The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, Jule Owen [classic romance novels txt] 📗

with the one you’re using. I’ll investigate whether you could use this work for collaborative credits instead of the robotics project. Then at least you’d feel your collaborative module is useful.”

“I’d definitely like it better than playing at Lego robotics with the rugby team.”

“Great. Let me make some calls.”

4 The Pianist

It’s late afternoon. Mathew surfaces from a long period of deep concentration, stretches, and goes to his window. Shen, the male dragon, lands on his shoulder and starts trying to chew his hair, snapping at air. 

A sleek black autonomous car is slowly driving along the street. It comes to a halt by the kerb. A man in a dark suit, wearing sunglasses, opens the back door. He’s an Aegis man much like Mathew’s mother’s thick-necked guard. Mathew ponders whether their corporate masters have started cloning them. 

A girl gets out. 

Her name is Clara Barculo. She’s fifteen years old, and it’s four months until her next birthday. She is single, not dating; a pupil at the Royal College of Music, her favourite thing in the world is her dog Cassie, a smooth-coated collie. He knows all this from the information hanging above her. In person, he observes that she’s tall and thin, with gangly long limbs and strikingly large hands, making her seem strangely vulnerable, like a baby animal not yet grown into its body. She has long brown hair tied back tightly, a long face and nose, striking thick black eyebrows, and blue eyes. 

Their neighbour Gen Lacey is a piano teacher, and Mathew has seen many pupils come and go to her house over the years, never paying much attention until now. 

For a moment Clara appears to look up at his window. She sees his broadcast data, floating in the cloud of information coming from all the other residents confined to their houses in Pickervance Road, but she doesn’t read it. Automatically, via his skullcap, Mathew’s Lenz recognises his desire to focus in on her further. Incomprehensibly, he finds himself smiling at her, but he’s standing in the shadows, and she turns away from his window and disappears from view.  

Down below, a doorbell rings; there’s the sound of the latch, some muffled voices, and then a door banging shut.

He’s stepping from the window when something makes him turn and glance the other way, into the bay window of the house next door. 

Through the darkened glass he discerns a face, pale and disembodied, staring with intensity in the direction of Clara as she enters Gen’s house. The face belongs to a tall, thin man. Mathew’s Lenzes adjust to the poor lighting, and the man’s form slowly emerges from the shadows. Sensing Mathew there, the man snaps his gaze away from the road and directly across at him. Dark eyes in deep eye sockets drill into him analytically, machine-like. Mathew feels a chill run along his spine.

A second more, and the man is gone, leaving him wondering if he was ever there, or if it was a trick of the light.

Five minutes later, Mathew is downstairs making a snack in the kitchen when the music reaches him. 

It’s just a snatch at first – there are bricks and mortar in between – but those few notes hit him like a physical punch. They are so familiar to him, yet it seems like a lifetime since he last heard them. In the living room, he puts his ear to the wall. The sound is indistinct. He gets a glass from the kitchen, and Leibniz follows him all the way, asking him if he wants a drink. He shoos the robot away, crouches next to the wall, and holds the glass against it to collect the precious morsels of sound. A matrix of notes, a musical puzzle. 

“Don’t you feel the synapses firing in your brain?” asks his father’s voice, the ghost in his head. 

Mental lights are going on, memories are stirred; half of him does not want to listen. What is this music? He can’t remember the name of the piece or the composer. His father would have told him, would have had him repeat it and tested him on it. It’s shut away in tender parts of his mind. He sets his e-Pin to record. When the music stops, he plays it back to the Nexus, asks the question, and gets the response. It’s Bach. The girl with the large hands and the eyebrows is playing Bach, his father’s favourite composer, music he hasn’t dared listen to for more than two years.

After the girl has gone, he spends his evening listening to Bach on the Nexus, researching his life and times and the highlights of his work. Using the few hours before his mother comes home, he decides to build a contraption to help him listen better, so when the girl comes back for her next lesson, he won’t need to sit with a glass to his ear.

He’s finishing when his mother comes through the door. It’s late. Leibniz has prepared a meal according to her remote instruction. The robot is serving when Mathew comes into the kitchen. 

“Hello, darling. Thank you, Leibniz,” his mother says as a plate is put in front of her. She sounds tired. “How was your day?” she asks Mathew. “What did you get up to?”

“I did an AI history module and spoke to my supervisor. Oh, and Grandma rang. She’s not coming.”

“I assumed as much. There’s no way of getting here.”

“That’s what she said.” 

She nods, staring at her plate as she slices her food. 

O’Malley is under the table mewing. 

“Did you feed him, Leibniz?”

“Yes, Hoshi, I fed him at seventeen hundred hours exactly. Rabbit flavour Katkins. It’s the new formula, as you instructed, with concentrated amounts of synthetic taurine.”

“Good. Thank you, Leibniz.”

“You’re welcome, Hoshi.” 

“He didn’t eat much of it. O’Malley prefers human food,” Mathew says.

“I don’t know why. There’s not much difference,” his mother says, poking at her cultured chicken.

