Binary Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  an imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2014 Stephanie Saulter

  The moral right of Stephanie Saulter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78087 892 8 (TPB)

  ISBN 978 1 78087 894 2 (EBOOK)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  and

  www.jofletcherbooks.com

  For Anna and Alison,

  who wanted more

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  FESTIVAL

  Chapter 1

  AWAKENING

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  UPBRINGING

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  DIVERGENCE

  PROPOSITION

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  INHERITANCE

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  EDUCATION

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  DISCONNECTION

  Chapter 13

  CONJUNCTIONS

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  QUESTIONS

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  REVOLVING

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  PLANNING

  Chapter 20

  FIRESTORM

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  LEGACY

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  ESCAPE

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  WINGS

  Chapter 28

  EPIPHANY

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  SCORCHED

  REMNANT

  Chapter 31

  PHOENIX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FESTIVAL

  1

  We are a split and splintered species. Every pivot-point of need and creed proves the ease with which we fracture; every heartfelt reunion warns against its own necessity. The lines of our division are as many and varied as the sins of our ancestors and the accidents of history; as varied as the lines on the palm of Mikal Varsi’s hand, double-thumbed and huge at the end of a three-foot-long arm, as he raises it and takes the oath.

  His eyes, split-lidded like a lizard’s, blink slowly as he listens to the solemn proclamation of the clerk, stumbling over her words a little as she gazes up and up to his face, wondering as she does so if her tiny part in this moment will be remembered; and wondering also, fleetingly and with guilt, whether posterity will smile upon the memory, or revile her for it. Then he opens his mouth, an ordinary mouth, a mouth she has already learned is no less quick with smiles than with wit, and in a gentle, nasal voice repeats after her just as he should, and she thinks, Well that wasn’t so bad.

  She turns to set aside the edicts he has sworn to uphold, and he turns aside to the woman who stands behind him, a woman whose height and hands and eyes are steadfastly normal and who would, moreover, tell you that her heart is too; though there are still many who think this unlikely, for she has given both it and her name to a gem, a man designed for service and built for labour. He bends now and the long arm wraps around her body, and the thumbs on either side of that well-lined palm squeeze her shoulder as she tips her head back to smile up at him and receive his kiss. There is applause from his fellow councillors and hearty laughter all round the chamber, but the clerk thinks she sees a hint of her own secret worry flit across more than a few faces.

  And then he steps off the platform, eight towering feet of genetically modified humanity moving to take its place for the first time among the elect of the city; and they part for him like a sea, and like the sea close behind him once again.

  *

  Aryel Morningstar watched until Mikal had settled into his seat at the horseshoe-shaped council table from which London had been governed since the dawn of what had then been called the twentyfirst century. The era had since been relegated, with distaste and a considerable suggestion of blame, to the third decade BS – Before Syndrome, the last generation to precede catastrophe. She often mused on how little had changed since then, and how much.

  When the formal welcomes concluded without incident and they moved on to the tedium of minutes and motions she flicked her tablet to standby and stepped out of the column’s shadow, enjoying the mid-morning warmth that radiated off the ancient stone of the cathedral. She was high up, standing on the circular balcony that ringed the dome, a place normally inaccessible to all but the few ecclesiastical staff who remained. Had any other gem, or norm for that matter, reached it unchallenged, the consternation and embarrassment of the custodians would have been intense.

  That the rules did not apply to her – anywhere really, but especially not here – was a fact acknowledged at so base and basic a level that formal confirmation was neither necessary nor expected. Her gaze slipped idly past the discreetly placed and probably derelict security vidcam, grateful for this stolen moment of sunlit quiet. The low hum of the streets drifted up to her, but her view was fixed on the river, old Father Thames rolling slow, slate-grey and imperturbable. Her eyes, eagle-sharp and attuned to movement, caught the ripple and a flash of green as a pair of gillungs broke the surface, got their bearings and submerged again.

  Visitors probably, in town for the Festival.

  She had much to do herself, and could expect it all to take far longer than was strictly speaking necessary, given the added responsibilities of profile. But Mikal’s ascension to the city council was a milestone that deserved to be marked, a victory that would have been unthinkable not that many years before and a validation which still bathed the residents of the Squats in a slightly stunned satisfaction. She had worked as hard for it as any of them, and with the added complication of fending off suggestions that the candidate should instead have been her. She knew better, as did Mikal himself.

