17

IN OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, of course, I would have avoided at any cost letting the forces arrayed against me—I visualized them now as a kind of semi-submerged sea monster, whose vast tentacles kept breaking the surface in more and more remote places—know what I had discovered. But they almost certainly knew—or at least guessed—already. And by telling Graham about it, I was, I hoped, buying myself some protection. They obviously had access to my emails, and the subject, Evan Bone, would, I imagined, have automatically triggered an algorithm, and alerted someone to what I’d written. The beauty of it was that even Evan Bone couldn’t sue me for slander for something I’d said in a private message—especially if he could only have seen it by breaking the law. And it would make him aware that I had evidence against him, which—if he tried to silence me—would inevitably come out.

I knew, though, that it was a gamble. And, even if it worked, I assumed they would continue to flex their muscles, make their presence felt, as a reminder that, while I might temporarily have the upper hand, in the long term I couldn’t win. However hard I tried to cover my tracks, they would always be watching me—and if I were ever unwise enough to reveal what I knew, they had the means to destroy me.

But, in the event, it seemed I was wrong. No one followed me on my way to the bus station. I was able to buy a Greyhound ticket without difficulty. When we arrived in San Francisco, late in the evening, I phoned the hotel Ruth and I had stayed at—half expecting, the instant I mentioned my name, to be told they were full up. After I’d checked in, I asked if I could use their computer to book my flight? Sure, no problem. I selected a morning departure, and—with some trepidation—entered my credit card details and passport number. British Airways accepted them without demur, and cheerily wished me a pleasant trip.

Was it possible that Bone’s cohorts hadn’t seen my email to Graham after all? Or that—since Ruth had thrown me to the wolves—they’d felt I was so comprehensively discredited I was no longer a threat? Or was it, perhaps, simply that my ploy had worked better than I’d dare hope, and—for all their almost limitless power—they were genuinely rattled?

Whatever the explanation, if they intended to stop my returning to England, surely they would have done something before now? Once I was back on home ground, I’d have more resources to call on, and a better chance of being able to give them the slip. At the very least, it would buy me some time.

It was after nine when I finally got to my room. For days I had been—or imagined myself to be—under continuous surveillance. Now, as I closed the door, I was all at once acutely aware of my own aloneness. It wasn’t cold, but I shivered as if someone had whipped the clothes from my body. This was where Ruth and I had spent the first night of our journey together. Released from the need to keep looking over my shoulder, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of her absence. It was palpable, a negative charge that prickled the hairs on my arms. I couldn’t bear it.

I grabbed my jacket and went back downstairs.

On my way out into the street, I had to climb over a woman wrapped in a blanket who was trying to sleep in the doorway. Beyond her was the usual downtown San Francisco swirl of the homeless and the crazed, muttering, shouting, shaking fists, swerving into each other’s path and then lurching out again. I wove my way between them, trying to avoid eye contact, ignoring the fucks and bitches and Jesus Christs that might have been directed at me, or could just have been a spontaneous outpouring of rage and despair.

I was so tired that the barrier separating the waking and dreaming worlds was beginning to leak. As I walked, odd memories kept breaking in, like wayward radio signals. My mind started to create a kind of fairy tale, in which time took pity on us and decided to give Ruth and me another chance. The ancestors came to the fork. And most of them went this way, where the river’s wide. I’d go into the restaurant, order fajitas and a Baja IPA. A moment later, she’d appear, look round anxiously, relax when she saw me. Hi. Hi. She’d sit down. We’d re-run the conversation we’d had here before. And when we got to the point where she said, This is the first time in years life’s paid me a visit, I wouldn’t hedge my bets. I’d say, Yes, me too.

A man in a hoodie swayed in front of me. In the dimness, all I could see was the glint of his eyes and a ragged growth of dark stubble streaked with grey. He looked troubled, but too slight and scrawny—emaciated, even—to be dangerous. I was only a few yards from La Guadalajara now, and could easily just have side-stepped him and hurried inside. But I felt in my pocket and pulled out a few coins.

It’s like a kind of running tab. Paying off what you owe.

Another, older man in a threadbare overcoat suddenly swam into view like a surfacing shark. He lunged for the money, barging the hoodie guy’s shoulder and knocking him to the ground.

“Hey!” I yelled. But the overcoat had already disappeared in the mêlée. I looked down.

“Are you all right?”

The hoodie-man nodded. He levered himself to his feet.

