Angela understood Sharon far better than Danny imagined. When Sharon called him on his new mobile, and he eventually passed the machine over to Angela, the invitation was accepted within seconds.
He met Sharon at the door when she arrived, half an hour later. They hugged, but it was a hug with an audience, so not entirely satisfactory.
"This is Angela," he said. "And Eric." He didn't introduce Frank's Aspiration. Eric was still making the final adjustments to the software so the touch-sensitivity of different sections of the screen changed over time. Danny had suggested it should be hidden away when Sharon arrived, but Angela said it wouldn't make any difference, and again she was right. Sharon must have recognised the purpose of the strange device, but she ignored it.
Angela and Sharon shook hands. Danny watched this first meeting closely but found it difficult to read. They were very casual, like old
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friends meeting in some kind of official capacity and obliged to go through the formality of a handshake, even though they'd had a quiet lunch together a few hours before. Either that or they instantly hated each other. It was hard to tell which, like seeing photographs of people crying and laughing and trying to work out one from the other. Certainly they didn't bother with much eye contact or small-talk.
"Right," said Angela. "Sharon and I need to discuss the world."
That statement didn't inspire anybody to comment or action, so Angela added, "Danny, there's a electrician's screwdriver set in the steeple. Do you mind getting it for me?"
Danny recalled his last visit to the steeple.
The room was tiny and he'd looked at every item in there. "I don't remember seeing one."
"But the set definitely exists, at least in a virtual sense, and performs an essential function, even if it can't be seen. That's a classic virtual function, as any programmer would recognise."
"Ah, you want me to leave the room."
"Oh, you can be so direct, you English.
Whoa! Eric, stay where you are. You're nearly finished, I don't want you stopping now."
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Danny looked at Sharon, who half-smiled at him. Apart from mild discomfort, that smile held no message.
"I'll shout when we're finished," said Angela, as he headed upstairs. "And don't tease the camera."
***
It was the first thing he looked at as he entered the steeple room, and unless he was mistaken the eyes briefly turned to him, maybe seeing him in their peripheral vision or noticing a difference in brightness or shade. Then they returned to their vigil of his home. He looked down the line of sight of the binoculars held by the hand, looked down at his own front door, with Ronnie on sentry duty and Bradlee resting in the blue Lexus a few yards away.
As instructed, he didn't tease the camera, and after a while he felt comfortable with it. It was a presence in the room, something partially alive, but as benign as a cat watching the outside world from a windowsill.
Circumstances were slightly more relaxed than last time he'd been here. With no threat of a maniac appearing from the bathroom below, he found the room had an entirely different dynamic. It was observatory, a thinking room
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with a panoramic view of the world, but isolated from its dangers and troubles.
Through the windows he counted cranes, tall construction cranes, some with a fixed horizontal jib and others with an angled version.
He could see eighteen. Some bright pundit had once said the health of London's economy could be read from counting cranes, or at least the health of its property market, but since Danny hadn't counted before he had no way of knowing whether eighteen was high or low.
He counted church spires too, fourteen of them in this relatively low-rise landscape. The nearest were just a few hundred yards south - a very muted pair of peaks on the Polish church at the far end of Devonia Road, the one with an unpronounceable name beginning Cz. The second nearest were on Duncan Terrace, close to Upper Street, two lurid green peaks above the Catholic church of St John the Evangelist, built for the Irish navvies who'd lived around here while they'd dug Regent's Canal and its half-mile tunnel beneath Islington, and who'd then decided to settle.
The canal itself couldn't be seen from the steeple, but the lines of tall trees on either side of it, close to the tunnel mouth, were clearly visible beyond the Polish church. That towpath walk
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area was a no-go zone for Danny, the water was way too deep for him to be near. Beyond St John the Evangelist he could see the clock-tower of King's Cross, and the tall gothic masterpiece of St Pancras station, evidence of eras - the canal era, and the railway era close behind it. King's Cross, its goods yard and its tracks, had arrived just thirty years after Regent's Canal was completed, taking the transport of coal and other important materials away from the canal and symbolically turning it into a commercial failure.
Down below the spire, on St Peter's Street, was evidence of an even later era, one that had eventually turned the railways into loss-makers too, Bradlee's Lexus - or whoever it belonged to - and the vehicles moving on the street and grinding their skirts on the speed bumps, the era of the private motor car.
Yet the digital era, the recent revolution of ones and zeros, was barely visible outside the cramped space of the steeple. It was manifest inside, with the strange camera and three computers burning their dust barbecues, two of them without cabinets, open to collect more fuel.
But outside, a couple of mobile phone arrays only hinted at it, one on top of Islington Green school, one above a tall block of flats. A time-traveller arriving from the nineteen-seventies
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wouldn't have popped out of their craft and looked around and said, 'Wow! Look at that!