  ‘It’s not that I want to be in the spotlight,’ he’d said. ‘But it can’t only be you, all of the time. We need to really test how things are for the rest of us, and we need someone who can be a bellwether. Now I tick all their boxes for outsize, ugly, scary-looking gem, and they know I came up under the gemtechs. But the point is, they do know me. My abilities aren’t mysterious, they know I was a factory model. They know my cognition and mannerisms fall within the standard range, they know I’ve got experience running a community, they know I’m married. To a norm cop.’

  ‘I know they know. And they haven’t been kind about it so far. Do you and Sharon really want to put yourselves through that again? Because you’d be perfect, Mik, but what it would do to you …’

  ‘What it would do to us it’s already done. And we’re
still standing.’

  So it had been decided, and the campaign proved as bruising as she had predicted. Scrupulously proper public discourse had been leavened with whispered, withering, back-alley nastiness. The vitriol levelled at Sharon Varsi was muted and reduced this time, but no less vicious. She had rolled her eyes, set her jaw and stood up to it with a fortitude that made Aryel’s eyes prickle.

  It was Eli Walker, carefully monitoring the tides of opinion on the streams, who first observed that he thought the naysayers had overreached, tipped the balance of acceptability and triggered instead a groundswell of opprobrium. It was a phenomenon they’d seen before. He looked keenly at her as he said it, as though expecting her to declare herself unsurprised.

  She was indeed less so than the others, but they were still all astonished when he won.

  Now she considered the impact of those few minutes in the council chamber on the people they represented, and thought about what it must mean to Mikal himself, only a few years emancipated; and to Sharon. It was nearby, no more than a couple of minutes’ flight across the river and downstream, and she could have been there to share the moment with them. But then she would have been unable to prevent the inevitable shift of focus from Mikal to herself.

  So she had stayed away, allowing Mik to shine without the competition of her own strange and omnipresent spotlight. If there had been any subtleties of reaction in the chamber she’d missed them; but her presence would have skewed the responses anyway. So much that happened now had become so difficult for her to see.

  Eli had been there. She would ask him later what he thought.

  She slipped the tablet into its squeeze-pocket on her thigh and grabbed hold of the stone balustrade, stepping into a chink in its richly carved surface and levering herself up. Her other foot found the top of the rail, and she balanced easily there for a moment.

  Sunlight glinted off bright bronze-coloured feathers as the first shouts came up from below. She spread her wings and leaned forward, falling into the wind, and angled to follow the gillungs up the river.

  *

  Further downstream, another woman also watched and pondered the significance of the morning’s events. She too had been less surprised than many, although she had both amused and startled herself with the surge of reflexive envy she’d felt that the first gem to attain such status had been the product of a competitor. Such distinctions hardly mattered any more. More important was the impact on her own intentions, and she considered the matter carefully. On the face of it Mikal Varsi, né Recombin, should have little bearing on her plans, but she’d been wrong about such things before.

  She rose from her desk, an elegantly sculptural piece made of wood engineered to grow in precisely the flowing, convoluted shapes that would render it both beautiful and functional, and walked over to the gently curving window that formed the back wall of her office. Her view was vast, towers of steel and turrets of stone and glass pinnacles stretching away in every direction. She caught a glimpse of the river between them, and a glint off the dome of the cathedral.

  Like everyone else in the city, she scanned the skies.

  She had seen many changes in her life, a life longer than most would guess. But there was something in this latest shift, in the election of Mikal Varsi and the insouciance of the gillungs and above all the flight of Aryel Morningstar, that felt indelible; less like a period to be weathered than one which heralded the beginning of an age.

  Her compatriots in the once monolithic gemtech world generally still decried it as a disgrace, or prophesied its derailment, or continued merely to wallow in a bewildered depression. She had worked hard to curb her own resentment and rethink the situation in terms of opportunity. She knew that a large part of what drove her on, what kept her focused and sharp, was the anger and excitement and bitterness she felt every time the winged woman soared over the city.

  Aryel Morningstar could not – should not – exist. All the manipulations of the human genome, even the most radical, had resulted only in variations on the basic mammalian body type – four limbs not six, except in those few dreadful cases where mistake or accident had replicated an existing pair to painful and useless effect. All the careful, clever splicing of the DNA of other species had been subtle, incorporating new attributes into extant body parts: hyperspectral eyesight, oxygen exchange in an aquatic environment, organ regeneration. Crafting wings greater than any bird had ever borne to spring from human shoulders, in a delicate, complicated double ball joint that existed nowhere in nature, was simply not possible.

  Yet it had been done, and in the doing, proved so many other certainties false.

  A soft chime sounded, directionless, and roused her from her brooding.

  ‘Yes?’

  The voice that responded was diffident, the undertone of apology for the interruption plain to hear.