“I’m afraid that’s all the change I had,” I said. I reached for my wallet. “But—”

“That’s OK.” He held a hand up: Put it away. I could see blood seeping from a roughed-up patch of skin on the palm.

I nodded and started towards the restaurant. As I passed him, he said,

“She’s not coming, man.”

I stopped. “What?”

“Last time I checked, couple hours ago, she was still back in Ohio, taking care of her sick mom.”

I squinted at him. “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

He said nothing, but turned to the light, so I could see him better. I riffled through the gallery of people I’d met in the past few weeks, laying their faces over his, trying to find a match: Richard Peake, Leonard Drew, Oak, Eric, Gerald Chess? The beard so completely hid his cheeks and jawline that it was difficult to be absolutely sure. But as far as I could tell, none of them fitted.

“Did she send you?” I said. “Ruth?”

He shook his head. Holding my gaze, he laid a trembling finger under his left eye, then moved it slowly to the right. Where have you seen these before? And I was suddenly back in the giant reception area at Global Village, cursing the huge picture of the t-shirted man with the ascetic stare.

“My God,” I said.

He nodded, made a sssh sign. For a moment, my mind ran completely out of control, unable even to formulate the question, What are you doing here?

“We need to move,” he said.

He glanced up, drawing my attention to a security camera. I pointed to the restaurant.

“Uh-uh. Not safe. I know a place.”

He set off towards the end of the street, then stopped and looked back when he realized I wasn’t following.

“Man, you think if I wanted you dead, I’d have come myself?”

We were there in less than five minutes: a narrow three-story redbrick building wedged between a food-and-liquor store and a laundromat. Light seeped through the blinded windows. Next to the door were four buzzers. Bone pressed the bottom one, then quickly stepped back.

“You’re Atchison,” he said.

“What?”

He reached inside his hoodie and brought out an envelope. “When she answers, you’re Atchison. Give her this.”

A woman opened the door. She was black, thirty-something, dressed for a swish evening out in high heels, tight-fitting white jeans and a slinky red blouse. She was beautifully made-up—bruise-colored lipstick; long curled lashes, like a doll’s—carrying a sparkly handbag over her arm.

“Hi. I’m Tasha. You Atchison?” She gave a slow, complicit smile. She was used to assumed names.

I nodded and handed her the envelope. She slit it open with a long fingernail and quickly counted the contents.

“OK. Where’s your friend?” She looked past me and saw Bone standing in the shadows behind me, head bowed to conceal his face. “Oh, I get it.”

Bone started to mumble something.

“Don’t worry, honey. I ain’t gonna tell your wife. None of my business what you do. Atchison here paid.” She stuffed the money in her bag, then tapped the small silver dress watch on her wrist. “Two hours, right?”

She stepped aside. We squeezed past her into the dimly-lit little hall. It had the drab, unloved feel of a common area that everyone uses and no one takes responsibility for, the air hazy with dust, the bare wooden staircase and floor scuffed and lusterless. There was a pervasive cloying smell—sweat and perfume and rubber—that seemed at odds with the impersonal chilliness of the place.

“It’s open,” the woman said, pointing to a door on the left. “Go right in. But be sure and lock it on the inside, OK? And anyone knocks or buzzes, don’t let them in.” She handed me a pair of keys. “And if you’re done before I’m back, leave these in the mailbox. I got a spare set.”

The entrance led directly into a small bedroom. Most of it was taken up by a double bed covered in a satiny bedspread, with a built-in alcove—a warren of drawers and little cupboards—surrounding the headboard. There was a puffy armchair, and a white-painted dressing table topped by a tall mirror. In one corner was a half-open door, through which I could see the edge of a kidney-shaped bathtub.

“Why here?” I said.

“Hookers don’t ask for ID. And they take cash.” He turned the key in the lock, then slipped off his hoodie and handed it to me. “Check it out.”

I patted the pockets. They were empty. He pulled out the pockets of his jeans and laid the contents—a tissue; a few coins; a wedge of folded paper—on the bed. Then he raised his t-shirt to show me that he wasn’t wearing a wire.

“OK?”

I nodded.

“How about you? You got a phone?”

I produced the latest incarnation of my mobile. In only a few seconds he’d thumbed off the back, removed the SIM card and the battery. He piled everything on the dressing table, then started pacing about the room like a dog in a strange house trying to find a place to settle.

“How did you know I’d be there?” I said. “Outside the restaurant?”

