Scale, p.11
Scale, page 11
“I win!” Idris announced triumphantly, pointing to the configuration of the pieces on the chessboard.
Sam made the effort to confirm the verdict; it was too late to reproach himself for being a world away for the game itself. “You win,” he agreed. “Congratulations.”
Noor arrived home, and Sam started cooking dinner. But he could not shake off the feeling that he was watching the whole scene from above, as part of some future recollection, or perhaps someone else’s version of his story, conjured to life in their own audience’s mind. The Mujrif family gathered for what seemed like an ordinary meal, little realizing that in a matter of days ...
But he did realize. That was the whole problem. Whatever was coming, it would not arrive unheralded. He didn’t know which choice would be better, or even which choice he would make in the end, but the dread he felt at this moment spread out across every possibility.
When Idris was in bed, Sam sat with Noor, listening to music on the radio.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” she asked. “I thought you were happy about your client’s sister. So is this a new case, or is the last one not over?”
Sam hadn’t wanted to infect her with his own malaise, but now that she’d confronted him he couldn’t stay silent.
When he’d finished explaining the situation, Noor said, “You have to tell someone. If they’re building the kind of weapon Yukio described, they can’t just be left unchecked.”
“I don’t have any evidence that they’re doing that.”
“Why have they built a bomb shelter on the riverbed, if they’re not planning a war?”
Sam had never thought of the structure that way, but he supposed it was one purpose it could serve. “A war against who, though? For what?”
“Against the other scales,” Noor replied. “For whatever they believe they’re entitled to. More land, more resources, more power.”
“Even if most people in D7 want those things, it doesn’t mean they want to go to war over them,” Sam protested.
“Of course not. But they can’t prevent a war, either, if they don’t know about it. If someone has a weapon so powerful that they don’t even need to raise an army, they can claim to be fighting for whoever they like, with or without their consent.”
“If this bomb makes them omnipotent, when will they be satisfied?” Sam asked glumly. “When they kick us all out and bring in the Scale Seven people from other cities to take our place?”
Noor said, “Separatism’s always ended in disaster; we all need too much from each other, and the smaller scales can only trade fast enough if they’re close to the rest. Give us each our own country, and we’d all be vastly poorer.”
“So ... ?”
“So they might want more land, but not all of it,” she reasoned.
Sam gave up trying to make sense of the politics. “What if they punish me, for breaking the deal? Punish this whole family? I can try to act anonymously, but they already know I’m involved. Even if they really did fall for the chewing gum on the wharf, the fact that I told them where to find the documents makes it obvious that I could have copied them myself.”
Noor pondered this. “Are they still tailing you?”
“I’m not sure. They might be.”
“Around the clock?”
“I don’t know.”
“The navy have no office in Mauburg,” she said. “If you want to take the evidence to them in person, you’d need to go to Wendale, at least.”
“That’s true.” Sam saw no prospect of McKenna helping him, and trying to convince anyone from afar, with a series of phone calls from public booths and a package of documents sent in the mail, would probably be equally futile.
“So we wait until they expect us to be sleeping,” Noor suggested, “then we catch a train to Wendale. All three of us.”
Sam didn’t know how to respond; he had no objection to this proposal, but he would never have dared make it himself. Noor had taken the landscape of wildly uncertain threats and impossible compromises that had filled his head since his meeting with Yukio and re-drawn it in her own mind as a clear, simple map with a few stark choices. Whether or not she was right about everything, at least she’d put an end to his paralysis.
“What about your classes?” he asked.
Noor laughed, and almost didn’t answer him, but then she realized he’d meant the question seriously. “I’ll phone the department once we reach Wendale, and arrange for someone to take over for me. And you can call Idris’s teacher. So if this all comes to nothing, we won’t be embarrassed at having skipped town without a word, for no reason.”
Sam said, “I’m still hoping it might come to nothing. Aren’t you?”
Noor thought for a moment. “Is everything you told me true?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Do you think Yukio was lying to you, or exaggerating how much he understood in those documents?”
“No.”
Noor said, “Then much as I’d like it to come to nothing, I really don’t see how it could.”
Chapter 21
When Sam had finished packing, he returned to Idris’s room, switched on the bedside lamp, and shook him gently by the shoulder.
“We’re going on a trip,” he said. “To Wendale.”
Idris squeezed his eyes shut against the glare. “No, I’m tired.”
“I’ll carry you, and you can sleep in my arms, but you need to get dressed first.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Do you want to wake up on the train in your pajamas?”
“No.”
“Then you need to wake up for a few seconds now and get dressed.”
Idris said nothing. Sam pulled the blankets away and lifted him into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Idris shrugged out of his grip and set about completing the task himself, muttering surreal insults without daring to throw in any of the forbidden imprecations he’d surely learned by now. “Paddle brain! Pig stitcher! Puddle huffer!”
“Petal poisoner,” Sam retorted. “Plantain peddler.”
