Chapter 2

"He's on the beach now, a toe in the water. He's asking you to come in with him. He's been racing his mother up and down the sand. There's so much love in this house. He's ten years old. He's surrounded by animals. He wants to be a vet. You keep a rabbit for him, a bird and a fox. He's in high school. He likes to run, like his father. He runs the two-mile and the long relay. He's 23. He's at a university. He makes love to a pretty girl named Claire. He asks her to be his wife. He calls here and tells Lara, who cries. He still runs. Across the university and in the stadium, where John watches. Oh God, he's running so fast, just like his daddy. He sees his daddy. He wants to run to him. But he's only six years old, and he can't do it. And the other men are so fast."

From Minority Report.

At first Beka wasn't particularly concerned. When she first heard Harper's yelp, she simply thought that the sudden light had taken him by surprise, as it had her. She blinked the little white spots away from her vision and squinted into the conduit. Maybe ten metres in, a small body was crumpled, unmoving and unresponsive. Now she started to worry, hell, she flat-out panicked, thinking that Harper had had a seizure or something, and launched herself into the conduit, crawling towards him as fast as was possible on her hands and knees. Friction burned at her palms as her hand scraped across the floor, but she ignored it. It seemed to take hours, but she reached him and touched the engineer on the shoulder. One of his hands had a nasty welt across his palm, where the wrench had conducted the electricity and grown white-hot in a matter of seconds. She gently touched the vicious red and black stripe and whispered, 'Harper?'

He stirred and his eyes flickered open. 'Huh? What? Beka, what just happened?'

'What just happened?' she repeated in a painful screech. 'You just made an attempt to give me a heart attack, that's what! I swear to the Divine, Harper, I'll be completely grey before I turn thirty-five with you around!'

'OK, I get the picture!' he gasped, not knowing whether to calm her down or make fun of her. He sat up painfully, and found his body pressed up against hers. Her cheeks coloured, and he grinned mischievously. 'Want to give me a little breathing room, boss? This conduit ain't big enough for the two of us.'

'Um… sure,' she said. It seemed that the spark of electricity had made Harper red-hot, because she backed off like he'd just had a close encounter with a skunk. It was lucky that he applied such liberal amounts of hair gel every morning, because if his hair weren't already standing up on end, it would be now. She hid a smile at the thought, then the concern came back. Harper was sitting with his back to the wall. He wasn't too badly hurt, apart from his hand, but his expression was troubled and distracted.

He was thinking of what had happened, what he had seen just before passing out, and as always his mind flickered back to that strange psychotic blip he'd had a couple of months ago. He'd been stuck in a delusion that all of this - the Andromeda and the Commonwealth and all his friends - was, well, a delusion. That had freaked him out so much that he had nearly killed Beka, and had actually been convinced that he was in a coma in a psychiatric hospital. Luckily, Trance had discovered a slipfighter full of renegade Than mercenaries, emitting dangerous levels of radiation that had been messing with his head, making him a paranoid delusional, and none of it had been real.

'Harper?' Beka's voice was tense and worried, and he could tell that she was thinking the same thing. He looked up at her, smiling reassuringly, and ignoring that tiny voice that still whispered of unsaid things, deep in the base of his skull, in a place where he could not reach. Even as he was telling Beka that he was fine, the little voice told him he was crazy.

Crazy my ass, he hissed back viciously, shaking his head wildly as soon as Beka turned her back and started to crawl out of the conduit. After a few deep breaths, Seamus Harper followed her.

Interlude 1: The year of Our Lord 1980 – Boston

'Seamus, sit still!' his mother snapped irritably, trying to fix the strange black tie around his neck. Her gentle hands made no impression as she gently pulled the wide end through the loop just below his top button, but though she neither pinched him nor did it too tight, he wriggled impatiently. He had never worn a suit before; they were never really designed for children. He knew that they were going somewhere, and that he would have to stand still for a long time. He didn't want that, he wanted to go out and play in the autumnal leaves, kicking the neat piles into a red-gold cloud and smudge the pristine black suit with thick smears of mud, after-effects of the near-monsoon conditions they had been experiencing. He fidgeted and made unintelligible sounds in his throat, ducking his head down into the shirt-collar and scowling at his mother. She lost her temper and raised a hand to him warningly, her eyes full of disappointment and, he was shocked to see, tears. They both knew that she would never, ever, hit him, not so much as a cuff or a slap on the back of the leg, but he flinched and stood still anyway.