He shrugged. “TOLSTOY.”

“TOLSTOY can predict exactly where I’m going to be?”

“Sure,” he muttered. “To within 97 or 98 percent.” As though it were obvious and needed no further explanation. Then he caught my expression. My surprise surprised him. “It’s just an algorithm. Everywhere you been, you left clues. And TOLSTOY processes them, to figure out”—tapping his temple—“what’s going on in here. The story you’re telling yourself.”

I don’t believe that. But I don’t believe that was probably what TOLSTOY had told him I would say. So I just stared at him.

“And your story is all about lost causes, right? Old-fashioned journalism. Dead civilizations. Yellowing—is that a word? It’s the word TOLSTOY uses, anyway. Yellowing love-letters stuck in the pages of a book. So—why you looking at me that way?”

“Don’t you think that’s frightening?”

He thought about it for a moment, frowning, and jiggling his jaw back and forth.

“No, I don’t think it’s frightening. It’s just, you know . . .” He shrugged. “When you analyze it, there’s only a few kinds of stories. People just aren’t that smart. And they all want to feel good about themselves. So there’s the one where they make the world a better place. The one where they beat the bad guy. The one where they win the prize. The one where they get the girl—or get her back when they lost her.”

Anger flooded my cheeks. “What a pathetic species we are. But you, of course, are exempt.”

His frown deepened. He must know what the word exempt meant. But he was obviously struggling to understand how it applied to him.

“OK,” he said finally. “I get it. You’re mad at me.”

As if he’d only just managed to work it out and was proud of himself for having done it. His disconnectedness, his lack of awareness incensed me. I longed to drive something—a blade, a skewer—so deep into him that he couldn’t fail to feel the full ferocity of the pain.

“Mad isn’t really the word,” I said. Now that my rage had broken free, I couldn’t get it back in its cage. “You’re a horror to me. A nightmare, a complete fucking nightmare. You’ve got rich by exploiting the vilest bits of human nature. You’ve created a police state that would make”—I hesitated a fraction of second, then thought What the hell—“Stalin and Goebbels faint with envy. You’ve thrown me and God knows how many other people out of a job. You’ve driven God knows how many more people to suicide. Including”—Come on, rub his nose in it. Make him listen to their names—“Anne Grainger, Carter Ramirez, and Hazel Voss. You tortured Ruth Halassian into betraying me. You murdered your own girlfriend—”

He raised a hand: Enough.

He looked so pitiful and defenseless, all of a sudden, that I couldn’t go on. In the silence we heard muffled voices from upstairs—followed, an instant later, by a sharp crack, like a firework going off. He glanced up, startled. I could see the Adam’s apple working in his throat. Then he slumped on to the bed, as if his muscles had suddenly lost the power to keep him upright. Even though the room was stuffy, he was still shivering. He scuffled up a corner of the bedspread and tugged it around his shoulders. His fingernails, I noticed, were gnawed to the quick, leaving a tidewrack of bloody skin. With his free hand he reached for the paper he’d taken from his pocket and unfolded the top sheet. For a moment he looked at it, like a man consulting a map to see where he should go next. Then he laid it down again and pointed at me.

“I didn’t do this right.” His eyes drooped shut, he shook his head. “What I’m trying to say is, we ought to be friends.”

I gawped at him.

“OK, OK,” he said. “Let’s start—” He paused. “I know you been there, right? Coyote Fork.” Another pause. “You seen the pictures. But I’m telling you, man. You. Have. No. Idea.” He swung his legs on to the bed, then drew them up and hugged them, like a child clutching a comfort blanket. “Like the rain. The mud. There’s months when the only way in or out is the Red Dragon. And who gets to use the Red Dragon? Whoever my dad says can use it. The people that go along with what he wants. OK, Hambone, you got it. We’ll build here. We’ll kill the cow. And you want to fuck my old lady, feel free, man.”

He was starting to sound more rational. Apart from a couple of snippets from news conferences, I’d never heard him speak before. But something about his delivery seemed half-familiar, like a parody of someone else’s voice. While I was trying to work out who it was, there was another whip-crack from upstairs. Bone winced, as if he had been on the receiving end of it.

“The one exception to the rule,” he said, “was Birch Ogren. He didn’t need the Red Dragon. ’Cause if he couldn’t drive, he’d come in on a chopper.” He shivered again. His eyes refocused on something I couldn’t see. “This one time, I guess I must’ve been eleven or twelve, I thought maybe I’d get a ride out by grabbing on to one of the skids when he was leaving. But then I did the calculation. Even at ten thousand feet, I’d be dead from hyperthermia before we reached Bel Air.”

