Oceanic

by Greg Egan

  He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”

  Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you. I’m glad you can finally see that.”

  Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time … as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?

  He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”

  “Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”

  “I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist.”

  Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second best. “One of the other kind, then?”

  Robert pretended to be pondering the question. “On balance, I suspect that’s not too likely either.”

  “So why bring his name up?”

  “I have a feeling he would have admired your methods, that’s all. He was quite the connoisseur.”

  “Hmm.” Quint sounded suspicious, but not entirely unflattered.

  Robert had first set eyes on Quint in February of 1952. His house had been burgled the week before, and Arthur, a young man he’d been seeing since Christmas, had confessed to Robert that he’d given an acquaintance the address. Perhaps the two of them had planned to rob him, and Arthur had backed out at the last moment. In any case, Robert had gone to the police with an unlikely story about spotting the culprit in a pub, trying to sell an electric razor of the same make and model as the one taken from his house. No one could be charged on such flimsy evidence, so Robert had had no qualms about the consequences if Arthur had turned out to be lying. He’d simply hoped to prompt an investigation that might turn up something more tangible.

  The following day, the CID had paid Robert a visit. The man he’d accused was known to the police, and fingerprints taken on the day of the burglary matched the prints they had on file. However, at the time Robert claimed to have seen him in the pub, he’d been in custody already on an entirely different charge.

  The detectives had wanted to know why he’d lied. To spare himself the embarrassment, Robert had explained, of spelling out the true source of his information. Why was that embarrassing?

  “I’m involved with the informant.”

  One detective, Mr. Wills, had asked matter-of-factly, “What exactly does that entail, sir?” And Robert – in a burst of frankness, as if honesty itself was sure to be rewarded – had told him every detail. He’d known it was still technically illegal, of course. But then, so was playing football on Easter Sunday. It could hardly be treated as a serious crime, like burglary.

  The police had strung him along for hours, gathering as much information as they could before disabusing him of this misconception. They hadn’t charged him immediately; they’d needed a statement from Arthur first. But then Quint had materialized the next morning, and spelled out the choices very starkly. Three years in prison, with hard labor. Or Robert could resume his war-time work – for just one day a week, as a handsomely paid consultant to Quint’s branch of the secret service – and the charges would quietly vanish.

  At first, he’d told Quint to let the courts do their worst. He’d been angry enough to want to take a stand against the preposterous law, and whatever his feelings for Arthur, Quint had suggested – gloatingly, as if it strengthened his case – that the younger, working-class man would be treated far more leniently than Robert, having been led astray by someone whose duty was to set an example for the lower orders. Three years in prison was an unsettling prospect, but it would not have been the end of the world; the Mark I had changed the way he worked, but he could still function with nothing but a pencil and paper, if necessary. Even if they’d had him breaking rocks from dawn to dusk he probably would have been able to day-dream productively, and for all Quint’s scaremongering he’d doubted it would come to that.

  At some point, though, in the twenty-four hours Quint had given him to reach a decision, he’d lost his nerve. By granting the spooks their one day a week, he could avoid all the fuss and disruption of a trial. And though his work at the time – modeling embryological development – had been as challenging as anything he’d done in his life, he hadn’t been immune to pangs of nostalgia for the old days, when the fate of whole fleets of battleships had rested on finding the most efficient way to extract logical contradictions from a bank of rotating wheels.

  The trouble with giving in to extortion was, it proved that you could be bought. Never mind that the Russians could hardly have offered to intervene with the Manchester constabulary next time he needed to be rescued. Never mind that he would scarcely have cared if an enemy agent had threatened to send such comprehensive evidence to the newspapers that there’d be no prospect of his patrons saving him again. He’d lost any chance to proclaim that what he did in bed with another willing partner was not an issue of national security; by saying yes to Quint, he’d made it one. By choosing to be corrupted once, he’d brought the whole torrent of clichés and paranoia down upon his head: he was vulnerable to blackmail, an easy target for entrapment, perfidious by nature. He might as well have posed in flagrante delicto with Guy Burgess on the steps of the Kremlin.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if Quint and his masters had merely decided that they couldn’t trust him. The problem was – some six years after recruiting him, with no reason to believe that he had ever breached security in any way – they’d convinced themselves that they could neither continue to employ him, nor safely leave him in peace, until they’d rid him of the trait they’d used to control him in the first place.

  Robert went through the painful, complicated process of rearranging his body so he could look Quint in the eye. “You know, if it was legal there’d be nothing to worry about, would there? Why don’t you devote some of your considerable Machiavellian talents to that end? Blackmail a few politicians. Set up a Royal Commission. It would only take you a couple of years. Then we could all get on with our real jobs.”

  Quint blinked at him, more startled than outraged. “You might as well say that we should legalize treason!”

  Robert opened his mouth to reply, then decided not to waste his breath. Quint wasn’t expressing a moral opinion. He simply meant that a world in which fewer people’s lives were ruled by the constant fear of discovery was hardly one that a man in his profession would wish to hasten into existence.

