Year Zero (2000), page 7
"Don't tell me," Molly said. "A second-class ticket to anywhere in Network South-East."
"Better than that," he assured her. "Cash in hand. Enough to buy all the over-the-counter tranks you want, and then some—or a fully comprehensive detox, if that's what you'd prefer."
"I'm not really worth it," Molly observed, with heavy sarcasm. "I've been fucked too many times, in every orifice, to command a high price from decent men like you."
He looked at her sharply then, with naked suspicion. "Don't get smart, Molly," he said. "We know where you live. We'll always know where you live."
She wasn't stupid enough to parry that one. She had to let him think that he'd won for a little while longer.
"Are you feeling okay," he said, when he finally made ready to leave. "Is there anything you need?"
"Now that you come to mention it," she said, letting her tongue play momentarily upon her lips, "there is a little something you could do, if you really wouldn't mind."
15
The greys could have picked her up again any time after the first three weeks, but Molly wanted to make sure that she'd got the job done. She knew that the men in black would cotton on eventually, but she figured that it was worth keeping the ball rolling anyhow. The aliens didn't know how successful the men in black would be in extracting information from the captured biochip, because they didn't know how much the men in black already knew, so they hadn't been able to quantify the risk for her, but they'd assured her that if things did get sticky they could get her out in one piece. She trusted them.
When the Rover 2000 screeched to a halt beside her King's Cross pitch, she wasn't frightened. Indeed, she felt preternaturally calm as she totted up the days in her head, multiplied the days by seven, and multiplied the figure she got by a further fudge-factor in order to estimate the total number of people who'd so far been exposed. It wasn't huge, but it was big enough. London might no longer be the cultural and financial hub of the world, but a lot of wheels still turned around it.
The man with the pencil moustache bundled her into the back of the car and slammed the door behind him.
"You were supposed to be clean," he said, in a voice which had more terror in it than wrath. "We were all in quarantine till they told us you were clean. They swore you weren't carrying anything that hadn't shown up the first time, and that it was all common-or-garden shit. I thought it was odd that you'd gone back to the game, even though I never doubted for a moment that you were a slag through and through, but do you know what I told myself? I told myself that you were worried about the chunk we had to cut out of your tit. I told myself that you were anxious about still being attractive. But you knew, didn't you? You actually knew."
"You're the one who watched while they had me stark naked and strapped down, questioning me under pentothal," Molly pointed out. "Everything I know, you know."
"All that shit about Elvis and angels," he spat at her, as the wrath began to climb out of the terror. "It was all just cover."
"Oh no," said Molly, mildly. "That was all true. It was the plausible stuff that was the cover. Double bluff, you see—trees in forests, all that sort of thing."
"I was being kind, " he yelled. "I was doing you a favour."
He actually seemed to believe it. He was enough of a public schoolboy to fool himself into thinking that he really hadn't fucked her for the sake of his own twisted power trip, but as an act of pure good-hearted charity. At least none of her more recent encounters had involved that level of self-deception.
"That's the difficulty, you see," she murmured. "How could they ever have decided, if they couldn't see us at our best? How could they ever have figured out what possibilities we had, unless they could get rid of all the crap that was obscuring the view? They didn't want to do it, because they're scientists at heart, and they have ethical as well as methodological reservations about observers interfering with the properties of that which is being observed, but it was the only way."
"It's going to kill us all, isn't it?" the man in black said, the fever of his paranoia having reached its final crisis. "AIDS was just the rehearsal, but this is the main event. How many people have you turned into carriers? They knew we'd already screened you for viruses and prions, so they just borrowed the protein coats from all the ones you were already carrying, and stuck new cargoes of DNA into every last one —and we fell for it. We took you in and we let you out, and we watched you go back on the fucking game, and we were too fucking slow to figure it out. You've helped them kill us all, haven't you?"
"Don't be silly," Molly said. "Why would I want to do that? Why would anyone want to do that? If they'd wanted the world, they'd have taken it a hundred years ago. You surely must have figured out that they wanted something much more difficult to obtain than that."
That took him aback, and a little of the wrath evaporated, along with a little of the terror. "You poor fool," he said, eventually. "They lied to you, didn't they? They lied to you, and you fell for it. No wonder they wanted someone like you —someone they could play for a sucker."
"No wonder," she agreed, mildly. "But you're not actually dead, are you, darling? You're not even dying, are you? Even when it's triggered you'll just feel a bit funny, hind-brainwise. It'll pass. Believe me, darling, it will pass, and you'll come out of it a much better person—so the greys say, and I'm inclined to trust them."
He groaned theatrically. He was evidently not a man much given to trust. It was probably the result of having spent his entire life immersed in various cultures of hypocrisy.
"Think of it as an adventure, if you can," Molly advised him. "I think you will be able to. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day. We have no idea what we might become, given the right sort of help—but it really will be wonderfully exciting. There are others like me, of course, on the other side of the Atlantic and the other side of the world. Not exactly the same, of course—been there, done that, didn't bother with the t-shirt—but fully-laden with similar cargoes. You may think you've been living in interesting times for the last forty years, Mister Man in Black, but you haven't seen the half of it yet, or even the tenth. Personally, I'm looking forward to it. They've assured me that nothing exciting will happen before I get back, so if it makes you feel any better, you can be certain that I'll be with you all the way. Wouldn't miss it for the world."
