Scale, p.7
Scale, page 7
As Jake turned the corner himself, he half expected Gray Jacket to step out from some hiding place and grab him by the collar, but instead he was there in plain sight a short way down the lane, feigning window-shopping but clearly searching for someone. Maybe he’d arranged to meet his contact around here, and while Jake’s initial presence had spooked him, he’d decided it was all a false alarm and he wasn’t actually being followed.
Jake found a bench where he could sit with his back to the man and watch his movements reflected in the unlit window of an empty shop. Gray Jacket was looking increasingly exasperated; had the Council member who’d hired him to collect the bribe simply failed to show up?
After a few seconds, Gray Jacket seemed to resign himself to the situation. He set off down the lane, back toward Davenport Street. Jake rose to his feet and moved casually toward the nearest shop, but it was too late; he saw Gray Jacket register his presence ... which seemed to elicit a flicker, not of annoyance, but relief.
Jake walked straight toward him. “Why are you following me?” he demanded.
Gray Jacket flinched. “What are you talking about?”
Now that Jake had a proper look at him head-on, he was fairly sure he did not have Bremmer’s parcel tucked away anywhere on his person.
“I don’t have time for this,” Jake said wearily. “I spotted you back in the park, before you flipped the jacket. Whatever you think you’re doing, it’s over.” There was no need to admit to his own confusion about the man’s involvement with the Bremmer case.
Gray Jacket’s resolve to play innocent wilted. “Okay, you got me.” He raised his hands in mock surrender. “But what difference does it make? It won’t put a stop to it. They’ll just replace me with another face you don’t know.”
Jake tried to give nothing away himself as he searched for reasons why anyone would think he was worthy of surveillance. Was this about Cara Leon? The mere fact that he’d revealed Cara’s interest in Generation Eight?
“Spotlight is a real cesspit, isn’t it?” he replied. “You screwed up so badly that you got your client vanished, and now you’re working for the people you spied on for her, to try to make sure no one finds out what any of you did.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“All right. Do you want to tell me why you think you’re following me?”
“That information is strictly ... ” Gray Jacket trailed off, visibly annoyed that he’d blurted out a response that might have been appropriate for a Spotlight colleague, when he should have just bluffed or kept his mouth shut.
“Strictly on a need-to-know basis?” Jake guessed. “I’m flattered. What do you think I’ve done that merits round-the-clock surveillance and firewalls within the agency? If it was something criminal on my part, you’d think the police would want to be involved. But if it’s something criminal on Spotlight’s part, or their current clients, that would make a lot more sense. You might want to ponder that when you think about your employment options.”
“I like it where I am,” Gray Jacket replied defiantly. Then he turned and walked away.
Jake couldn’t face going straight to the Mayor’s office to report that he’d fumbled the operation on Bremmer. He wanted to put the blame on Gray Jacket for distracting him, but the truth was he’d mismanaged the whole thing. If he’d still been working with Loretta, the two of them could have made it work flawlessly.
Did Loretta know that she was being watched? Not necessarily; they might have given the job to someone more experienced, who’d managed to remain less conspicuous. But once Gray Jacket reported back, his superiors at Spotlight would assume that Jake would have told her, so there was nothing to lose by doing it, whether or not he was seen tipping her off.
He found Loretta in the Palimpsest office. She offered him some water, and he described his encounter.
“I didn’t think they’d drag you into it,” she said. “I’ve been pretty careful, but it’s good to know I’m not just being paranoid.”
“Even for Spotlight, the hypocrisy’s breathtaking,” Jake marveled. “To take Cara’s money, then turn on her when it blew up in their face.”
“Maybe they didn’t take her money,” Loretta suggested. “Maybe they handed her over straight away.”
“Just for asking them to do what she asked me?” Jake found that even more shocking. “They couldn’t say no, and leave it at that?”
“I don’t know what actually happened with Spotlight,” Loretta conceded, “but I do know G8 have good reasons not to want anyone poking around in their business.”
“Enough to justify whatever they’ve done to her?”
“Enough to motivate it, maybe,” Loretta replied. “I’m sure as hell not excusing them. They might think there’s a lot at stake, and they might even be right, but Cara was just desperate about something else entirely.”
Jake knew better than to press her to explain the whole case to him, when he wasn’t a part of it. “If you ever need an extra pair of hands ... ” he offered.
Loretta was amused. “I thought you said it would be impossible for us to keep working together.”
“That was days ago. Anyway, this would just be temporary. I’m not talking about rejoining the firm, I’m just saying we could still collaborate.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
As Jake was about to leave, he noticed the cipher machine on the shelf behind her. “That’s new,” he said. “You really think it’s come to that?”
“Maybe.”
“What if they’re listening to us right now?” he joked.
Loretta opened a drawer and took out a device about the size of a phone, which she proceeded to sweep across the surface of her desk. “I’ve yet to find a bug,” she assured him. “But the technology moves so fast, so who knows if the detectors have kept up?”
Jake was on the verge of replying that it was lucky she hadn’t told him G8’s big secret, but since she had more or less let it slip that she knew what it was, it seemed safer to treat the whole thing as a joke than draw attention to any part of their discussion.
