happened to ‘Ben'?”

“It's not appropriate.”

“So why was it appropriate for a little while yesterday? What's changed?”

She didn't answer.

“Are you going to pretend nothing happened in the library, that there wasn't some sort of chemistry between us?”

Her silence and inability to look me in the eye told me this was exactly what she intended doing.

“Damnit, Paula, how can you be so cold about it?”

“Because I'm a Number,” she said, bitterly, “and my head tells me love is an illusion, a weakness.”

“So how come there was no scorn or mockery in the way you looked at me yesterday when I was talking about Jen, or when you saw the way I'm starting to feel about you?”

“Because my heart tells me something very different from my head, and for a little while I listened to my heart,” she said. “Have you any idea how confusing it is to desperately want something, and yet at the same time believe that what you want isn't worth having?”

“Paula, have you ever been in love?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Then how can you believe it isn't worth having if you've never experienced it? I don't understand that.”

“That's the whole point. You can't understand, because you're not a Number. You don't think the same way we do. You're not genetically hard-wired like we are. You have an open mind.”

“But you came close to believing in love yesterday. I know you did.”

“Maybe being away from the community helped me forget who I am, what I am.”

“Maybe it let you be yourself. Maybe for the first time in your life you were starting to find out who you really are.”

“It's probably just that my surroundings were so unfamiliar they preoccupied my head and left my heart free to do its own thing… And during the storm, when I saw how much you cared about Jen, when I realized you were starting to care about me… I don't know. All I know is I felt like a different person for a little while yesterday. I felt like I imagine a Name must feel.”

“And now?”

“Now I feel foolish when I remember yesterday.”

And to think that until 24 hours ago I'd looked on Paula as being a Class-A ice maiden, a woman who was so together she wouldn't come apart in any circumstances. Especially not a set of circumstances like this. “Look,” I said, “don't you think it's at least worth giving things a—”

“These things never work out between Names and Numbers. We both know they always end badly.”

“But you're not like other Numbers.”

“And I'm not like a Name. I'm neither one thing nor the other, but I'm probably more like a Number than a Name, Travis… Ben. I don't even know what to call you. I just know there's no chance of things working out.

“You don't know that. You can't know that.”

“What I know is that listening to my heart, the way Names seem to, leaves me horribly confused. Listening to my head and trying to forget about my heart, like I'd always done until yesterday, makes life a whole lot simpler.”

“It might make life simpler, but I'm willing to bet it also makes it a lesser thing in some way. In every way. A pleasure's more than doubled if it's shared, Paula, and a burden is more than halved. Jen taught me that.

“Then I hope you find another Jen.”

“That's not how it works.”

“How does it work?”

“I don't know, I just know it does work; not always, but when it does it makes life come alive. I saw your life come alive yesterday, and it was a truly amazing thing to watch. And I felt my own life come alive, in a way I believed it never would again.”

For a moment I thought she was going to reach out for me, hold me, maybe kiss me. In that moment her eyes truly were windows into her soul, and I saw a longing as intense as my own.

But the moment passed, and her eyes became cold and so did her voice when she said, “I don't want to talk about this again, Travis. Not ever.” She swiftly changed the subject, pointing to the book I carried and saying, “Didn't MacDougall's daughter want to read it?”

I was so preoccupied by what we'd been talking about moments earlier that I couldn't work out what she meant now.

“You've brought the book back with you; did Annie MacDougall not want to—” she was interrupted by a call.

If the call had come a couple of minutes later—if I'd had a chance to explain to Paula about the book, to read out the last passage Doug MacDougall underlined—it would have changed everything. But the call came in before I could answer her question, and seconds later we were hurrying up in the lift to level seven, where a row had turned violent. It was between a Name and a Number, of course. It made Paula's point more eloquently than any words, but she didn't give me an ‘I told you so' look.

For once she looked like she'd rather have been wrong than right.

When we got back to the station house Paula did what I think of as the ‘paperwork,' even though paper is way too precious to be used for administrative tasks and everything's processed electronically. I suppose I've just seen one Olden Days cop show too many.

While Paula spoke to her screen, I used mine to check back on Doug MacDougall's contributions to The Search. I knew I wasn't likely to turn up any new leads, just add to the validity of the lead that had dried up, but I'd nothing better to do. And besides, I take a pride in never giving up until I have to. I think the fact we can't match Numbers in terms of logic drives us to outdo them in other areas, like sheer dogged determination. Most of the time all it leads to is weariness and frustration for us, and a mocking sneer from them. But occasionally it pays off and
we
get to sneer at
them.