Perhaps the man in black was far enough gone to be getting past his panic, or perhaps it was his training reasserting itself. At any rate, he almost relaxed.
"What is it, if it's not the doomsday plague?" he asked, in the manner of a man who really wanted to know, and was at last prepared to listen.
"It's the stuff of saints and scientists," she said. "Vision. Ecstasy. Not the sort that fries your brain—more the sort that will bring it very gently to the boil, and simmer it till it's done. They couldn't promise that we'll love it—not all of us, at any rate—but they guaranteed that we sure as hell won't find it boring."
He wanted to know much more, and she would probably have been prepared to tell him, always provided that he'd asked politely, but as the Rover sped southwards over Vauxhall Bridge it was suddenly bathed in bright white light that poured down from above. The man in black knew exactly what that was.
"Don't worry," Molly said. "They haven't come for you. It's me they want."
"You were in on it all the way," the man in black whispered, as if he couldn't quite believe it even now. "You knew everything. You went along with it."
He didn't know the half of it. Molly might even have told him that it had been her plan, not theirs, but he didn't give her the chance. The anger and the terror were making themselves felt again.
"I knew you were just a slag," the man with the pencil moustache went on, his voice rising in pitch as well as in volume, "but I didn't have you pegged as a traitor to the whole human race. What did they offer you, Molly? What are they giving you in return?"
"Just a travelcard," she said, as the window of the car wound down of its own accord and she floated out into the starry night. "They're on a tight budget too, and they've got a lot of work to do before they can trigger the psychological transmogrification of the human race—but their travelcard really is all zones."
16
When Molly got back to the B&B after the aliens dropped her off, she found that her room had been let to a new tenant. She'd been gone five weeks, Earth time, although she'd only experienced two because of the relativistic effects of interstellar travel, and year zero was now almost half way through. She hadn't been any further than Altair, which was a lousy 15.7 light-years away, but the warp-drive had thrown a wobbly somewhere around Sirius B and the starship had got caught up in a sub-cee jam caused by a chronoclasm on the hyperspatial freeway. The landlord explained that ordinarily he'd have kept the room for her and carried on banking the giros, but that there'd been too many people looking for her to let him keep her absence a secret.
"What sort of people?" Molly asked.
"Y'social worker twice, the DSS—the real DSS, not the cowboys from Croydon—and a WPC. Askin' after y'daughter."
"Which one?" As far as Molly knew, both of her daughters were safe in the bosom of their oh-so-adorable foster family in Tooting.
"Dunno. Y'stuffs in two boxes in the cupboard under the stairs—what's left of it. Y'II need a car ify'goin' to shift them books, mind."
Molly told the landlord that she'd pick up the boxes when she could and hopped on a bus to the Social Services. She had to wait two hours before Elizabeth Peach could find a gap in her schedule, and the bad temper Molly had built up wasn't improved when the first thing the social worker said to her was: "Is that a suntan?"
If there was one thing social workers hated more than another it was finding out that their clients had been taking holidays, and Molly's current handler was an old timer whose last vestiges of conscience and goodwill had shrivelled after her divorce, five years before she ever clapped eyes on Molly. It would have been pointless to explain about the shortage of shade on 61 Cygni C VIII. In any case, Molly had always found that when dealing with the Social Services honesty was the second best policy, so the only reply she offered was: "No. What's up with the kids?"
"Christine's absconded," Mrs. Peach informed her. "We figured that she'd come probably looking for you, but we had to assume that if we couldn't find you, she couldn't either. That left us no alternative but to inform the police."
"Thanks a bunch," Molly said. "I suppose you know that I've lost my room at the B&B. Not that I'd have still been there, of course, if you'd kept the promise you made six months ago that as soon as you could find me a decent flat I'd be out of there—and then I'd have the girls back in no time."
"Well, that's all out of the window now, " said Mrs. Peach. "We were trying so hard to find you, and for such a good reason, that one of the other women at the B&B mentioned something about travelcards and King's Cross. That wasn't in the contract, Molly. If you're back on the game that means you're back on the smack, and if ..."
"I'm not," said Molly, shortly. "That's all over and done with. I've even kicked the Prozac. I'm clean as a whistle. I just need a place to live, and I can be a model mother." Molly could see that it wasn't going down well. It would only have made things worse to explain that the greys had sorted out her metabolism while they were repairing the mess the men in black had made of her left breast.
"It's not that easy," the social worker informed her, with an edge to her voice like a worn-out bread-knife. "All that's available is a thirteenth-floor flat in Arcadia House. It's not big enough for three, and even if it were, the case conference would have to address the question of whether Arcadia House is a fit environment. It might be a stepping-stone, but you'd have to stick it out longer than the last three tenants —none of them lasted a week."