“You sound like someone from the slow zones,” he said. “I thought that in D7 we were at the forefront of everything.”
Loretta laughed, but Jake understood from the look on her face that he’d walked straight back toward the subject he’d intended to avoid. D7 as a whole might be ahead of the other districts, but right now, G8 alone was at the front of the pack.
Chapter 14
The sky was pale and starless as Sam waited at the docks. He’d come early so as not to risk wasting his consultants’ time, and Jessica’s money, but the Cyclops only appeared, chugging west into the mouth of the harbor, after he’d been peering out across the water for a couple of minutes.
As the boat drew closer, his fears were assuaged a little: it didn’t look like a toy that would keel over from the addition of one swaying double-sized passenger. It wasn’t huge either, but the assurances he’d received over the phone had been accurate.
“I’m Lea Holst,” a woman called out to him. “You’re Sam Mujrif?”
“Yes.” It was Lea he’d spoken with.
“Jump on board,” she suggested, as the Cyclops came up beside the jetty. Sam hesitated, but although the boat wasn’t quite motionless, it would take exceptionally bad luck for the swell to send it lurching away from him at just the right moment to cause him any harm.
When he landed on the deck and took a few steps, it felt firmer beneath his feet than the Idyll’s. Still rootlife timber, but a different kind of tree.
The engine started up again and the boat moved away from the jetty. Sam glanced toward the wheelhouse. Lea said, “That’s Eugene doing the driving.”
“Is it all right if I sit?” It was possible that he’d keep his balance if he tried to remain standing, but anything that brought his center of mass closer to the deck could only make him feel safer.
“Sure. I’m sorry we don’t have suitable furniture, but we don’t get many commissions like this.”
Sam lowered himself onto the deck, and drew his knees toward his chin. “You mean cross-scale?”
Lea said, “No, plenty of those, but most clients don’t want to come on board. They’re content to look at charts and read reports.”
“It just seemed more efficient for me to be here,” Sam explained. “I might not know what I’m looking for unless I see it.”
“That’s fine.” Lea smiled and quoted his request back to him, “‘Something unusual, that could be in any layer.’ That makes a change from assessments for shipping channels.”
There was a stack of electronic equipment beside her: four boxes covered in dials, and four cathode ray tubes displaying multiple flickering traces. Sam suspected that all of this would normally be kept sheltered inside the wheelhouse, but he would have struggled to fit in there. They were lucky there was no rain forecast.
“Needless to say, you’re going to have to interpret for me,” he said, gesturing at the traces.
“The distance of each line from the top edge of the screen gives the time it took the pings to get back to us,” Lea replied. “The horizontal position corresponds to the direction of the transponder, as we sweep it left to right.”
“How many frequencies are you using?”
“Four. One on each screen. But we get echoes from every boundary between the layers, as well as the riverbed itself, so ... there are a lot of lines.”
Sam said, “I guess the boundaries are as important as anything solid?”
“Absolutely,” Lea confirmed. “Some vessels need to keep their hulls entirely in the Scale Zero water, or they become unstable; others rely on reaching down to the Scale One layer to help support them. Depending on the currents and the depth of the riverbed, the whole structure can get quite complicated.”
“So what did sailors do before sonar came along?”
“They dropped things on ropes, and poked around with rods.”
They’d left the harbor and were moving out across the river. The swell lifted the boat by at least the height of its hull as each crest passed, and rolled it twenty or thirty degrees, but while Sam’s stomach stayed clenched, the cycles were so alike that his body was beginning to settle into a kind of wary accommodation.
Looking back, he could see the three-story riverfront towers of D3 rising up in the west, already grand enough to make his own slice of Mauburg seem like the conurbation’s neglected outskirts, left behind by the march of progress. He had never actually viewed the city from this vantage before; the photographs he’d seen had always struck him as novelties, raising the same uneasy smile as the odd, often crassly staged pictures where someone lined up people of all seven scales in a row.
To the east, Districts Five to Seven appeared as an even more benighted fringe that tapered away into the desert. As the panorama grew broader and his own neighborhood dwindled into insignificance, Sam could feel an entirely irrational sense of shame rising up in him, souring into resentment. How could it be fair that his own scale controlled so little of what lay before his eyes? The simple pleasure of having ample elbow room on the uncrowded streets of D4 lost its sway here, and the wildly disparate sizes of the swathes of buildings and territory splashed across his vision had more impact than any abstract calculations.
All this agitation was entirely unwelcome, but there was no soothing rebuttal he could summon to banish it in an instant. He turned back to Lea, pretending to have merely been admiring the view.
“We’ll crisscross the river as we work our way east,” she said. “Exactly how far we get in an hour will depend on whether you need to pause to examine anything more closely.”
“I understand.” Sam eyed the screens again. “Why are the tops of the Scale Two and Scale Three layers so ... thick and fuzzy?”
“That’s where most of the minerals float,” Lea explained. “Scale Two water is denser than the lightest bits of sand, and Scale Three is denser than most of the rest.”
Sam was embarrassed; he’d probably learned that in school and then forgotten it.
