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  ‘No. I don’t like it.’ Mrs Carter gave a little shake of her head, as though this simple statement was the end of a long and tiresome discussion she’d been having with herself. She turned to walk back inside. ‘What does it matter what I like though, hmm? What choice do I have?’

  Emma didn’t feel these questions were really for her but she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity for conversation. ‘What choice do any of us have, Mrs Carter? Nobody likes moving house. I can’t pretend to you that any of our clients have ever expressed enjoyment on the day.’ She followed the old lady inside before the screen door began to swing shut again. ‘But we do try to make things, well, fuss free. You know? Smooth. Easy-going. In effect we try to make your—’

  The house was dark and cool. There were no carpets, nor even rugs to cover the highly-polished golden brown of the parquet flooring. Emma tried not to think what her colleagues’ boots would do to that varnish as they traipsed in and out with heavy furniture. At least the old lady would be moving on before the day was through.

  ‘Here.’ Mrs Carter had stopped in the centre of an open hall from which the stairs curved up towards a narrow landing. ‘Best if they start here.’ She pointed to several stacked cardboard boxes. ‘You’ll see I’ve put tags on everything. Everything with a tag is to go. If there’s no tag, it stays. You understand? Will your men understand? You mustn’t let any unlabelled items leave this house. Not in your—contraption. Such items will be coming with me. Later.’

  Emma glanced casually about her, taking in the scene, nodding. She had encountered this sort of behaviour on many occasions. She accepted it, even if she didn’t entirely understand it. She’d learned early on there was little point in trying to persuade the client that there was nothing at all for them to worry about. Such people would never change their minds, even if practical evidence were provided.

  ‘That’s—very thoughtful of you, Mrs Carter. Makes our lives much easier.’ She smiled and lifted the tag on the box nearest to her. It was blank. Just a paper label, its trailing thread taped crudely to the cardboard. ‘I’ll tell the boys. They’ll appreciate that. You have no idea how many people don’t give clear instructions. And then they go on and on at us if something isn’t done exactly how they wanted, etc. etc.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I believe it is important to be thorough.’

  ‘It certainly is, Mrs C. It certainly is.’ Emma patted the box.

  It was a risk, abbreviating her name like that, but it seemed to pay off. The old lady’s face softened a touch, and a small smile twitched momentarily on her lips.

  ‘Quite. And you’ll want to see the larger items, yes?’ Mrs Carter turned around smartly and strode away into another room. ‘The patio doors are unlocked, and the side gate round to the front can be pinned back, and if you do find you need—’

  Emma smiled again, this time to herself, and followed at an easy pace. It looked like it was going to be a straightforward job after all. That is till Emma saw the baby grand piano and the antique chest of drawers and several other such cumbersome objects.

  The smile dropped. It wasn’t the size of these things that concerned Emma, that wasn’t a problem at all, it was that not one of them had a brown tag attached.

  ¶

  The rear doors of the lorry had been securely fastened back and the long battered ramp was down.

  While Krištof and Stefan were in the house negotiating the larger items, explaining to Mrs Carter in short no-nonsense phrases that there really wasn’t any option for their removal besides the one being offered, Emma climbed the ramp and unhooked her control unit on its extendable spiral cord.

  She opened the secondary set of doors, just enough to step inside the main chamber; that springy length of flex being all she had to ensure the door could not be closed on her by accident. It was a simple but effective safety measure: if the cable was indeed severed by the door inexplicably closing then it would be impossible for the system to function.

  The unlit chamber was cool and clean. Emma put the machine through the first of its checks, bringing a faint yellow glow to the ninety thousand or so small glass bulbs that lined the chamber’s inner walls and roof. She glanced at a spot just above her. A bulb was out. The same bulb that was always out. It showed as a tiny black hole in the otherwise glowing honeycomb. She was through replacing it. It wouldn’t make a difference anyhow. Theoretically up to two per cent of the bulbs could be failing with neither analysis nor transmission being compromised; at least so long as the faulty bulbs were uniformly scattered throughout the array, not all clustered into a single dark patch.