He glanced towards me. But he wasn’t inviting a response, just checking that I was still listening.

“So I stayed where I was,” he said. “With the animals. You seen dogs, right? The way they act? Well, that’s what they were. Up in the Fork. Wild dogs. All they wanted to do was fuck, fight over bones, sniff the leader’s ass. And prove what good guys they were by ganging up with the rest of the pack against the losers. You know what I mean? The scapegoats du jour.”

He put his head back and let out a wolf howl. The noise above us abruptly stopped.

“Only place to escape,” he said, “was Patti’s house. Because Patti had a computer. And that Mac and me, we were best buddies. I got it. And it got me. It wasn’t crazy. It didn’t get mad or jealous. It didn’t talk about spirits and grandfathers. It wasn’t always trying to make itself look good. It didn’t have a story. You gave it the data and it processed it and gave you the answer.”

That was who he reminded me of: Stewart Crothers. Stewart Crothers with a dimension missing. Stewart Crothers being mimicked by a machine.

“And I thought, this is it,” he went on. “This is the future. This what I’m going to help build. So I apply to Stanford. And when I get there, I find there’s a load of other people have the same idea. And not just the geeks—” He hesitated. “You seen a picture, right?”

“A picture of what?”

“Beth?”

“Yes.”

“She was really into it. Usually, you talk to a normal about this stuff, they don’t want to hear it. They’ll buy the first stage, computers for everyone on the planet, gene therapy to cure diseases. But then when you tell them the future’s trans-human, that we’re going to transition to a new species—so fifty, a hundred years from now, we’ll all be part-cyborg, plugged in to a Super-Intelligence—they’re like, Whoa, no way! But she got it. For her it was like religion. Getting close to God. First time I told her about it, she went, Wow, that’s amazing! It’s the old dream, isn’t it? What Jesus wanted. What the Buddha wanted. No more illusions. No more me me me. No more wars. No more hatred. Just people coming together, working together, for everyone. And you’re the one’s going to make it come true.” He paused. When he went on again, his voice was groggy with phlegm. “And she was going to help me. My brains. Her money.”

He lowered himself against the pillows and shut his eyes. The sounds upstairs were becoming ever more frenetic, but he seemed oblivious to them now. After a few seconds he murmured,

“Going back to the commune with her, that wasn’t my idea. It was hers. She was like, Come on, you met my family. If we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, I have to meet yours, see where you were raised. I warned her, I said, You don’t realize: it’s a swamp. You’ll just get sucked into it. She said, You got to trust me. I’ll be fine. She had no idea what she’d be up against. Birch Ogren. My dad. And that Indian guy, figuring she’d be a way to bankroll his court case. So—”

He opened his eyes. They were glittery with tears. He reached for the sheet of paper again and studied it, scowling slightly, as if he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing. Then he re-folded it and said,

“OK, yeah.” He paused, steeling himself to go on. ‘So that’s what I got to tell you. You were right about them. Beth and Chess. They’re—” He sliced the air with his hand.

My heartbeat was pinging in my neck. I held my breath, terrified that the slightest sound might deter him from saying more.

“Only where you’re wrong is, it was nothing to do with me.” He hunched forward, scanning my face, forcing me to look at him. “I couldn’t have killed Beth. She was—” He paused. “I could never kill anything. I can’t stand the sight of blood. When I was a kid, the day they slaughtered the hogs, I’d run and hide”—sticking his fingers in his ears—“like this.”

You could have paid someone else to do it. But there was no need to prompt him. More was obviously coming. Watching him was like seeing an iceberg start to crack and split apart.

“You’re thinking, I could have hired a hit-man. But I was a student, man. I was broke. The only person I knew with money was Beth. All you got to do is look at my bank account back then. No big payments out. No big payments in.”

“So how do you know they’re dead?”

He grimaced, not looking at me. “I don’t like that word.”

I waited. After a moment he slid off the bed and stood facing the window, strait-jacketing himself with his arms to stop himself shaking. With a noise like a goaded bull tormented past bearing, the man in the room above us finally reached orgasm. As the racket started to subside, Bone muttered something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“I saw her.”

“Who?”

“Beth.”

“Where?”

It was a long time before he could answer. When he did, his voice had lost its thickness again, leaving it as thin and reedy as a child’s.

