Like a fool, I was too busy formulating my own grand plan to anticipate what actually happened next.
I had reached the threshold and was just about to cross over into the waiting darkness, when I was struck down from behind. I was shoved hard, and cleverly, so that I went down face first, sprawling across the open doorway.
If I’d had even half a second’s warning I’d have been able to get my hands spread, in such a way as to prevent my nose coming into contact with the floor, but I didn’t. Once I’d actually been hit, mere reflexes weren’t up to the job.
As the pain exploded in my mind I lost track of everything, except that two feet came down in the small of my back, one after the other. They didn’t belong to the same person; two people bounded over my fallen body, each one using it as a springboard as they hurled themselves through the doorway.
That seemed to me to be adding insult to injury, twice over.
I fought with all my might to recover my presence of mind, and the capacity to act in spite of the agony, but I still needed to be picked up and helped to my feet. Yet again, it was Mortimer Gray who took the lead in rendering assistance, but this time Adam Zimmerman had come to help him.
I couldn’t reply immediately to their inane inquiries as to whether I was “all right” but it must have been obvious that I wasn’t. I was incandescent with pain — and with rage.
I still couldn’t see properly when Solantha Handsel dragged a struggling Alice through the doorway, but I knew that the person still missing had to be Niamh Horne — the only member of our tiny community fully kitted out to see almost as well in near darkness as she did in ordinary light.
The sane and sensible thing to do would have been to stand clear and get myself into proper fighting trim, but fighting isn’t a sane and sensible business. I was still near enough to the door to get in the bodyguard’s way, although I had to shake off a couple of restraining arms to make a good show of it.
“Let her go,” I said to Solantha Handsel, with all the menace I could muster.
She actually looked surprised.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I had to do it that way, or we’d have lost the opportunity.
“Just let her go,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” she retorted, undiplomatically. She couldn’t help the reflex that made her hold on to her captive just a little more tightly. That was when I hit her, right between the eyes.
Her nose didn’t break, and I had the impression that it wouldn’t have broken even if I’d hit an inch lower, at the most vulnerable point. My knuckle was probably a good deal more vulnerable than any part of her — but she was used to the protection of state-of-the-art IT, and she wasn’t expecting the uninsulated shock and pain that followed the punch. She wasn’t expecting the kick in the belly either, but it would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t been barefoot.
The bodyguard let go of Alice, and collapsed in a heap that must have seemed even more undignified to the astonished observers than the heap I’d been in when she hit me from behind.
Nobody else surged forward to grab Alice when Solantha Handsel let her go, but Niamh Horne had already returned from her excursion. The cyborg was blocking the doorway, so there was no opportunity for Alice to run into the darkness.
I did the best I could to get between Alice and trouble, but it wasn’t possible to cover both directions at once. Solantha Handsel came slowly to her feet. Her wrathful anguish was a joy to behold.
“You’re insane,” she told me, in what might conceivably have been a dutiful manner. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“No, I don’t,” I agreed, “and neither do you. You might be the best trained fighting machine in your unviolent Utopia, but I’ve actually been in real fights, without IT to help me. You’ve proved that you can hit me in the dark and from behind, but I’m still willing to find out what you can do when I’m actually looking.”
“This isn’t necessary, Tamlin,” Lowenthal’s voice swiftly cut in. He probably intended his tone to be soothing.
Solantha Handsel wasn’t listening. She probably figured that she had given fair warning, and was now at liberty to tear me apart. She got up and made as if to come at me, with her deadly hands ready and willing to chop me into little pieces, figuratively if not literally.
And that was when Christine Caine hit her from behind, with a full water bottle.
As improvised weapons went, the plastic bottle wasn’t very useful, and Christine hadn’t anything like the body mass or musculature of Lowenthal’s bodyguard — but the blow was delivered with a will and the cyborg hadn’t been expecting it. The most surprising thing about it, from my point of view, was the expression on Christine’s face, which faded almost immediately from sheer astonishment to something much more peculiar: a far deeper sense of puzzlement.
Solantha Handsel went down again, but she was hardly injured at all except for her dignity. I kicked her a second time as she sprawled, but without any kind of footwear to protect my toes I had to be careful not to inflict more damage on myself than I could on her.
I think Niamh Horne might have come forward then to settle the matter if it had been her call, but she and Lowenthal had already exchanged glances. She had shaken her head to indicate that she hadn’t been able to get out of the corridor into which the door opened, and hadn’t found anything useful there.
Lowenthal must have calculated that there might be more to be gained by letting me run with the ball than by trying to hold on to it by force. When Solantha Handsel rose to her feet again he was quick to say: “That’s enough. Let them go.” He paused for a significant couple of seconds before saying: “Do you need medical attention too?”
Solantha Handsel was too angry to speak, but she shook her head in a suitably derisory fashion.
“Right?” was all that Lowenthal said to Alice.
It was enough. She nodded her head.
Niamh Horne stood aside and let us pass through the doorway unimpeded. The door closed behind us, leaving us in the darkness.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Alice said, as she guided me back to the cupboard.
“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, nursing my pain. “It wasn’t even sensible. But there was no way in the world I was going to resist the temptation. I’m the barbarian from the dawn of time, remember.”
“I’m older than you,” she reminded me, as the lights came on again.
This time she had a hypodermic syringe ready, and a vial from which to draw liquid.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Nanobots,” she told me.
“I thought we weren’t allowed privileges of that sort.”
“They’re making an exception.”
“They?” I queried. “Not we?”
“ We’re making an exception” she said, a trifle wearily. It didn’t sound like a wholehearted correction. “We didn’t want you here, but now you are here you’re our responsibility. I know it’s difficult, given that you don’t know what’s going on, but it would help us all if you were to be patient. Pleasedon’t do anything else to make things worse than they already are.” I gathered from this speech that the negotiations in which she and her companion were involved were proving almost as frustrating and unhelpful as Lowenthal’s conference.
“How am I supposed to know what might make matters worse?” I asked her, without having to feign annoyance. “You can’t blame Handsel and Horne for trying to find out more about their situation. Maybe it would have been a stupid move to try to beat the truth out of you, but if you wanted us to stay quiet you should have let us sleep.”
“I agree,” she said. “But we have all kinds of conflicting demands coming in. We have to keep a lid on things until we’ve set a meeting place. It’s all spinning out of control, and we have to do everything possible to keep the game going. You have to calm things down back there, if you can.” She jabbed the hypodermic in as she pronounced the final phrase, as if to emphasize it. Maybe she thought the note of challenge would get results, but I needed a better incentive than that. I wasn’t prepared to believe that I was better off not knowing what kind of “conflicting demands” she and her mysterious companion were trying to satisfy.