You've had a digital revolution.' At least not until they'd peered through an office window at a computer, or seen their first mobile phone.
Electricity - there was another hidden revolution. Danny scanned the cityscape for evidence of electricity. He could see a big substation near City Road, concealed in an anonymous grey building - you had to know about that one to see it. Down on St Peter's Street all the electricity cables were buried in accordance with the rules for a Grade 2
conservation area. Electricity was nowhere to be seen, apart from in the streetlights, flickering on to show their presence, one by one.
The canal and railway revolutions had left their permanent marks. The revolution of the private motor car even more so with its flat blue robot tracks spread around like horizontal cobwebs. The revolution of electricity was hidden in the day, though it would be impossible to miss at night, a vampire energy, half hidden, half obvious. Only the digital revolution was more secretive.
Two more eras were clear from this vantage point: the television, showing itself in the forest of aerials on rooftops, pointing south
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towards the mast at Crystal Palace like spiny compass needle tails; and in the sky, the era of mass air travel, aircraft curving in on their long approach to Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport, twenty miles west, queuing in the sky for touchdown, ten or twelve of them visible at one time. Three or four thousand people were up there right now, the population of a village, waiting for their turn to reach the ground.
All these eras, these revolutions of transport and communications, had once lined up in a similar way to the approaching aircraft, but in time rather than space - the canals, electricity, railways, roads, television, mobile phones, the invisible digital revolution - all had waited there in line in a fourth dimension, in time, becoming more and more inevitable until eventually they made their final approaches and touched down, one by one, to change the world, irreversibly, to change the way people communicated, learned, met lovers, moved their bodies and their goods from one location to another, how they raised their children, how they lived and died.
Right now, a plane called artificial intelligence was on its final approach in this fourth dimension, barely seen from the ground, destined inevitably to land at some point. All he
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and Angela were trying to do was scare the plane off the tarmac on its first approach, as its wheels made first contact, forcing it to make one more circuit, maybe in the hope that it would make a better approach next time, or that humanity could at least prepare for its arrival.
A tapping sound brought him out of his daydream. At first he couldn't tell where it came from, then he noticed the hand of the bizarre camera banging its binoculars on the wooden base.
A malfunction? He looked out of the window and saw Bradlee and Ronnie staring up at him, not at somewhere close to him but at exactly where he was. Surely they couldn't see him? Given the distance and the size of the window, that would be a miracle. Also it was getting dark. If he hadn't known who the pair were, he wouldn't have been able to make them out in the twilight. And he hadn't switched a light on. No, it would be impossible for them to see him inside this dark room, yet they gave every indication that they could. They looked at each other and set off at a run. He tracked them, first through this window, then through the one to its left as they ran into Devonia Road, and into the entrance of the church.
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He was down the steps in seconds, missing many of them in the rush, almost tumbling down the last set into the lounge, so quick the others immediately knew something was wrong.
"Bradlee!" he said, breathlessly. "And Ronnie, headed this way."
"Right," said Angela. "Action stations.
Everybody upstairs. Danny will show you the way."
"What about this?" said Eric, pointing at Frank's Aspiration.
"No time. Let's just hope it distracts them."
Danny headed back up the stairs again.
By the time he made it to the bathroom, he could already hear Ronnie fiddling with the lock of the apartment door, like a metallic mouse building a nest inside the tumbler. This was going to be close. The aluminium steps for the top room were still down. He ushered Eric and Sharon up, taking care not to touch Eric and equal care to touch Sharon, who looked even less happy than when she'd first arrived. Angela closed the bathroom door and signalled for Danny to go up before her.
He reckoned there would be just enough space for all four of them in the narrow steeple.
Unfortunately, he hadn't thought about the
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process of getting everybody inside. When Angela arrived, there was nowhere for her to stand. There would be space once the ladder and trapdoor were tucked back in their resting position, but right now there was none.
Angela realised this as she reached the top of the ladder. "Fuck," she whispered. With no time for niceties she placed her feet on top of Danny's and hung off his arm, which was braced against the opposite wall. "Eric, lift the steps and the door will come up."
Eric did as he was asked and the trapdoor began to close. Angela, to Danny's relief, placed her feet back on the closed trapdoor, making no noise.
They could hear the traffic outside on St Peter's Street, and their own breathing. Sharon had her arms tight around Danny, Angela still gripped his arm, but lightly. Eric was doing a good job of making himself as small as possible, so he didn't touch anybody. Below them they heard the bathroom door burst open, immediately followed by a loud banging on the trapdoor.
"Alee alee in!" yelled Bradlee. "Come on out, you fucker. Uncle Bradlee knows where you are."