  ‘The latest status report’s just come in, ma’am. From the new project? You said you wanted to know right away.’

  ‘Post it to my private stream. Immediately.’

  ‘Yes, Ms Klist. It’s been done.’

  She was already back at the desk, activating the holoscreen. After a beat that was just a second too long to signify close attention, as an afterthought, she said, ‘Thank you.’

  The unseen assistant knew better than to reply.

  AWAKENING

  It is a noise that comes back to her even now, in moments of fear or confusion, or sometimes in the instant of waking. She is never certain, then, if it is the lingering echo of a dream, or the grip of unguarded memory, or the memory perhaps of a dream dreamt long ago and never entirely shaken. It is a sound like the sea, a regular, implacable surge before the hissing retreat through shingle, incessant and foreboding. With that rushing, metronomic threat comes a waft of cold, the chill of bare skin dusted by a light draught that smells of nothing; an empty, antiseptic cleanness.

  At some distance she cannot measure, over the steady bellows sound of the surf, a baby begins to wail.

  There is light, finally, and the surprise of not having noticed its absence; but it is no more than a dull murk of blurred shapes that refuse definition. It adds little to her understanding. She wishes for something – warmth perhaps, or comfort – and another shadow flails feebly in the dimness before her. She thinks later that it might be her own hand. It slides out of her vision and she feels it subside onto the thinly cushioned surface upon which she lies.

  She cannot tell whether the failure of illumination is due to a weakness in the light itself, or that it falls upon eyes that cannot yet see.

  2

  Eli was stopped twice on his way out of the venerable, bulbous city council building; once by a blushing sociology student with colour-streaked hair stammering out her admiration, and again by a newstream vidcam crew looking for a learned sound-bite on the latest entry to the city’s political pantheon. When they realised he was accompanied by Sharon Varsi, trailing a little behind as she finished listening to messages on her earset, they abandoned him practically in mid-sentence. He shrugged, cocked an eyebrow and a grin at her over their shoulders, and escaped outside.

  The riverwalk was buzzing with activity. He leaned against the guardrail, watching a group of gillungs and norms on a nearby pier as they signalled to a small tender that was helping to position an airwalk circuit. The inflated corridor began as a platform at the end of the pier, before it sloped gently away to become the entrance to a tunnel that projected out into the channel. He could see the buoys that marked its progress as it curved away upriver.

  Some crucial decision made, the tender stood off as the waterbreathing gems slipped into the river, submerging to swim out to an anchor point while their norm compatriots paralleled their progress from inside the airwalk. He quickly lost sight of the gillungs’ shimmering lime-green hair in the bright sunshine glinting off the water’s surface, and turned around to look for Sharon.

  She emerged from behind the curved glass of the building and hurried over to him. ‘Sor
ry about that.’

  ‘Fine by me. Were they all right?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sweet as one of Bal’s plum pies. Everyone’s being just lovely, now.’ She sighed and shook her head, leaning on the rail beside him. ‘That’s not fair of me, really. UrbanNews are always pretty okay.’

  ‘Unlike some of the others.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She was distracted, staring out at the airwalk. ‘I thought this would’ve been ready by now.’

  ‘It’s bigger than I expected.’

  ‘Mik told me they want to showcase more than just the technology – they’ve expanded the original design so as you move further beneath the surface there’s room for them to demonstrate all the different kinds of things they’re starting to do, beyond just farming and fishing and foraging. He says the gillungs want it to be an immersive experience. Pun very much intended, of course.’

  Eli laughed. Mikal’s fondness for wordplay, already well known to his friends, had proved a surprising hit in the campaign. ‘How is he today? Really?’

  ‘Really? He’s fine. You know Mik. Taking it in stride. There’s nothing they can throw at him in terms of council business that he won’t be able to handle, not after five years running the Squats. As for the rest of it—’ She shrugged. ‘He only really gets pissed off when they come after me. Everything else washes right off him. He’s had to put up with worse than a few Reversionists being nasty to us on the streams.’

  Eli nodded, although privately he thought that they remained more than a few; and suspected that Sharon thought so too. Outright opposition to the desegregation of gems had largely faded away, drowned out by horror and remorse in the wake of the fundamentalist violence that first brought both her and Mikal to public notice. Archive vids of the no-nonsense police sergeant and the giant gem, desperately trying to help survivors and impose order in the chaotic aftermath of the worst such attack, were reposted with new rounds of heated commentary every time their union was criticised, or doubts raised about the wisdom of the new world order. The memory of those events kept even the more extreme Reversionists permanently in defensive mode.