Idris stared at him contemptuously, but finished lacing his shoes.
“Was that so hard? Now go to the toilet.”
“You go to the toilet.”
“I already have.”
“I don’t want to.”
Sam poured water from the jug on the bedside table into a glass and back, until it produced the desired effect. When Idris returned, Sam scooped him up into his arms and said, “I’m sorry, I know this is annoying. But we need to do it.”
Idris stretched his arms out at odd angles in a short-lived gesture of defiance, before going limp and resting his head against Sam’s neck.
Sam met up with Noor in the front room, and took hold of one of the bags.
“Do you think they’re watching the house?” Noor asked. Sam looked out the window; there was no one on the street, and he was pretty sure that none of his neighbors would have taken in a lodger whose sole activity was surveillance.
“No,” he replied. He hadn’t spotted anyone since Cara had been released, so G8 had either dialed down their expenditure on him, or hired a whole new crew who were better at staying hidden.
The trams were scarce at this hour, so they walked all the way to the station on the northern part of the border. Sam gazed across the line at the second platform with its larger benches, signs and ticket booth – and many more people waiting; it was the middle of D3’s activity cycle.
When the train pulled into the station, the two front carriages were like entire buildings on wheels, but they slid away into the gloom beyond the platform. The Scale Four carriage was almost fully occupied, but not remotely crowded, with its quota of seats divided between four rows that spanned the entire width of the tracks, leaving arm’s-length gaps in all directions. Sam and Noor found the closest pair of seats, and Sam kept Idris draped across his chest. As he waited for the D3 passengers to board, he tried to picture a fusion-powered super-train built of Scale Seven metals that could carry as many people as could squeeze inside, and then whisk them to their destination in what even the smallest of them would consider a brief journey. Was he over-reacting to what he’d learned from the documents, and putting all the benefits at risk? But it was G8 who had brought suspicion down upon themselves – and the bulk of their discoveries need not be lost. If the weapons Yukio feared could stay buried, while everything else was shared across the world, there could be no better outcome.
The train finally departed, heading west through D3 and D2, but Sam was too far from the window to get much of a view of the city. At the next stop, the last in Mauburg, the platform was so long that it accommodated the entire train, and Sam dozed off watching the shins of D1’s aspiring passengers as they inched their way toward their carriage.
When he woke they were out in the darkness of the countryside, with the windows showing nothing but the reflection of the interior. Idris stirred, and Sam handed him a flask of water.
“Where are we?” Idris asked.
“On our way to Wendale.”
“Why?”
“To see somewhere different for a change.”
“What about school?”
“You won’t miss too many lessons,” Sam promised. He was about to add, lamely, and it will be fun, but he cut himself off in time.
Idris handed back the flask and closed his eyes again, scowling. Lying to him was appalling, but what was the alternative? Telling him that in Mauburg he’d be at risk of being kidnapped and taken to the bottom of the river? Telling him they were trying to stop people from building a bomb as bright as the sun?
The journey lasted almost an hour. When the train stopped in Wendale’s District Seven, it took off again almost at once. By the time they reached the D4/D3 station, District Four was bustling with activity, and Idris was fully awake. They had to queue to use the toilet in the station – there’d been one on the train, but most passengers had slept through the journey – then the family sat down for breakfast in a café.
“Where are we going to live?” Idris enquired, eyeing the toast in front of him dubiously before taking a bite.
“In a hotel,” Noor replied.
“But what will we do?”
“There are plenty of things to see,” Noor offered valiantly. “You’ve never seen the ocean.”
“I’ve seen the river. It’s all just water.”
“There’s a museum,” Sam recalled.
“We could have come here in the school holidays,” Idris countered.
“I have some work to do here,” Sam said. “And I didn’t want to be away from you and your mother, so I brought you along.”
Idris knew better than to ask him questions about work, but this sudden revelation only seemed to increase his skepticism.
Sam asked the waiter where they could find a hotel. He’d last visited the city more than a year and a half ago, to attend a training course, and though he could still picture the building he’d stayed in, he had no idea where it was.
They walked to the place the waiter had recommended, and booked into a family room with two beds. When they’d unpacked, Noor told Idris, “We’ll take a look at the museum, while your father gets his work out of the way. What do you think?”
“All right,” Idris replied, without much enthusiasm.
Sam said, “I’ll meet you there when I’m done, and we can go and get lunch.”
When they’d left, he put together a copy of the G8 documents and the sonar traces from the river. Flipping through the pages, he wondered if anyone else would see what Yukio had seen in them. And the navy had already laughed off his submarine story once; maybe they could laugh off Lea’s riverbed scan as nothing but a freakish geological formation.
But there was no point having second thoughts. Whatever harm he’d risked by coming here would already have been set in motion; deciding it had all been a waste of time and rushing back home wouldn’t make his flight from Mauburg less suspicious. He had no choice now but to go through with the plan.