“In my dorm room. After I got back. I was wired in and I turned and there she was, standing there. And first off I was just like, Jesus, what’s she doing here, she’s meant to be up in Coyote Fork. But then I got really mad, you know, Oh, you think you can just show up again, do you? Whenever it suits you?, di-dah-di-dah-di-dah. But all she did was keep on . . . looking at me. Like she was, I don’t know, not blaming me, that’s not the word, but unhappy about something. So I got up, I don’t know why, I guess I was going to shake her or something, try to get her to speak.” He paused, cleared his throat. “But next second—wham, she wasn’t there anymore.”

He edged round to look at me. He wasn’t lying: no actor on earth could crater his face like that to order. We stared at each other.

“Was that how it was for you?”

I swallowed. “Pretty much.” Or at least, that’s what I tried to say. But I couldn’t get the words to form.

“So you and me both,” he said.

He screwed up his eyes and started to cry. It didn’t come easily to him: there were hardly any tears, and his sobs were like nothing I had ever heard: a series of strange mechanical whoops, as if some alien had seized control of his vocal chords to send a signal to the mother-ship. I went over and put my arms round him. He clawed at me, burrowing his nail-less fingers into my shoulders. I began to cry too. For perhaps two minutes we stood there, holding each other and weeping. Then he broke free and pushed me away.

“So what you do with something like that?” he said, moving back to the window. He sniffed. “Where do you put it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, you believe it? You believe you really saw that woman down in the Global Village parking lot?”

I said nothing. He turned sharply, trying to surprise a yes or no in my face.

“Sometimes,” I said.

He sat on the corner of the bed, still looking away from me—embarrassed, even now, by his own nakedness. “Me, I . . . I just didn’t have a category for it. It wasn’t a dream. Or a trick of the light. Or mistaken identity. I figured, well, the brain’s a processor. And sometimes a processor screws up—there’s a power surge, or a circuit failure, makes it see a zero where the code says there ought to be a one, and pow. I kept telling myself that’s what had happened to me. But I couldn’t make it go away. Couldn’t forget it. Couldn’t sleep. In the end, three in the morning, I got in my car and drove up to Coyote Fork.”

He lapsed into silence. From the hallway outside I heard footsteps, the sigh of a hinge, the click of the latch. The man upstairs was leaving, cherishing the cuts and bruises that had temporarily freed him from captivity, and restored the order of the universe.

“First person I see up there is Eric,” he went on. “Eric? How can I tell Eric what I saw? So I just keep going, up to Patti’s place. She and Starlight are having breakfast. She’s like, Jesus, what are you doing here? Did somebody call you? I told her no. And she’s like, I wasn’t going to tell you. But you being here like this, it’s like it’s meant. But when I’m done, you got to go, OK? No hanging around. She’s crying by this point, and looking out the window every half minute, like she’s expecting someone.”

His voice had seized up. He swallowed a few times to free it.

“What she tells me is,” he went on, “is she’s up on the ridge the night before. She’s just taking a walk there, thinking about the commune, whether or not she ought to leave. And she hears this noise. An argument. Shots.” He hesitated. “And she goes to look like, you know, on tiptoe. It’s dark, but there’s a moon. She sees the bodies laying there. Blood all over. And my dad and Many Rivers digging.” He cleared his throat. “Patti figures, what happened was, they tried to buy them off. With Birch Ogren’s money. But they wouldn’t leave. So they shoot them. And get to keep the money themselves.”

From the front of the building, we heard a muffled buzzer, then the door going through its whine-and-click routine. Footsteps passed us en route for the stairs. Another door, voices. The woman above us was clearly in hot demand.

“She heads for home,” said Bone. “But she trips on a branch, crack. My dad comes after her, shouting. She gets away, but she knows he knows someone saw them.” He doodled with a finger on the bedspread, then looked up at me. “Which is why she wanted me to leave, soon as she’d finished telling me about it. Because if he saw her talking to me, he’d suspect the someone was her. So I left. And a couple days later I hear about the fire. About her and Starlight?”

I nodded.

