Zero history

“Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven seconds, in most cases.”

›››

Fiona’s dress was a seamless tube, lustrous black jersey. She was wearing it with the top rolled down, forming a sort of band across her breasts, her shoulders bare. A gift from her mother, she said, who’d gotten it from an associate editor at French Vogue. Milgrim knew almost nothing about her mother, other than that she’d once been involved with Bigend, but he’d always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating.

He wore his freshly dry-cleaned tweed jacket and whipcord trousers, but with a Hackett shirt, no extraneous cuff-buttons.

Cocktails were being served in the ballroom, so-called, which ordinarily was the main dining room. The walls were decorated with quasi-Constructivist murals of ekranoplans, looking, as Milgrim thought they somewhat actually did, like the Pan American Airways Flying Clippers of the 1940s, but with truncated wings and that strange canard that supported the jet engines. As he and Fiona descended the spiral stairway, he saw Aldous and the other driver towering elegantly above the assembled passengers, many of whom Milgrim hadn’t seen before, as he and Fiona had been spending most of their time in the cabin. There was Rausch, too, his black suit rumpled, his matte hair reminding Milgrim of the stuff Chandra had used on Ajay, though with a different style of application.

As they reached the deck, Aldous arrived at the bottom of the stairs. “Hello,” said Milgrim, not having seen Aldous since that night in the City. “Thanks for getting us out of that. Hope it wasn’t too hard on you, after.”

“Bigend’s silk,” said Aldous, with an elegant shrug, which Milgrim knew meant lawyer. “And the courier,” he said to Fiona, winking.

“Hullo, Aldous.” She smiled, then turned away to greet someone Milgrim didn’t know.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Milgrim, lowering his voice, glancing across the ballroom at the polished head of the other driver, “about the testing. It’s been a while.”

“What testing?”

“Urinalysis,” said Milgrim.

“I think they discontinue that. Gone from the call sheets. But everything’s changing, now.”

“At Blue Ant?”

Aldous nodded. “New broom,” he said, gravely, then nodded to his own earpiece, and slipped silently away.

“We found your mouthwash,” said Rausch. “In New York. Sending it to your cabin.” He looked unhappy with Milgrim, but then he always did.

“Aldous says that things are changing at Blue Ant. ‘New broom,’ he said.”

Rausch’s shoulders rose. “Everyone who matters,” he said, “who’s made the cut, is on this plane.”

“It’s not a plane,” said Milgrim.

“Whatever it is,” said Rausch, irritably.

“Do you know when we reach Iceland?”

“Tomorrow morning. A lot of this has just been cruising, breaking the thing in.”

“I’m almost out of medication.”

“That’s all been placebos for the past three months. I suppose the vitamins and supplements were real.” Rausch watched him carefully, savoring his reaction.

“Why tell me now?”

“Bigend told everyone to afford you full human status. And I quote. Excuse me.” He scooted away into the crowd.

Milgrim slid his hand inside his jacket, to touch the almost-empty bubble-pack. No more tiny purple notations of date and time. “But I like a placebo,” he said to himself, and then there was a burst of applause.

The Dottirs and their unpleasant-looking father were descending the spiral, down the thick steps of frosted glass. Milgrim knew, via Fiona, that their album had just gone something. Ermine-haired and glittering, they stepped down, on either side of their glum Dottirs-father. Who Fiona said now owned, in partnership with Bigend, though in some arcane and largely undetectable way, a great deal of Iceland. Most of it, really. It had been Bigend, she said, who’d sold those young Icelandic fiscal cowboys on the idea of internet banking in the first place. “He put them up to it,” she’d said, in the cabin, in Milgrim’s arms. “He knew exactly what would happen. Out of their heads on E, most of them, which helped.”

A toast was being poured. He hurried to find Fiona and his glass of Perrier.

As he took her hand, Pamela Mainwaring walked quickly past, headed in Bigend’s direction.

“Hi, Mum,” said Fiona.

Pamela smiled, nodded, made the briefest possible eye contact with Milgrim, and continued on.

87. THE OTHER SIDE

Clockwise, this dream: eighteenth-century marble, winding, worn stone unevenly waxy, tones of smoker’s phlegm caught in its depths, profiles of each step set with careful segments of something lifeless as plaster, patching old accidents. Like the scribed, transected, stapled sections of a beloved limb, returned from voyaging: surgery, disaster, a climb up stairs taller still than these. Westernmost, the spiral. Above the lobby, the stripes of Robert’s shirt, the Turk’s head atop the stapler, above the subtly rude equine monkey-business in the desk’s carved thicket, she climbs.

To this floor unvisited, unknown, carpet flowered, faded, antediluvian, beneath incandescent bulbs, an archaic controlled combusion of filaments. Walls hung with madly varied landscapes, unpeopled, each haunted, however dimly, by the spectral finger of the Burj Khalifa.

And at the far end of a vast, perhaps endless room, in a pool of warm light, a figure, seated, in a suit of Klein Blue. As it turns, pale fur, muzzle rouged, the wooden painted teeth-

She wakes beside Garreth’s slow breathing, in their darkened room, the sheets against her skin.