Anwar tried to stare through it. He’d been there while it was actually being fitted, and armed guards had been there ever since, so he knew nothing was behind it. Yet he still ramped up his senses in the hope that he might see or smell or hear something there. He didn’t, though he saw and smelt and heard rather more than he wanted of the other people crowding the room.
They wore a mixture of modern clothes and traditional robes and he saw the microscopic texture and weave of the fabrics, the tiny dust motes in their interstices. And smelt them, though they’d all been painstakingly laundered and pressed for the occasion. Their colours were different when seen microscopically, because colours didn’t really exist, they were only selective light filters.
And the textures of their faces, in unforgiving close-up: minute tips of embedded stubble despite careful shaving, or traceries of cracks in makeup carefully applied for the occasion. Hair smelling stale despite careful shampooing. Body odours, bad breath, sweat, and subcutaneous grease despite careful morning toiletries. Snatches of conversation, normally indistinguishable in the background murmur, now each one a separate and distinct thread, some benign and some embarrassing. Sexual liaisons were a regular feature of most summits and conferences, and of ten had more far-reaching results than the formal business itself.
This was how The Dead could step outside the world and perceive it as nobody else could: by ramping up their senses, for surveillance or combat. Sights and sounds and smells crowded Anwar. Each one was separate and distinct, and each one was already matched, in his memory, to a name and a face and a profile and an identity. More information than he wanted or needed. He powered down his senses, and saw and heard and smelt what everyone else did. The cool pleasant citrus air returned to his nostrils and the individual conversations sank into the background murmur.
It was now only a few minutes before 10:00, and the Signing Room was full. Delegates crowded into the main part, standing. Occasionally, spotting a photo opportunity, Zaitsev would smile or wave at someone, glancing to camera as he did so.
The media were at the back of the room, the other end from the panelled theatre set. Quite close, Anwar remembered, to where he’d put his bucket during his stay there. Cameras, mikes, lights were all angled towards the top table and the illusion of rectangular panelling behind it.
At one minute to 10:00 the top table party nodded to each other, and the room fell silent. Zaitsev took a deep breath and, exactly as 10:00 came around, smiled and began.
“Welcome,” he said. “It’s an unexpected path that has brought us here. A few days ago the path we’d chosen seemed impassable. Then we took another, and we’ve arrived at a place none of us would have thought possible.”
Humility, not triumphalism. A mere messenger, carrying something of greater import than his mere self. But Anwar noted the careful modulation of the voice, and the slight contrivance of the near-rhyming of Impassable and Possible.Still a good actor.
He continued, “You all know what happened yesterday: the new direction we took, and the Statement of Intent to confirm that new direction and our unanimous commitment to it. If you’ll permit me” (
He cleared his throat; looked around the room portentously; and began.
“The following communiqué on the United Nations summit on Water Rights was issued today,October 20,2060.
“The United Nations summit on Water Rights was convened by the Secretary-General and was held at the Conference Centre, New West Pier, Brighton from October 15 to October 19, 2060. Delegates unanimously agreed that the previously published Agenda should be set aside, and the following Statement of Intent was adopted by all those present:
“Brighton, October 20, 2060. We the undersigned—”
An explosion of dust and fragments, a tearing and rending of structural members, and the wall burst open. Not the wood-panel theatre-set wall whose construction Anwar had witnessed, but the original pearlescent white wall at the other end of the room.
Arden at last knew what she was looking for. But she hadn’t found it yet, and there wasn’t
She’d been playing it back for nearly two hours, since he last called her. Nothing. She played it back again, and there it was.
