TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘So I did what they said: shut up, went back to Don, hated it, learnt more about what Don was up to, hated it more, ran from time to time, always got brought back. Then your Chris shows up. The sequence in its natural state. I’m there for the debriefs, I hack into the rest of them, I remember it all by the ways they’ve taught me to remember, stars and whorls, that’s how I know so much. Chris and Don, the gruesome twosome. In cahoots, big relief. Play with your new toy. But when Chris turns up Tibet gets worried. They think Chris may know things from Alan, Tibet is connected to Alan. Many years before, Alan sent Tibet a coded message through the secret networks of the world.’

  ‘Alan’s from Tibet?’

  He shook his head. ‘From some other place of knowledge. They’re all connected in the end.’

  ‘I thought Alan worked for Don?’

  ‘He did. An old-place guy who went round the world on Don’s behalf to meet old guardians on their islands, up their mountains, with their objects, in their caves. Getting them to trust him, to tell them their stuff, snaffle up the pieces for master. Till he learnt too much and turned and stole Chris. Or he was working against Don the whole time.’

  The ratty tramp in his bus, from where, knowing what, hiding out.

  ‘So Tibet thinks Alan’s sent them a message they can’t decode for safekeeping, in case something happens to Alan. A message Tibet thinks Don may want at all costs. Tibet stores this message, forgets about it. Till word gets back that Chris has turned up, is in deep thrall to Don, Don’s new chief lickspittle, the new main Donling. Bad times in Tibet. Cos Tibet thinks maybe cam-king Don sees all messages, maybe secret networks aren’t secret, maybe Chris can decode this message from Alan that Tibet can’t decode, what with Chris growing up with Alan and Alan’s codes.’

  ‘And why did Chris grow up with Alan? Why did Alan take him? Is Alan my dad?’

  ‘Not your dad. I don’t think. I just said that before to…get you to come with. Necessary means. As for why Alan took Chris—leverage, I’d say. Have something over Don, who no one has anything over. Grow his own Don, for the other side. Get that Don to replace the real Don one day. Who knows. So Tibet’s freaked out. They get in touch.’

  ‘How?’ I wanted to know more about these secret networks of the world.

  ‘They send me this wooden statue, a priest brings it. A regular visitor to Don’s court. Their sign, their terma. Inside: a rolled-up sutra: instructions: the first letter of each line. Simple stuff. Read, absorb, destroy. A little job. Go to Britain, lay low in forests for six months, make sure Don’s off your scent. Then go to Cuckfield. We’ll write Alan’s message into the visitors’ book. Get your hands on the message, learn it by heart, destroy it, find a woman called Nim. Chris’s old love. She grew up with Chris and Alan, she knows those codes, she’s still hung up on Chris, pretend to be him, use your knowledge. Tell her Alan’s still alive, that the message will lead to Alan, she wants to find Alan, she cares. Get her to decode the message, tell us what it says, we’ll be with you, we’ll help you. But don’t let Don and Chris get their hands on the message and crack the number. Stop that happening at all costs.’

  ‘The number?’

  ‘A missing piece from Project Jigsaw. The trigger point for the Pacific crack.’

  I gave him a look.

  ‘Earth’s alive,’ he said, cuffed to me in the growing rock shadow, the dark path we walked in, shielding us from the reborn afternoon sun. ‘Earth’s a living organism with pressure points, like human bodies have pressure points, like on the Chinese map that’s a human body and Britain too. Got a headache? Press your wrist here,’ pressing a soft nook in my wrist, ‘open the blocked vein in your head, cure your pain. Want to open a tectonic plate? It’s the same. You just have to know where to press, the trigger point at the end of the vein somewhere else on earth. Apply force to that point with drums, vibrations, music, Thor’s hammer, jumping slaves, acupuncture needles, whatever. You open the flow path to the crack place elsewhere. Open the chakras to the underworld, move mountains like waves.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I said.