  With no other black spots showing, Emma took a small carved soapstone figurine from the top pocket of her workshirt and placed it alone in the centre of the room before exiting the chamber herself and sealing the door. This simple test-analysis was fairly quick, the drumming and rattling and pulsing that came from inside the machine lasting barely a minute before the results came through on Emma’s control panel. She scanned down the bright orange lines of data, clicking swiftly between the pages. She knew what patterns to expect. It was always easier to use a familiar test object, you tended to find exactly what you asked the machine to look for.

  Emma retrieved her figurine just as Krištof and Stefan were bringing round the first items to be loaded. They’d got their way by simple dogged reasoning, convincing Mrs Carter that if she didn’t allow them to transport all the big pieces of furniture then such items would never leave the house. No other option was available.

  The piano came out first. Neither of the men was particularly large. Tall, yes, but not broad. Still, they carried the baby grand between them as though it was a mere toy, a folly made with hollow plastic keys and nylon strings, not something of lacquered maple and cast iron. In it went, to the very back of the chamber, and the two men at once headed off towards the house to fetch more.

  ‘I was told it couldn’t cope with things like pianos.’ Mrs Carter was standing beside the ramp with her arms tightly folded and her pale sun-hat back on. She stared up at Emma from under the wide floppy brim. She spoke in a low voice. ‘I read it somewhere. Complex materials. That’s what the article said. Hardwoods. Felt. Ivory. It couldn’t deal with them.’

  ‘Used to be the case.’ Emma nodded without looking round. ‘Must have been an old article. Out of date.’ She fiddled with the buttons on her control panel, trying to get a clear fix on the link-up. ‘For early models, yes, anything organic was, as far as we know, a major problem. Not so these days. Much better depth-analysis. Just as long as it’s not living matter, not actually animate, then—it’s really no trouble.’

  Krištof and Stefan continued to load item after item and Mrs Carter watched them without saying a word. Despite the heat neither man appeared to sweat. For them none of this seemed in the least bit strenuous, no matter the size and composition of the furniture being loaded.

  ‘It doesn’t seem right.’ Mrs Carter fidgeted on the spot. ‘All bunched up like that. All going in one go.’

  Emma smiled to herself. ‘Same as if we were to drive it. All bunched together. All done in a one-er.’

  ‘And you still could drive it. You could simply load it up, in this very van, and drive it there yourselves.’

  Emma paused. She stared up at the blue cloudless sky for a moment. ‘Bit out of our way. And it might damage the equipment. Not to mention your belongings. All that distance? On all those old roads? Potholes and the like? Broken glass? Accidents and hold-ups? For the insurance alone it’d be a great deal more expensive.’

  ‘I was reading into that, too. The cost. It hasn’t changed. No matter what they say. Not since my day. Not really. All this—’ Mrs Carter waved a hand vaguely. ‘New-fangledness. This rigmarole. And what difference does it actually make? How does it actually make things better? And for whom?’

  ‘The price will come down, eventually. But you’re sort of right. The service is essentially the same, so, to be frank, there’s no real reason for the overal
l cost to change. Same service. More staff. Just a different, you know, outlay. A shift in what that money goes into.’

  As Krištof closed the chamber door and bolted it, Mrs Carter unfolded her arms suddenly. ‘That’s not all of it. What are you doing? There’s still plenty to—’

  ‘It’s okay, Mrs Carter. Be calm, be calm.’ Emma hopped down from the ramp. Her tone was playful but the old lady didn’t seem to notice. ‘We do it in batches, that’s all. Standard procedure. It gives the team at the other end a moment to unload it. And while they unload it there we load up the second lot here. Gets into a bit of a rhythm, see?’ She pressed the go button.

  The drumming and knocking and rattling began as before. Mrs Carter looked a little dazed.

  ‘The other team? I—I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘Two lorries. Two teams. Senders and receivers. A direct connection, a link, between the two machines. You can hardly expect your furniture to appear just like that on the front lawn of your new house. And even if it could, well, who’d be around to carry it indoors?’

