Part 23 (1/2)

I snuck out of the bathroom and headed for the dark stairs.

Was this how Luis had felt about the monster? And now Swan? Was the monster clouding up the air around me with irresistible pheromones? Or was it doing something directly to my grey matter? The urge to toss it away rose up in me again, like the first thump in your stomach when you know you're going to thunder and nothing can stop it. But something did stop it. The ugly fear that I was being reprogrammed faded into the background, beaten by my need to get the monster somewhere safe and start feeding it breakfast cereal.

Swan met me at the bottom of the steps. I was so wrapped up in my furry armful that she just stepped out of nowhere and hit me across the back of the shoulders with a baseball bat. All my muscles stopped working for long enough that she could take hold of her alien baby and shove me back onto the uncarpeted stairs.

The thump of wooden angles into my spine seemed to break the monster's spell. Swan gripped the thing tight against her winter coat, and I had no jealousy, no urge to take it back from her. I could have got the baseball bat out of her awkward grip in a moment, but instead I just lay there, propped up on my elbows, waiting to see what she'd do next.

Swan cussed me out in no uncertain terms and added, 'I'm going to ruin you, freak. Just ruin you.'

'Screw you, lady.'

'You must've realised the call at the office would warn me.'

'I can't believe you just left it there. Not with everybody that wants it.'

'You'd never have got it out of the house,' snorted Swan.

'Is that right,' I said, hauling myself to my feet. I was in her face, but she didn't so much as take a step back.

I am lying on that second-floor bed in Los Angeles, naked as a snake, suns.h.i.+ne slanting in hot white beams across the room. I am yelping in time with Heart of the Sunrise Heart of the Sunrise. The record player is under the bed, speakers tipped onto their backs, so the sound is coming to me from another planet, through a wall of springs and mattress and bedclothes and my own skinny, helpless flesh. Each time the guitar starts its merciless climb and fall, like a race car driver accelerating, I am shouting out CHRIST JESUS and bursting frozen sweat through every pore. I'm riding a bull, naked, bareback, I'm flying and leaping over as it tosses me away again and again, circling round to land on its back, like a piece of stretched elastic snapping home. The bull will not stop, its buck and plunge matching the rise and fall of the guitar. The acid I have taken has turned out to be angel dust and everyone I know in the whole city is peeking in through the crack of the bedroom door.

I landed back in the present again, sitting on my a.s.s at the bottom of the stairs. Swan and her baby were gone. Every inch of me was soaked, as though I had been covered in snow and thawed out. For a paranoid moment I was sniffing my own sleeves, nervous that Swan had doused me with petrol. After a moment I realised I was covered in sweat, my hair heavy with it and glued to my face.

I had never, never been able to remember that s.h.i.+t before.

People had told me a little about it, looking at the floor while they hinted at what had happened that afternoon. Now I had all the details in hi-fi stereo Technicolor.

I could hear Swan upstairs, cooing to her little mutant baby in the bathtub. I disappeared out the front door, not giving a d.a.m.n about cameras, and shot through.

90.

The Doctor bit my head off when I confessed. 'The Savant could have done irreparable damage to your brain!' So could the angel dust, I thought, but I kept that to myself. 'It's obviously bonded deeply with Swan. It was just beginning that process with Luis when she stole it away from him.

Threatened with being s.n.a.t.c.hed from her side, it responded with a mental attack. A very low-level one, happily, for your peace of mind.' That was low-level? I was there, absolutely there, as though every molecule of the event had been recorded somewhere in my body and played back like a tape.

'Why do you imagine we simply didn't knock the door down and purloin the component? Why do you think the Eridani haven't done it themselves? No, now that the Savant has fallen into the proverbial wrong hands, we've got to handle this with the proverbial kid gloves.'

He seemed to have run out of steam. I had been sitting on the arm of my sofa through the whole speech. Now I slid down onto the cus.h.i.+ons. My head was freezing cold after walking through the winter air with my hair full of sweat. In a few minutes I'd take a hot bath and try to forget about the whole thing.

I said, 'I still don't get your angle, Doc'

'What?' he huffed.

'What's in it for you? Besides whatever the Eridani are paying.' He sniffed at that, like it was an insult. 'I could really believe you'd do this even if they didn't have a red cent. For a good cause. Or Just to put Swan in her place.'

'That certainly needs doing,' he said archly. I thought of Swan's speech about the food chain. The Doctor was making a mess of the whole concept of stronger beats weaker, winner takes all. I wondered what kind of card player he was. 'Peri was right,' sighed the Doctor. 'In the end, this is about taking a lost child home. An enormously dangerous child.'

'I gotta tell you the thing looked perfectly happy with Swan to me.'

'She simply cannot care for it,' said the Doctor. 'No matter how slavishly devoted she may become to its needs, only the Eridani have that expertise. There may be nutrients it requires that aren't even available on Earth it could be starving slowly to death for want of them. Its neurological development will already have been stunted by lack of contact with the rest of the components, particularly the control unit.' By now he was talking more to himself than to me. 'No. We must restore it to the Eridani, whatever their purpose for it.'

'Couldn't we get them to hand over the manual or something?'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. 'And do you fancy raising the Savant to maturity?'

I hauled myself up off the sofa. 'The only thing I want in my bathtub right now is me.'

Swan was as good as her word. She phoned my editor at home, where he was relaxing with his wife and three kids, and told him all about my adventures in LA. She convinced him to check the news archives over his modem. He spent half an hour digging up the little news item about how I'd slugged the editor of a well-known west-coast newspaper.

Swan called him back the moment he logged out. 'Well?'

'You're right about the a.s.sault charges,' he said. 'But there is no way that man is a f.a.g.'

'You saw what the paper said.'

'I don't care care what the paper said. I've met three of Chick's girlfriends.' what the paper said. I've met three of Chick's girlfriends.'

'Camouflage,' she spat.

'Bulls.h.i.+t. Maybe one lady, sure, but three? Now if someone in San Fran called the man a p.u.s.s.y, I can understand why he might take a swing at them.'

'Better make sure he doesn't take a swing at your a.s.s.'

'You've got a dirty mouth, ma'am. What'd Chick ever do to You?'

'I'd be more worried about what he might do to you,' said Swan, and slammed down her phone.

Swan ground her fists into her temples. Nothing was working. Nothing was helping. The Doctor seemed unmoved by her threat to destroy his young proteges life. Her threat to wreck mine bad hit a dead end. There wasn't the slightest hint of a shred of information on the network about her precious windfall, and even it was out there somewhere, the Doctor would pester and plague her every step.

She ought to be on top of the world, and instead she was boxed in on every side.

Bob could be crushed simply by pressing charges. There must be more to my story than she had been able to find, something she could use to turn my editor's stomach the way it had done in Los Angeles. And the Doctor; what could she find out about this Doctor, what was there about him that he would never want the authorities to know? She would dig and sc.r.a.pe and claw until she ruined us.

It didn't take the Doctor long to find Luis Perez. He traced the MUD connection back to a forged university account, had a word with the sysadmin and got help tracing the connection back to a second forged account on another machine, and left a message in that account with a request for Luis to email him at Bob's account.

Luis asked for a meeting in a cafeteria in one of the Smithsonian buildings. It had a sort of conveyor belt on which the food went round and round, and you s.n.a.t.c.hed what you wanted. Kids stood next to it, watching all those desserts cruising past, just out of their reach.

The Doctor had insisted we all stay behind; he didn't want to intimidate the man and he wasn't sure if he was dangerous.

Bob and Peri protested a little, but it was obvious they were going to do as they were told. Not so me. I wasn't going to miss a thing.