  ‘You can,’ he said. ‘Open your mind. That’s what happened before, in the wipe-out. They learnt where on earth to press to open up where the Pacific cracks in Indonesia, the real Eden, where they walked to from Africa, the place of richest minerals and vegetation growing out of the deepest crack on earth. They thought they’d nailed it: how to flood their land with goo riches on-demand, like how they later tamed the Nile to flood water to irrigate desert Egypt and power their pyramids which are stone volcanoes, like they tamed and controlled everything, almost everything, organic civil engineering on a global scale. But some things are hard to control. They pressed too hard, pulled out the plug from the bottom of the world. Volcanoes, quakes, melting ice caps, the drowning of most of Indonesia, the ancient cities getting feasted on by molluscs deep under the waves. End of the Ice Age, the wiping of the whole world, escape to Tibet, Egypt, Easter Island, wherever you can, up to the highest mountains to save what you know from the floods. Let’s not ever let that rehappen. Scatter that knowledge. But Don has plans. There’s things inside Earth Don needs to get his hands on.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Stuff. That Don’ll risk anything for. That others will risk everything for. Pacific world wars, Japanese and Americans—what do you think all that was? Vietnam, the Chinese now in the South China Sea. Tiny islands you fight to the death for. What’s beneath is what matters—the deep trenches of the Pacific, the one true ocean, the plug down there, the gateway to what’s inside. Don says he’ll be careful. But. What are sunk lands, a few million dead dumdums, to someone like Don? He’s already working on it, even without the number: hacking at the crack directly, blunt weapons, blast it open. Those quakes and tsunamis, ocean shelf shifts? Don’s undersea robot army hammering away. But give Don the number, the coordinates of the trigger point, he’ll open it up deep, hey presto, forget about robots.’

  ‘To get at what?’

  ‘Goo and more. What goes on at Earth’s core. The nucleus of the cell that powers us, where the parts get built, where the microbes are made. Don needs a peek at it, see how it works. Future projects to harness to his tech. For the good of Earth, Don says.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘Earth doesn’t have pressure points. You can’t press one place and open up another place and sink continents and open Earth’s core. Ancient people didn’t do that, they didn’t end ice ages, they didn’t harness mineral power via volcanoes, they didn’t power pyramids. It’s a pile of crock.’

  ‘The whole set-up’s a pile of crock. Wouldn’t you say? Us spinning round on this planet that happens to be perfect for us? The sun and moon? The lovely maths? Physics turning chemistry into biology for us, at the perfect temperature? The moon being just the right size to square earth? Pull the other one. It stinks. Where are we, when you step back for one moment, take a clear look at the set? Perfect water and atmosphere, perfect-sized moon to give us tides, stabilise climate? Perfect seasons? Planets arranged in perfect chords, drawing lovely patterns round us everywhere we look? That we can smelt metal, shape and cook it in clay moulds that don’t burn or melt, build Wi-Fi? That ice floats so seas don’t freeze? That it’s all just lying in wait for us to discover, everything so perfect for us, trillion-to-one odds. Where are we? What made us? What’s the game? What are we trapped in? That’s what Don wants to find out.’

  We walked on.

  ‘So Don wants some numbers he thinks Alan gave me the key to?’ I said after a while. ‘Some numbers he thinks are coordinates for a place on the globe that if pressed will open up another place? A deep tectonic crack under the sea in the Pacific near Indonesia that will let him get at things he needs inside the planet in order to explain the puzzle of our set-up? Solve the original swizz? A place that was once opened before by ancient knowledge that nearly wiped everything out?’

  He nodded. ‘More or less.’

  I laughed for a while. ‘How’
s Don going to do it? If he gets the coordinates. The opening-the-crack business?’

  ‘With the Arctic rods. His rig up north. The Hedgehog, they call it. Two hundred and seventy three thousand two hundred mile-high metal rods stooked up there where you don’t go. Each one paired to a different point on the planet. Don’s sceptres, his microcosmic world temple. Old knowledge tweaked. That’s always been the project, right? Turn the world into numbers, map it, turn it into a model, make it digital. Make it twice so you can control it. Even if it doesn’t want to be controlled. Once Don has his number: boom: space mirrors to the right point on the globe. Sound reflection, sonic power. Sound waves, conch shells, Joshua and his trumpets. All wrote down, if you can read it. Souped-up old ways.’

