The Long War

The minds hiding behind the various pseudonyms Nelson found himself staring at among the Quizmasters were not stupid. They could not be, given the high bar set for entrance in the first place; indeed it sometimes felt as if a membership of Mensa might just about qualify you to make the coffee for this particular metaphorical kaffee-klatch. Not stupid, no. But . . .

Nelson had met many people in different walks of life, and he thought he could read at least some of them. These men and women were bright, truly bright. But in some, even through the impersonal medium of the chat rooms, he sensed something dark and hidden, sometimes betrayed by the occasional comment, or curious turn of phrase. Envy, to start with. Paranoid suspicion, for another. A kind of seam of malevolence – a capacity for cold hatred – a capacity that needed an outlet, any outlet. A man like Black, who presented a public face, who could seem either an object of envy, or too good to be true and therefore deserving of suspicion, was an ideal target. This didn’t show itself often, no, but it was apparent to those who really watched other people.

And especially to a man who had grown up a black kid in South Africa, and had not forgotten the experience.

Anyhow, whatever you thought about Black, Nelson did like the Black Corporation, in all its wonderful and manifold manifestations. And in particular he liked the mysteries their various activities threw up for him to ponder over.

For example, as he had drifted somewhat aimlessly through the periphery of the information cloud that surrounded Black, he had started to notice how often the ‘Lobsang Project’ was mentioned. But it was always a dead end in any search, a link to nowhere. Lobsang: of course the name meant ‘big brain’ in Tibetan, which showed that somebody in the Black Corporation had not only a sense of humour but also some skills when it came to languages. But Lobsang was a personal name too, and, slowly, Nelson had come to envisage Lobsang as a person. A person to be tracked down. Him and his ‘Project’.

And now Nelson, all alone in this rather chilly rectory, with all eight screens windows to the world, smiled. For suddenly his search had borne fruit.

One of his screens filled up with an image of the airship Mark Twain, rather battle-worn after its now famous journey, being towed into what remained of Madison, Wisconsin, after the nuke attack ten years back: towed by Joshua Valienté and a young woman whom no one to Nelson’s knowledge had subsequently been able to identify.

Nelson was pretty sure that he’d seen just about everything that Joshua Valienté had brought back from the extraordinary voyage of the Mark Twain. The Black Corporation – in a gesture typical of Douglas Black – had dumped Godzillabytes of data from the voyage into the archive of any university that wanted it, for open public access and study. (Godzillabytes: Nelson had an irrational dislike of ‘petabytes’, the recognized term for a particular, and particularly large, wodge of data. Anything that sounded like a kitten’s gentle nip just didn’t have the moxie to do the job asked of it. ‘Godzillabytes’, on the other hand, shouted to the world that it was dealing with something very, very big . . . and possibly dangerous.)

Nelson had seen this particular clip, or variants of it from other camera angles, many times before, and he wondered why his search engines had thrown it up now. Watching, he saw that this bit of hasty amateur footage showed a scene where Valienté, in a radiation-exposure processing camp in West 1, seemed to be carrying a cat under one arm. Some bystander off-screen burst out laughing and called, ‘What’s that, the ship’s cat?’ And somebody else, almost certainly Valienté’s unknown companion though she was out of shot, called back, ‘Yeah, wiseass, and it can speak Tibetan.’

You had to listen very carefully to make out this piece of nonsense. But that word was evidently what the search had picked on: ‘Tibetan’, a subsidiary search tag from ‘Lobsang’, had brought this fragment of the complicated saga of the Mark Twain drifting to the surface for his attention.

What had the woman meant? Why use such a word, ‘Tibetan’, if it wasn’t somehow relevant? He had no idea yet where this was leading. But now he had a link between one of Black’s more high-profile projects, the Twain and its journey, and one of the most low-profile, Lobsang, embodied in that single word.

Of course the complete absence of any other link was itself suspicious.

For now the search was going no further; he was covering what he already knew. Nelson yawned, blinked and shut down the screens. There was a mystery here, he was sure, and he felt a tingle of anticipation at the prospect of following this trail further. And this was precisely why he was shedding his parochial duties: to have the time, while he had the resources and the strength, to follow such trails wherever they led him.