“And after that,” he said, “I went a little bit crazy. I didn’t talk to anyone. I stayed wired in sixteen, eighteen hours a day. It was like someone had opened me up here”—putting an invisible screwdriver against his temple and turning it—”and changed the motherboard. Before, I’d always thought, yeah, most people are stupid. They believe all kinds of impossible garbage, do insane stuff, cheat, lie, throw each other under the bus and kid themselves they’re doing the right thing. But Beth and me were different. We were going to fix the problem.” He opened his hands, surrendering to despair. “And then turns out, we’re screwed up too. She’s a cheat. With someone calls himself an Indian, wants to forget about the future and go back. And me . . . I see something that’s impossible.”

There was a shout from outside. The next moment we heard the crash of breaking glass, followed by a woman’s scream and a gabble of angry voices. Bone got up and walked to the window again. He slipped a thumb and forefinger between two slats in the blind and fish-jawed them apart, then peered through the gap, his face jaundiced by the light of the street-lamp.

“So what you going to do?” he said, turning back to me. “Either you’re going to kill yourself—and, believe me, I thought about that. Or you get real, and—doesn’t matter how bad they are—you face the facts. And fact number one is, that’s the way people are. We came out of the swamp with a whole load of shit that’s no use to us any more. And if we can’t get rid of it, amputate it, we’re not going to survive.” He jabbed a finger against his chest. “And that means starting here. Taking a big knife and cutting it out. Seeing Beth was just a swamp thing. Like a vestige of some earlier stage. If it had been useful, conferred an adaptive advantage, evolution would have run with it, and everyone would have that kind of experience now. But obviously it didn’t. Because they don’t.”

“I did.”

“That’s just chance, man. Random. White noise.”

There was sweat on his forehead. He paused to wipe it with the back of his arm.

“Fact number two is, our life on this planet is over. Rome, Egypt, Carthage—all those places you write about, with beautiful ruins? The same thing’s coming here. Only this time, it won’t just be one empire. It’ll be the world.” His voice dropped, almost to a whisper. “Trust me, it’s going to happen. The only question is: when? I used to think we had a fifty-fifty chance of making it to the end of the century. Now? Absolutely no way.”

The guy’s a mathematical genius. And for the first time I could hear it. This wasn’t just dinner-party chatter, a series of recycled headlines and Tweets trotted out to support one political position or another. He had seen the data. He had devised the programs to process it. He had weighed the conclusions, calculated the odds.

“You mean nuclear war?” I said.

“War I’d put at between twenty and thirty percent. Another pandemic: about the same. Then there’s AI, getting smart enough to take control of its own evolution and developing so much faster than we do that we can’t keep up.”

“Climate change?”

He nodded. “That’s the biggie. Because it doesn’t matter what we do, we can’t reverse it. There’s going to be more floods, more droughts, more soil erosion. If we could cut the population, redistribute resources, change the way we live, we might just be able to adapt. But we can’t do that.”

“Unless we finally wake up to how serious it is.”

“You know what happens when you try to redistribute resources and change the way people live? Coyote Fork happens.” He shook his head. “Everyone thinks, wow, this is going to be great. We’re really going to get our act together this time. No more jealousy. No more greed. No more That’s mine! But it doesn’t work out. And of course, that’s not my fault. My story says I’m a really right-on guy. It’s her fault, or his. So all you got to do is get rid of them, and everything’ll be fine.”

The whip action was starting upstairs, with the usual accompaniment of groans. But Bone was impervious to it now.

“This stuff’s deep-rooted,” he went on. “Hard-wired. And 99.9 percent of people can’t even see it’s a problem. The stories they tell themselves are too powerful. They don’t realize they are stories. There’s no way you’re going to change that before we destroy ourselves.” He coiled and uncoiled his fingers but couldn’t hide the tremor in them. “We’re in the last chance saloon here. Either we just keep on drinking till the avalanche hits. Or we get a few people off the planet, wire them up, and start colonizing the galaxy. It’s no future at all—or a future for 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent. Your choice.”

He sat back, giving me space to respond. I said nothing.

“We got the technology,” he said. “We already landed probes on Mars. But to develop it so you can get people there, establish a viable colony, you need a lotta lotta lotta money. And you can’t expect the 99.9 percent just to give it to you. Armageddon’s coming, and you and your kids are all going to die, but I really want you to help save some tech genius who probably totaled your job. So how do you get a hold of it?” He paused. “There’s one sure-fire way: you monetize the things that are going to destroy us, whatever we do. The things I saw up at Coyote Fork. The pack instinct. The bullying. The tribalism. The we’re right and you’re wrong, so why don’t you go kill yourself?” He spread his hands wide. “Da-dah. Global Village.”

He searched my face for a reaction. I struggled to keep it blank.