  ‘Two teams. Yes. Of course.’ Mrs Carter was staring into space. She seemed to be debating the matter with herself, her voice little more than a murmur. ‘Indeed. Small wonder it costs so much. Two of everything, one must suppose. All so—complicated.’

  The knocking from the lorry stopped. Mrs Carter glanced up sharply, expecting something to happen. Then she looked at Emma.

  ‘Is that—that? Is it gone?’

  Emma shook her head. ‘Not yet. Need to wait for a window. Could take up to, say—five minutes? Maybe more. Depending on traffic.’

  ‘The traffic? Are they not there yet?’

  ‘The connection. A firm link-up. The network is pretty busy most days. Specially days like today. But once we get that good connection, once we’re locked in—’

  Emma’s voice trailed off. She was looking at the display on her control panel. She was scrolling through the lists of data from the preliminary analysis.

  Mrs Carter peered down at the screen also, but all she saw there was a lot of gobbledegook. She recognised the same sets of letters, even some of the words, but the phrase constructions made her feel as though she’d suddenly lost her faculty for language.

  Emma glanced up. ‘Sorry, Mrs Carter. This is the boring bit. Necessary, but boring. So I really do need to concentrate. And what with it being such a hot day and all.’

  Mrs Carter stepped back. Her eyes were wide and she looked as though she might speak again, but she simply turned about and headed indoors.

  Emma shaded the screen, putting her back to the sun and bending forward over the unit. This really was the important part, this was why she was here at all, the aspect of the job she was especially good at, aside from dealing with clients. She was looking for anomalies in the data stream. The feed coming through from the analysis really was gobbledegook, for the most part. It was machine-speak. That is, it wasn’t really something anyone actually spoke, but Emma understood it, it’s what she was trained for, and she could tell instantly when something didn’t look right. It was like hearing a wrong note at a piano recital: it didn’t matter how complicated the piece was or if you’d never heard it played before, so long as you had a good ear for music, and so long as you listened attentively, you simply knew, at once, that that single note should not be there among the rest.

  But a mistake in a concert was one thing. Mistakes like that happened and nobody minded. Here such mistakes could not go so easily ignored.

  Emma worked quickly but thoroughly. Not one line of code was overlooked, and when at length the light on her panel flashed to tell her they had a clear connection, she was satisfied, and without a second thought she pressed send.

  The world jolted, briefly. A small sphere of birds burst from a tree and thrummed away into the hot blue sky. A brindled cat dashed across the road from under a parked car and disappeared into the garden opposite.

  It was the usual sort of thing.

  Emma remained very still, tensed at the edge of the ramp, her head bowed, her eyes screwed shut.

  If there had been a dog barking a moment earlier, it wasn’t barking now. If there had been grasshoppers scratching their insistent pulse out on the lawn they too had ceased. Emma could hear no distant wash of traffic from the motorway, but maybe it hadn’t been there beforehand. She couldn’t say for sure. The sudden silence had pressed everything flat.

  When Emma opened her eyes the hard sunlight seemed thinner. The heat of the air was sharper. The quick gust that had risen in the breeze had settled abruptly into new and definitive calm.

  Emma checked the display on her remote control. Then she hung it back on its hook and went into the house.

  ¶

  The lounge, having been stripped of most of its fittings and furniture, did not feel like a place one could relax in any more. In the centre of the room, around a tall cardboard box, three simple bentwood chairs had been set. It looked like a small gathering for a game of cards around a makeshift table, or vagrants crowding close to a burning brazier. Except on top of the cardboard box was a painted wooden tray, which in turn supported a set of tea things: a pot with a woven bamboo handle, four small cups on deep-set saucers, a matching milk jug, a sugar-bowl with silver spoon protruding, and a small plate of shortbread fingers.

  Emma wondered if the tea set had been unpacked specially. Krištof and Stefan were back at work in the end room, hauling the remaining items out the patio doors and round the side of the house. Only Mrs Carter sat beside the box, her knees neatly together, back arched and head dipped slightly forward, gazing wide-eyed at a spot on the skirting board. When Emma entered and took one of the seats, the old lady straightened, smiled, and began pouring a fresh cup.