  Space mirrors. Stooked rigs. Booms, sonic power. And how would I know? He could say anything. He did say anything. We walked on.

  ‘If the knowledge is so bad,’ I said, ‘then why preserve it? Even in fragments?’

  ‘Why preserve Earth’s user manual? Might turn out useful, one day, you think? Even if it nearly destroyed you. The millions of years it took to compile, from when we were animals. You just make the systems to keep it separate, for the pure only, out of the hands of Dons and the like.’

  ‘And the pure are Tibet?’ On whose instruction we were acting?

  ‘And other places.’

  ‘And why does Tibet,’ whoever, ‘want to decode Alan’s message, get the…coordinates? Doesn’t Tibet know them already? What’s Tibet going to do with these coordinates if it gets them? And what if I don’t have them?’

  ‘The coordinates come from someplace else, Alan got his hands on them, didn’t want to hand them over to Don, stored them in you somehow instead maybe, transmission, in case something happened to him. Maybe you got them, maybe you don’t. Tibet wants to…shore the trigger place up. Stabilise it so no matter what Don won’t be able to deploy it. You can do that, pour in molten metal or something. Very carefully.’

  Tibet wanted to pour molten metal into a weak spot to… shore it up?

  ‘Bollocks. Plus: you pour molten metal into a weak spot, it’s going to trigger it.’

  ‘Is it? Since when did you become an expert?’

  We walked on in the long shadow of the rock.

  ‘If Tibet knew about me, knew I might be able to decode Alan’s message, how come they only came for me now? Why not years ago?’ I said.

  ‘They only knew about you after Chris turned up at Don’s and got probed. I think. Everything backed up on Antarctic servers, Tibet has ins there.’

  ‘Do they? Leaky ship Don runs.’

  ‘There are always ways.’

  ‘I thought there were no adventures left in the world? So the number’s in Vengeance Street?’

  He nodded. ‘Or has something to do with Vengeance Street.’ ‘And who set all that up? Who’s been laying the clues for us? Tibet?’

  ‘Alan, at first, way back, must have set up real Vengeance Street as his fallback, should you ever need the number, then taught it all to you via the copy of his bus. As for the rest: whatever you found in Ickthwaite, the Braille message in Vengeance Street—I don’t know. Tibet, I guess. The fight back. Friends of A, people like these guys we’re here with.’

  Ah yes: A. These guys.

  ‘So why did it warn me? The Braille. Against you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t read it. What did it say? You should have trusted me. Maybe they were worried you’d end up there with Chris.’

  It was true, I’d only read the first half sentence. Then he’d eaten it.

  ‘And where is Alan?’

  He shook his head. ‘Alan’s dead. I think. Don or natural, his last bender.’

  ‘So you just used Alan to get me to come with?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re a shit.’

  I stopped, made him stop too in the now fat and blurred rock shadow, the tip now way in front of us at the horizon, a sundial merging with oncoming night. It was cooler now and soon the sun would set behind us, where the stone and jeep were, far away from us now, us heading where? Escaping into the nothing together? Us walking out towards night, no food, nearly no water.

  ‘You bullshitted me. All that.’

  ‘Cos I had to. Some things matter. I’m sorry. I know it hurts. The Alan stuff. That I wasn’t your Chrissikins come back to you. Yeah,’ seeing my look, ‘easy meat. Tibet said: Alan’s the trigger, she’ll want to find Alan alive, use that. But when I came to know you I came to sense what Tibet didn’t know: that I’d speak bogus and you wouldn’t believe me but you’d come along and love it and pretend to you and me it was cos of Alan. When in fact it would be cos of the thrill of being back with me, being back with a Chris who was sorry, who’d repented and still loved you. Triggers and weakness.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Yeah. Be honest. Yes I bullshitted you, used you, for good reason. I hurt you. I lied to you. But I’m not him. I’ve been him, a jumped-up callow fuck living for himself. I’ve learnt my lesson. I’ve come out the other side. I see through him, I see through you, privileged access, I know where to push. I know you better than yourself, I know that hurts. I’m sorry you find us so irresistible. But you won’t be free till you fess up. And I need you free. I need you over us and beyond this, clean and strong, ready for the fight.’