“OK,” he said. “Hiroshima.”

“Sorry?”

“Hiroshima. Right or wrong?”

“I don’t think I’m qualified to say.”

“That’s a cop-out. A lot of innocent people died at Hiroshima. But it ended the war with Japan. So probably a whole lot more innocent people were saved. But if you’re the guy flew the Enola Gay, you’re still going to hurt.”

His fingers strayed to the folded papers. Then, without picking them up, he said,

“Look, I’m real sorry about your friend. I’m sorry about Ruth’s mom. I’m sorry about the muffin girl, what was her name?”

“Hazel Voss?”

“Yeah, Hazel.” His eyes narrowed, like a man trying to make out something indistinct on the horizon. “But I’m the guy in the Enola Gay. You could stop me. If you say publicly what you wrote in that email, I’ll sue you and I’ll win. But that doesn’t mean you won’t damage me. There’s a lot of people on my case already. About the suicides, about the way we raise revenue. If you and me go to court, it doesn’t matter I’d whip your ass: what matters is, they see Evan Bone and murderer together, and that makes me look worse. And then Global Village takes a hit, maybe so bad it can’t recover. And bam: the Mars program is finished.”

He hesitated, like an actor who’s forgotten his lines. He reached for the papers again. This time, he discarded the top sheet and opened the one underneath, lovingly smoothing it with his hand.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was going to show you this.”

I perched on the bed to look at it. It was a printout of an artist’s impression of a domed building. The roof was covered in silvery diamond-shaped panels. At regular intervals around the perimeter, little tunnels protruded tentatively into the desert landscape. The sky above was butterscotch gold, streaked along the horizon with blue.

“That’s what it’ll look like,” he said. “We already built this. Out in New Mexico. That’s where I’ve been the last couple months. I had to break sim to come meet you.” He tapped the picture. “If they leave us alone, fifteen years, twenty max, we can have the real thing up and running. Like it is here.” He pointed at two little figures in front of the building, encased in identical spacesuits. “That can be you. And this one’s me. The guys that did this together. The guys realized, it’s time to cut away the junk, leave it all behind, continue the journey. Think about that. You wake up one morning and you look out the window and you’re on Mars.” He gestured towards the street. “All this is behind you. And ahead of you”—jabbing a finger ceilingwards—“is the whole universe. Waiting to be discovered. All you got to do is—”

There was a loud thump on the door. We glanced towards it, holding our breath. Someone tried to insert a key in the lock, hit the one that was already there. Another round of thumping. Then a man called, “Hey! Get the fuck out of there! This place is guy on girl only, OK?”

Tell him, mouthed Bone. Scared, presumably, his voice might be recognized.

I walked to the door, pressed my face against it.

“We paid Tasha, OK? For the use of the room.”

“I know you did. But you didn’t say nothing about using it to fuck your boyfriend.”

“I’m not fucking my boyfriend. We’re just talking.”

“Sure you are. Out now! Or I’m coming in!”

I looked at Bone. His eyes were white-rimmed with fear. He nodded.

“OK,” I said.

Bone pulled on his hoodie. He stuffed the folded papers back in his pocket—in his haste, leaving the coins and the picture of the Mars colony on the bed. I snatched them up, along with my dismembered phone, then unlocked the door and opened it.

The pimp was a squat, bald man. His face, red with righteous anger, was sprinkled with warts. He held out a large hand.

“Tasha told us to leave them in the mailbox,” I said.

“I’m not talking about the keys. I’m talking about fifty bucks.”

“I told you, we already—”

“I ain’t seen none of that. Fifty bucks extra. For the hassle.”

“OK,” grunted Bone behind me. I heard the rip of a zip. A fifty dollar bill appeared over my shoulder. I took it and handed it to the pimp. Bone edged past me, then headed for the front door, stooped and hooded like a Good Friday penitent.

“Who is that guy?” muttered the pimp. I said nothing. He grabbed my arm. “I seen him someplace.” He held two fingers up to his eyes.

I broke free and followed Bone outside. He was already fifteen or twenty paces ahead of me. I half-ran to catch up. As I fell into step beside him, he muttered, “You got to leave. Now. Cameras.”

I increased my pace and passed him. At the end of the street I looked back. He stopped for a moment, making a sawing gesture with his hands, like Marianne Chess cutting meat. It was a second before I got it: Amputate.

I turned round again, and hot-footed it through the swamp back to the hotel.