“Not good?” Mathew asks.

“It’s fine,” she says with a sigh. “I hope my mother wasn’t filling your head with her enviro-political nonsense.” 

“Not much.”

“She has nothing better to do there in that commune-thing she lives in. It’s dangerous. But it’s her life. You, on the other hand, have a lot to lose. You need to keep this scholarship. I don’t want you engaging with any of her gibberish. Do you hear me?” she points her knife at him threateningly. 

He nods. “How did your day go?” he asks to distract her. “Busy?”

“Nonstop. It’s going to be this way for a while, I’m afraid.”

She eats in silence for a few minutes, and then he asks, “Mum, do you know our neighbours?”

As she lifts her fork, she studies him curiously. “A few of them, yes. You know Gen. Don’t you remember? She was often round here when your father was alive. We should have her over for dinner. She was very good to us when. . . . She’s a nice person. I never have time to see my friends anymore.” She sighs and sinks further into her chair.

“Not that house. The other side.”  

“You mean August Lestrange? Do you know, you’ve lived in this house your whole life, and this is the first time you’ve expressed an interest in anyone who lives on our street.”

“I saw him today, staring out of his front bedroom window.”

“It’s not a crime, is it? You’re always doing that.”

“But he looks odd.” 

“Again, pot and kettle.”

Mathew grimaces. “Thanks.”

Hoshi smiles, leans across and touches his face, “You know I’m just kidding. To be honest, I haven’t laid eyes on him for ages, although he’s lived there since before you were born. In all those years, I think we must have spoken to him once. We used to occasionally see him in his garden, but then he put the extension on the back of the house, with the conservatory. He’s a bit of a recluse.”

“What does he do?”

“Oh, I don’t know, some kind of historian, I think.”

“A historian?”

“Don’t quote me.” 

Hoshi has finished her dinner. Leibniz comes to take her plate.

“It’s nearly midnight,” Hoshi says, checking the Nexus clock in her Lenz. “We should get to bed.”

Lying in bed, Mathew watches the dragons dogfight in a blur of movement under the ceiling of his bedroom, circling the light shade, lit now by the streetlights. 

Thinking about the cold eyes peering at him from the bedroom window next door, he recalls the strange, immobile face, the neck snapping towards him, reptile-like, as if it sensed him there before it saw him. 

Sleep washes over him, and the circular movement of the dragons lulls him. 

He thinks, as he falls asleep, Lestrange doesn’t even seem human.

5 Psychopomp

DAY TWO: Tuesday, 23 November 2055, London

“My car’s here,” his mother says, peering around his bedroom door. “Don’t let O’Malley out, will you?”

“Of course not,” he says.

“And let Leibniz prepare your meals. What’s the point of having him, if you don’t let him help?”

“Leibniz is an ‘it’, not a ‘he’.”

“Where are the dragons?”

Mathew points to his wardrobe. Yinglong is climbing on the top. Shen is hanging from a door by a clawed foot. Mathew can switch them on and off as he wishes. These days they mostly follow him everywhere. 

“They’re very good. What are you working on? New project?” She gestures to the scattering of tiny electrical parts on his desk, the 3D micro-printer and nano-assembler.

“It’s an acoustic amplifier microphone.” 

“I won’t ask.”

Mathew smiles. 

“I’d better go. They’re nudging me,” she says, pointing to her eye. She means she has received a reminder message in her Lenz. “See you later.” 

Mathew watches his mother’s car drive to the end of the road and disappear around the corner. The windows of the house next door, where Mr Lestrange lives, are dark and fathomless. O’Malley jumps onto the windowsill and butts against his hand, mewing. One of the dragons swoops at him but grasps thin air, and O’Malley purrs loudly, oblivious. 

In the Darkroom, Mathew searches the Nexus for Clara Barculo, pianist, Bach, Gen Lacey, and gets the usual results: the Consort profiles, the personal web pages full of videos and photos, the official government ID records, all floating in front of him the full width of the room; he lays them out, steps back, and takes it all in. 

Gen Lacey is Genevieve Lacey of the Royal Academy of Music. Clara Barculo is a fifteen-year-old piano prodigy, known in particular for her interpretation of Bach’s keyboard masterpieces. 

He finds a holofilm of Clara performing in the Wigmore Hall and runs it. 

Suddenly, he’s in the audience, rows of seats behind him with enough virtual individuals to fill the room, mostly wearing evening dress. They cough, shift in their seats, and fiddle with their programmes. Someone comes in late and makes the people behind Mathew stand. In front of Mathew’s seat a stage appears, with waist-high dark wood panelling on the back wall and two doors. He raises his eyes and sees the distinctive mural of the Soul of Music in the cupola. 

A grand piano materialises.

There is a moment’s silence and then applause. 

Clara comes onto the stage in a simple black dress, her hair piled on her head. Someone in the audience whistles. She takes a small, nervous bow as the applause dies, sits, and abruptly starts to play. She is so close, so real, he feels he could reach out and touch her.