  ‘These came out of Shanghai with my family when we were forced, and I do mean forced, to return to this country. Carried in our luggage all this way. By boat, no less. They’re extremely precious to me.’

  The cups were of fine bone china, duck-egg blue, with paler dimples, small lozenge-shaped spots, patterning their sides.

  ‘We always called them rice bowls. They’re not for rice. Not these. It’s the pattern, like rice, especially if you hold them up to the light. The dimples are very thin, very delicate. The light shines through them.’

  The tea Mrs Carter poured was pale and yellowish. As its level rose inside the cup Emma saw the dimples turn to a faint green. Milk and sugar were added without question, but only a drop of milk and barely a few granules of brown sugar; hardly anything at all; hardly worth it. The milk flowered downwards through the yellow tea. The dark crystals of sugar punctured this inner pluming as they fell. A brief melodious stirring with the silver spoon, and the cup and saucer were lifted and presented to Emma.

  ‘Part of a much larger set, you understand. And no, they won’t be going via your—your system. They will travel with me.’

  Emma said nothing. She sipped from the cup. It was good tea. She couldn’t place the variety. But it was good.

  ‘You see, it’s the altogether unique items that have been worrying me. I’m old. Oh yes, you don’t need to make a face. I’ve lived for longer than most. Unexpectedly so. I’ve collected a lot in my time. A lot has been passed on to me. Been put in my care, so to speak. And I couldn’t bear it. You see? I just can’t take such a risk.’

  Emma thought she should perhaps nod sympathetically at this point, but for now she stayed as she was, just watching, letting Mrs Carter speak, allowing her to say whatever she felt she must.

  ‘And my first thought, of course, was the jewellery. Yes. One tends to consider that first. And not simply for its value. Each piece has its story, has its personal connection. But, all in all, they don’t take up much room. A simple zip-up leather case. An enamelled box.’

  Emma smiled. This was something she was more familiar with. ‘People always do that. It’s a funny thing. But they always do it.’ She set down her saucer and cup. ‘Oh, it’s okay. Don’t worry. I do get it. I understand comp
letely. But it’s funny all the same.’

  Mrs Carter eyed the girl quizzically.

  ‘Because—don’t you see? It’s all just gold and silver and gemstones!’ Emma smiled again. ‘It’s elements and compounds. Regular minerals. They may be precious but they are, in effect, the simplest of all materials. They each have a very uniform, a very well-defined, crystalline structure. They show up really beautifully on the analysis. You can always spot them. Very clear, very hard points of data.’

  ‘For their materials, perhaps. They may be simple in that respect. But your machine can’t so easily account for the artistry that went into making them, it can’t capture the personal design, the skilled fashioning, the hammering, the heat, the very history of them.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s all just positional!’ Emma laughed. ‘That’s what the machine’s best at. Position and direction and speed and relative force. Right down to the subatomic level. It’s quite incredible really. And very very accurate.’

  Mrs Carter did not look at all impressed by this.

  ‘But books, for example.’ Emma put her head on one side. ‘Now, that’s a different matter. Books are essentially, well, blocks of wood.’ She tapped the cardboard box with the toe of her shoe. The tea set it supported chimed and rattled in response. ‘Fill a box like this with books and you’ve made yourself one big box-sized block of wood. Very heavy. Complicated too. All those fragile pages. Sliced and printed. And I’ve sometimes wondered—’ Emma leaned forward and took one of the shortbread fingers. She dunked it in her tea thoughtfully. ‘Say, what if a book was to arrive at the other end with all its words muddled. Still all the same letters, just rearranged. Would it be, in essence, the same book? So long as the information itself is retained, I mean. The same amount of ink, paper, board, cloth, but—you know, reordered. Or else all those words bunched up. A tight black hole in the centre of each page. The story would still be in there, somewhere. The sense of it might still come out, at some point. A sort of rare emission. Unlikely perhaps. But possible.’