'Don't wanna,' he muttered sulkily. He was young, but the American accent had already started to develop. His mother was American, his father Irish, and he had lived in Boston all his life.

'Don't be so childish, Seamus,' she scolded him, tugging on the end of the tie a little harder than was necessary, venting her rage on the thin strip of black material. Had his mind been fully matured, had he already had the wit that would not kick in for a few years yet, he would have cleverly pointed out that he was still a child. But he was only six years old, and knew no better. 'We have to go to… the church. To see Grandpa.'

Grandpa. A vague figure seen only a few times every month, who smelt of pipe tobacco and had a deep, husky laugh and thin wispy hair. He sometimes gave Seamus peppermint sweets that made Seamus' mother fret, because they were small and hard and she was worried he might choke. More often than not she would whisk them away and dispose of them later on, but sometimes he could conceal them in the turn-ups of his cuffs and would eat them later on. He could remember every detail of those sweets: the way that they rattled against his teeth, the funny taste that made his mouth cold when he breathed in and the way that they started to taste sickly after he'd had too many. Yet he remembered nothing of the man who had given to him beyond pipe tobacco, a husky laugh and wispy hair. Now they were going to see him again, but Seamus' mother didn't seem happy. Stupidly, Seamus voiced his thoughts in a loud, truthful, childish voice.

'I don't remember Grandpa,' he said. His mother's head snapped up and she looked frail. She stopped sorting out his clothes and grabbed his shoulders. He fancied that it hurt, but really it was as usual: firm but gentle.

'Of course you do, Seamus.' Parents never believed you, not unless you told them you had done something wrong. 'Now don't say anything like that at the f… at the church.' She stopped and breathed deeply, the tears appearing again. 'Honestly, Seamus, you'd forget your own head if it wasn't screwed on!' He reached up nervously to his neck, half expecting to feel the heads of screws and bolts there, like Frankenstein. She saw and laughed through her choked tears. 'It's a figure of speech, Seamus. Just promise you won't ever go forgetting me!'

He felt a rush of simple, childlike compassion, and leaned forward to brush her cheeks with his sticky mouth. Afterwards she would retrieve a handkerchief from her pocket and wipe it clean. 'I promise, Mommy,' he said.

Harper took in a sharp, involuntary gasp, and sat up bolt upright in bed, his skin prickling. He would never have been able to sit up that fast if he had been thinking about what he was doing, but in the depths of his pillow lurked the dream that evaded him, a dream that he couldn't remember but didn't want to go back to. He wasn't crying or anything sappy like that, but he was surprisingly unsettled, and though he punched the pillows and lay back down, he couldn't get back to sleep.

He sighed, more irritated than anything else, and tried to think of alternative entertainment. He had the holo-films with the women in bikinis running in slow motion down very long beaches etc. But he didn't feel like that right now. He suddenly found himself wishing he were back n Earth, something that he had never felt before. The sensation shocked him. On Earth, you could go for long walks in the middle of the night, sure, and you could breathe fresh air, but you also made yourself a target for roaming Magog. You would be better off sticking a sign to your forehead in giant neon letters saying, "Hi, big scary alien dudes, want a potential meal or host for your kiddies? Check me out!"

He lay back down. This was annoying. He stared at the ceiling and drummed his heels on the end of the bed. It was more than wanting to be back on Earth; he wanted to… God, this sounded stupid. He was just glad the others couldn't hear his thoughts. He wanted to play in mud, to swim naked in rivers and streams, to climb rocks like mountains and skin his knees. He wanted to throw snowballs and shout rude words in public places. He wanted to kick and pull hair like a kid in the playground, and to stick his tongue out at people for no reason. He felt a maelstrom of strange thoughts and he didn't know whether to feel elation or concern, or embarrassment. He rolled over, thinking he would be awake all night, but was asleep in a matter of minutes.