  A noise from behind us: the toot of a horn, an engine. The jeep and men bearing down on us, sand in their wake. They waved at us to stop us there, arcing round to halt beside us, talking to him through the windows with their hands and in their language, opening the door for us while I stood there cuffed to him.

  ‘Junk the past. Be the bitch you are.’

  41

  Back in the jeep with the crew, driving through nothing, the sun and black stone behind us, the whole pressable world in front of us now in shadow, night about to fall for the second time that day. Strange identical landscape, grit everywhere, moon and silence, our guards, his profile, his ridiculous story and its holes.

  And yet and yet.

  We stopped at random, there being no features. They hollowed out a small dip and made a fire out of thorn branches from the jeep roof. Gramps started to cook. The others laid bedding down near the jeep then got something metal off the roof: a camp bed they carried over and unfolded a little distance away. They brought down a white mattress, unrolled it over the bed frame, laid a blue silk quilt on top, laid brown patterned blankets over that.

  We sat on a carpet cuffed together facing the fires. It was cold, they covered us with patterned blankets. The sky went transparent again, the stars and space mirrors twinkled. The fire burnt.

  ‘What else did you lie about?’ I said. ‘Who’s Ahmed? How does he fit? How’s he going to help?’

  When I said ‘Ahmed’ the men flicked their heads at us from the other side of the fire.

  ‘Don’t say his name. He’ll help by getting us routes and cover, get us to Vengeance Street.’

  So we could find the number Alan left for me there without Don seeing. Don with his nanocammed world and all-seeing eyes. Then ‘A’ would whisk us back to safety so we could give the number to Tibet who’d work out where it pointed on the globe and shore up that weak spot by careful pouring of molten metal while Don didn’t notice to save the world. Was his story.

  And what then, if I bought this, if we did this? What about my old life, hanged on social media? No getting back to that in his version, I reckoned.

  And how would Don not notice?

  And how would Ahmed whisk us around the world?

  ‘“A”,’ he said, people like “A”—part of the anti-world, the fightback—were masters of old routes and odd ways. Paths like the one we were on now, tracks through seemingly featureless desert that adepts could flow their way through.

  ‘Nice,’ I said. But how exactly would sniffing paths, trusting inner landscapes, let ‘A’ and crew smuggle us in and out of phone-loving Britain, the cammed docks of Barrow?

  ‘I
don’t know. But they will. They do it every day. The anti-world economy, moving drugs, people, weapons, under Don’s nose, without Don noticing despite all the cams. South American cocaine flown to lawless African islands of witches and airstrips, spirited by ‘A’ up through this desert and into Western Europe and then back over to North America.’

  ‘Nice. I thought they didn’t drug.’

  ‘They don’t drug us. Not their guests. Other people, exchange that cargo for weapons to fight Don.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Drugs have their place. Plants to change your head. The colonised changing the brains of the coloniser’s kids and redistributing wealth. But Don doesn’t want your brains changed. He wants you plugged into the half-life he controls.’

  We ate grain and cheese from wooden bowls. They gave us dates, made tea. They chatted to Sean round the fire.

  ‘Asking about our world,’ he said. ‘“Kel Ehendeset”. That’s what they call us, the West, Don’s realm. “Men who make and use machines”. Machineheads.’

  The men smoked, maybe talking with their hands and eyes, the flicks of their ash. We went behind the jeep to pee, he crouched down for me and looked away. The men got out skinned gourds and started drumming. Grandpa yodelled.

  ‘Secret messages?’

  ‘You bet. The whole world’s one song in the end.’

  We listened together under the diamond sky. Crazy times. That all this had actually happened and lord knew what else in the deep green past, again and again. I had to laugh. Then he was laughing too, though I hadn’t said anything. Then we were all laughing: us and the men and Gramps, for no reason, plugged into the same flow. It seemed.

  The men kicked over the fire and went to their bedding by the jeep. Sean took a leather bottle and we went by moonlight over to the camp bed which was our bed. A bed on legs out in the sand, a luxury, to protect us from snakes, scorpions, other creatures. He said. Their ultra-hospitable culture, the men more used to desert danger. Us the honoured guests, precious cargo.