“The heaviest layers are denser than the rocks in the riverbed,” Lea added. “So they’re constantly percolating down through any cracks, breaking up the rock and carving a deeper channel for the river.”
“So all our precious higher-scale water ends up at the center of the Earth?” Sam asked, trying to adopt a tone that would let him pass the question off as a joke if it was too foolish to be taken seriously.
“No one really knows how much is trapped indefinitely,” Lea admitted. “But I think most geologists believe that the bulk of it never goes deeper than the outer mantle, before it gets recycled and spewed out in volcanoes.”
“Ah.” Sam felt a bit less foolish now, but he was going to need to move on from geology to marine biology. “Most of the blips are fish?”
“Fish, crustaceans, cephalopods,” Lea replied. “Mammals are only in the top three layers; any deeper than that, and they wouldn’t be able to surface for air.”
“But a Scale Two whale can rise all the way to the surface?”
“Yeah. They have a bladder that’s full of water when they dive, but they can pump air into it from their lungs to expel some of the water when they need to ascend. Don’t ask me how they manage that without getting an aneurysm.”
Sam smiled, but the thought of needing to perform such an elaborate maneuver – instinctively or not – just to take your next breath made him feel claustrophobic. “I guess submarines do something similar?”
“Pretty much.” Lea did not respond with a knowing smile; either she hadn’t heard the rumors about the Nimbus that Sam had heard from Jerome, or she was far too professional to let on that she believed she knew exactly what Sam was searching for.
“How big do whales get, in the river?”
“Not very big. Maybe a meter.”
“Anything larger than that?”
Lea said, “Maybe a dead animal floating on a boundary.”
Sam nodded, and Lea’s demeanor grew sober; though Sam had said nothing about the case, it had probably crossed her mind that a private investigator might well be looking for a body in the water.
The lower limb of the sun broke free of the horizon. Sam took out a flask and drank, trying to keep his eyes on the sonar screens. If an hour of this would be tedious for him, it would be positively grueling for Lea and Eugene, even if Jessica was paying them all well enough not to resent it.
Was he bleeding his client dry while he chased after phantoms? Jessica had understood that there could be no guarantees, but if he’d let himself be swayed too easily by Loretta, and by the sparse evidence he’d gathered on the docks, he would still be culpable. He wasn’t even searching the right part of the river to find Cara’s body, unless she’d been taken a long way east before she’d been abandoned to the mercy of the currents.
Lea excused herself to use a toilet inside the wheelhouse. “Feel free to piss over the side any time,” she urged Sam cheerfully as she departed.
The Cyclops was on its umpteenth approach to the southern shore of the river; the land here was mostly set aside for farming, but Sam was too much of a city boy to do more than guess the scale of a few crops, judging it more by the plants’ hues than any knowledge of the different variants’ anatomies. On the opposite shore, District One was gleaming in the morning sunshine. It was even more beautiful to behold from afar, but he managed to laugh off any pangs of envy. If he’d tried to live in a penthouse apartment in D1, he would have felt like a mad king lost in a deserted palace – and if he’d tried to fill the emptiness by subletting to people of his own size, the collective weight of his new housemates and their guests would collapse the whole structure the first time anyone threw a party.
The boat passed a dark-feathered bird paddling on the water whose head rose higher than the edge of the hull; it uttered a slow, deep cry that might have been a territorial challenge, a warning to others about a possible predator, or just an affronted exclamation at the presence of this strange interloper.
Sam forced his gaze back to the sonar. With the riverbed rising, the lowest layers of the water vanished one by one. He’d considered saving time by asking for their zigzag sweeps to avoid these shallows, but he wasn’t confident that a submarine would necessarily find them unnavigable. For all he knew, its home port might be in a secluded bay, discreetly dredged just deep enough to accommodate it, but no deeper.
Here, though, there was nothing of the kind. Eugene turned the Cyclops around and they headed north-east again.
Lea rejoined him. “The other sailors must think we’ve lost our minds,” she joked, nodding toward a couple of cargo vessels making their way upriver.
“They could be right,” Sam replied, trying not to make the concession sound too gloomy.
“Are you sure that what you’re looking for would be large enough to spot?” she asked.
“If it’s not at least 1.6 meters long, it’s not what I’m after. But it could be bigger.”
Lea said, “So either a Scale One person, or ... something able to contain such a person?”
“Yes.” Sam couldn’t blame her for wanting to get specific, and there wasn’t much point now fretting about G8 learning that he was hunting for a submarine, when the river was literally echoing with the sounds of the search.
Lea looked thoughtful, but resisted any impulse to question him further, or lecture him on the unlikelihood of them encountering such a machine.
They watched the traces together in silence. The sun was well above the water now; they had about another twenty minutes left. Sam started on the sandwiches he’d brought; he’d been hungry for a while, but he’d put off solid food as long as possible, afraid it might bring on the nausea that so far he’d been spared.
“What’s that?” Lea muttered, leaning toward one of the screens.
“What?” Sam hadn’t noticed anything unusual.
“On the riverbed,” she said. She pointed at the bottom trace. “There’s a kind of mound there. Long and flat.”