Sam asked at the front desk for a tourist map of the city. The Wendale Naval Base was on a peninsula that could be reached from any of the districts, and while the map showed the bulk of the complex marked off limits, there was a part protruding out from behind the red dotted lines into the civilian world, including an Enquiries Office and Recruitment Center.
He left the hotel and walked down to the ocean road. An underpass beneath a fourteen-lane highway took him to a broad pedestrian track that weaved along beside the dunes, raised high enough to let him watch the waves breaking in the moonlight. Someone small ran by and vanished in the shadows; a little later he found himself striding past a Scale Two woman.
He caught sight of the silhouettes of two ships, docked beside the peninsula, and then he came to a large illuminated sign spelling out in Panscala and seven dialects exactly what facility he was approaching, and what punishments he would be liable to receive if he strayed onto forbidden ground. A second sign, a few meters on, offered an effusive welcome to potential recruits.
The Enquiries Office was large enough to accommodate Scale One visitors, and it had a single huge entrance with an automatic door that slid aside as Sam approached. Inside there were reception desks at seven heights, albeit not all currently occupied. It was well into D4 opening time, but with nobody of his own scale apparent, Sam approached the man at the Scale Five desk and greeted him in a suitable pitch.
“How can I help you, sir?” the man replied. “Would you prefer to use a rescaler?”
“No, I can understand you fine, thanks. Can you follow me?”
The man replied, “I can, sir,” without a trace of condescension, but Sam recalled belatedly that naval policy would almost certainly have seen him serving on a vessel with at least three scales, quite apart from the obvious mix present at his current posting.
Sam said, “I’d like to see an intelligence officer. I have some information that I believe raises a security issue.”
His interlocutor didn’t blink. “Are you able to provide any further details?”
Sam was more afraid of sounding crazed before he’d had a proper hearing than he was of downplaying the urgency of the matter. “I’d prefer to disclose everything to an intelligence officer.”
“Of course, sir. Please take a seat.” The man gestured at a bench a short distance away.
Sam complied. The man spoke to someone on his phone, then left his desk and approached Sam to inform him, “It might be a few minutes, sir. There’s water if you need it.” He gestured at a drinking fountain, a combined unit that dispensed all seven kinds at seven different heights.
A few minutes was maddeningly vague, but Sam was still glad he’d come here in the flesh and hadn’t tried to do everything from Mauburg.
There was no one else in the lobby apart from the staff, who seemed to be busying themselves with paperwork and taking occasional phone calls. Eventually he heard a door open; he looked up to see a Scale Six woman emerge. She exchanged a glance with the man at the desk, then she approached Sam.
“I’m Lieutenant Chu,” she said, a small device she was carrying bridging the octaves between them.
“Sam Mujrif.” There was no point pleading for anonymity; if his testimony leaked out, G8 would have no trouble identifying the source.
“Would you come with me, please?”
Sam followed her back the way she’d come, through a massive doorway into a vast corridor. There were people of every scale coming and going, like a much busier version of the coastal path. The palatial architecture was as exhilarating as it was absurd, wildly oversized for everyone but the largest occupants, and yet scrupulously accommodating to everyone’s needs, inasmuch as they could be reconciled.
Lieutenant Chu led him into what he supposed was a meeting room, with nests of chairs and tables of every kind, and guided him to a configuration of furniture that she might have set up in advance, with seats for both of them beside a table at a height that either of them could access.
Chu asked for his contact details; he told her where he was staying in Wendale, and gave his phone number in Mauburg as well.
“How long will you be in town?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.” It seemed unwise to add that that would probably depend on how quickly the threat he was about to disclose could be dealt with.
“You have information that you think we should hear,” Chu said.
“Yes.” Sam placed his dossier on the table, then he set about recounting the history of Cara Leon’s case. He had no idea if he was capable of picking up any signs of skepticism from Chu’s body language, but she seemed to be listening patiently and seriously, notwithstanding the disproportionate cost to her time, and neither the hints and rumors of a submarine, nor the fully documented sonar traces of whatever lay on the riverbed, elicited any change in her demeanor.
He finished by describing his limited understanding of the contents of the G8 report – without mentioning his scientific consultant by name – raising the possibility of weaponising the fusion technique, but taking care to explain that he had no evidence that any such thing had even been attempted.
“Do you need these back, or can we keep them?” Chu asked, gesturing at the papers.
“You can keep them.”
“All right. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.” She rolled up the dossier and rose from her chair, then gestured to Sam to accompany her.
In the corridor, it took him a moment to realize that she was leading him back to reception.
“Don’t you want to ask me about anything?”
Chu said, “Your testimony was recorded. We’ll contact you if we have any questions.”
“But do you believe what I’ve told you?” he demanded, trying to stay calm. Somehow he’d only imagined two possible outcomes from the meeting: being laughed out of the building, or being offered protective custody, if not a new identity in another country.
“We’ll assess everything carefully,” Chu promised. “But I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we can’t discuss any matters of security with the public.”