Arcadia House was an authentic 1960s tower block, so old that it would have been in danger of becoming a listed building if it hadn't been so far down the list of sink estates as to be popularly known as "the Waste-Disposal Unit." In other circumstances, Molly might have preferred to sleep rough, but if she didn't have a solid address there was no way Christine would be able to find her if and when she decided to start looking.
"I'll take it," Molly said. When Mrs. Peach had made the call to the Housing Department, she added: "Could you possibly give me a lift with my stuff? There's a couple of boxes back at the B&B. The books and the frying-pan are a bit heavy."
She had to wait until Mrs. Peach came off shift, of course, but she got the lift she needed. Molly made sure that her old landlord knew exactly where she would be, in case anyone came calling. She used a red magic marker to write the flat number—1303—on the back of an old betting-slip and pinned it to the noticeboard beside the phone in the downstairs corridor.
"She might not come," the social worker said, once they were back in the car. "Did I mention that she'd been seen a couple of times with a man."
"A boy, you mean," said Molly. She had no need to ask who had seen them. Christine's foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis, took their pseudoparental duties very seriously indeed.
"No, a man. Two, actually, but not at the same time. One in his late twenties, maybe your age. The other about fifty, dressed in an old-fashioned trench-coat and a broadbrimmed felt hat. Ring any bells?"
Molly knew that Mrs. Peach was wondering about Christine's father, but whoever that had been was highly unlikely to have fitted either description sixteen years after the moment of her conception. Molly had to hope that if Christine had run off with anyone, it would be the younger one. The idea that she might have been entrapped by a comicbook child-molester was presumably the kind of paranoid fantasy which routinely haunted people like the Jarvises, but it certainly wasn't one that Molly wanted to entertain.
At Arcadia House even the OUT OF ORDER signs on the lifts were shrivelled by age and ill-use. Mercifully, Elizabeth Peach—who had been working out twice a week at her health club ever since the divorce, ostensibly to relieve work-related stress—condescended to carry the lighter carton up the twelve flights of stairs. Molly took care of the one with the paperbacks and the frying pan.
Molly was pleased to notice that the stink of stale urine abated somewhat as they climbed. By the time they reached the thirteenth floor it had faded away entirely, although it was replaced by another faint odour she couldn't quite identify.
The man from the Housing Department was already waiting for them outside the flat, nervously jingling the keys in his hand. Somewhat to her surprise, Molly recognised him—he moonlighted as a bouncer at the Netherworld. In spite of his obvious qualifications for the latter job, he was extraordinarily anxious to be away; he seemed deeply relieved when he was able to scurry away after handing over the keys. This did not seem to Molly to be a good sign. It was almost as bad, in its way, as the fact that her door was the only one in the corridor—there were nine others—that was not fitted with a steel security-gate. Such gates were theoretically illegal, on the grounds that Fire & Rescue found them almost as hard to force open as the local burglars if the need ever arose. Because the local burglars doubled as arsonists when frustrated, the need tended to arise on a regular basis, but the council turned a blind eye anyway.
Mrs. Peach seemed almost as pleased as the part-time bouncer to be able to depart again, although it was common knowledge that the local rude boys considered their mothers' social workers to be strictly out of bounds.
17
Molly had only just unpacked when the boy that the estate boss had sent to check up on her appeared at her door. Oddly enough, he seemed just as anxious as Elizabeth Peach and the man from the Housing Department had been, although his gang was presumably the thing of which the respectable citizens had been most frightened. He was only fifteen, of course —as soon as the gang members reached eighteen the local police fitted them up for the Scrubs in order to pay them back for all the trouble they'd caused while they were minors—but fifteen-year-olds were nowadays under just as much pressure as their seniors to act macho at all times.
The boy relaxed somewhat once he had looked Molly carefully up and down. She invited him in and stood meekly by while he checked out her luggage, or lack of it.
"I don't have a lot of stuff," Molly told him—which, roughly translated, meant I'm not worth burgling.
"If you need anything," the boy said, "just let us know. We usually hang out in the ground floor derelicts but you can leave a message at 349 in an emergency. Say it's for Dean. TVs and stuff come with the standard policy—third party fire and theft." That meant insurance against thefts committed and fires started by third parties in the gang; one thing that would emphatically not be covered was the possibility of being done for handling.
"Thanks Dean, but all I need for now is a few clothes, " she said. "I'll try the Oxfam next to Kwik-Save when I nip out for groceries." She gave no hint of the fact that she was uncommonly flush because her benefits had been accumulating while she was touring the galaxy with the greys.
"We take commissions," Dean told her, but not very enthusiastically. He meant that he and his mates would shoplift to order, but she couldn't blame him for not getting overexcited at the thought of yet another trip to M&S. He was only offering because he had to follow orders.
"That's okay," she said. "Oxfam will be fine."
"You're not a tart, then?" the child commented, showing off his powers of deduction. "Perhaps as well. Tricks won't come up here."
"The stairs would be a disincentive," Molly conceded, although she was pretty sure that wasn't what he meant.
"You get a good view of the races from the window," Dean observed as he moved away, evidently feeling that he'd done his duty. "Better be careful not to see too much, though. Might be seeing you around, if you can hang on longer than usual."