  #

  When Robert was alone again, the time dragged. His hay fever worsened, until he was sneezing and gagging almost continuously; even with freedom of movement and an endless supply of the softest linen handkerchiefs, he would have been reduced to abject misery. Gradually, though, he grew more adept at dealing with the symptoms, delegating the task to some barely conscious part of himself. By the middle of the afternoon – covered in filth, eyes almost swollen shut – he finally managed to turn his mind back to his work.

  For the past four years he’d been immersed in particle physics. He’d been following the field on and off since before the war, but the paper by Yang and Mills in ’54, in which they’d generalized Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force, had jolted him into action.

  After several false starts, he believed he’d discovered a useful way to cast gravity into the same form. In general relativity, if you carried a four-dimensional velocity vector around a loop that enclosed a curved region of spacetime, it came back rotated – a phenomenon highly reminiscent of the way more abstract vectors behaved in nuclear physics. In both cases, the rotations could be treated algebraically, and the traditional way to get a handle on this was to make use of a set of matri
ces of complex numbers whose relationships mimicked the algebra in question. Hermann Weyl had catalogued most of the possibilities back in the ’20s and ’30s.

  In spacetime, there were six distinct ways you could rotate an object: you could turn it around any of three perpendicular axes in space, or you could boost its velocity in any of the same three directions. These two kinds of rotation were complementary, or “dual” to each other, with the ordinary rotations only affecting coordinates that were untouched by the corresponding boost, and vice versa. This meant that you could rotate something around, say, the x-axis, and speed it up in the same direction, without the two processes interfering.

  When Robert had tried applying the Yang-Mills approach to gravity in the obvious way, he’d floundered. It was only when he’d shifted the algebra of rotations into a new, strangely skewed guise that the mathematics had begun to fall into place. Inspired by a trick that particle physicists used to construct fields with left- or right-handed spin, he’d combined every rotation with its own dual multiplied by i, the square root of minus one. The result was a set of rotations in four complex dimensions, rather than the four real ones of ordinary spacetime, but the relationships between them preserved the original algebra.

  Demanding that these “self-dual” rotations satisfy Einstein’s equations turned out to be equivalent to ordinary general relativity, but the process leading to a quantum-mechanical version of the theory became dramatically simpler. Robert still had no idea how to interpret this, but as a purely formal trick it worked spectacularly well – and when the mathematics fell into place like that, it had to mean something.

  He spent several hours pondering old results, turning them over in his mind’s eye, rechecking and reimagining everything in the hope of forging some new connection. Making no progress, but there’d always been days like that. It was a triumph merely to spend this much time doing what he would have done back in the real world – however mundane, or even frustrating, the same activity might have been in its original setting.

  By evening, though, the victory began to seem hollow. He hadn’t lost his wits entirely, but he was frozen, stunted. He might as well have whiled away the hours reciting the base-32 multiplication table in Baudot code, just to prove that he still remembered it.

  As the room filled with shadows, his powers of concentration deserted him completely. His hay fever had abated, but he was too tired to think, and in too much pain to sleep. This wasn’t Russia, they couldn’t hold him forever; he simply had to wear them down with his patience. But when, exactly, would they have to let him go? And how much more patient could Quint be, with no pain, no terror, to erode his determination?

  The moon rose, casting a patch of light on the far wall; hunched over, he couldn’t see it directly, but it silvered the gray at his feet, and changed his whole sense of the space around him. The cavernous room mocking his confinement reminded him of nights he’d spent lying awake in the dormitory at Sherborne. A public school education did have one great advantage: however miserable you were afterward, you could always take comfort in the knowledge that life would never be quite as bad again.

  “This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!” That had been his form-master’s idea of showing what a civilized man he was: contempt for that loathsome subject, the stuff of engineering and other low trades. And as for Robert’s chemistry experiments, like the beautiful color-changing iodate reaction he’d learned from Chris’s brother—

  Robert felt a familiar ache in the pit of his stomach. Not now. I can’t afford this now. But the whole thing swept over him, unwanted, unbidden. He’d used to meet Chris in the library on Wednesdays; for months, that had been the only time they could spend together. Robert had been fifteen then, Chris a year older. If Chris had been plain, he still would have shone like a creature from another world. No one else in Sherborne had read Eddington on relativity, Hardy on mathematics. No one else’s horizons stretched beyond rugby, sadism, and the dimly satisfying prospect of reading classics at Oxford then vanishing into the maw of the civil service.

  They had never touched, never kissed. While half the school had been indulging in passionless sodomy – as a rather literal-minded substitute for the much too difficult task of imagining women – Robert had been too shy even to declare his feelings. Too shy, and too afraid that they might not be reciprocated. It hadn’t mattered. To have a friend like Chris had been enough.

  In December of 1929, they’d both sat the exams for Trinity College, Cambridge. Chris had won a scholarship; Robert hadn’t. He’d reconciled himself to their separation, and prepared for one more year at Sherborne without the one person who’d made it bearable. Chris would be following happily in the footsteps of Newton; just thinking of that would be some consolation.

  Chris never made it to Cambridge. In February, after six days in agony, he’d died of bovine tuberculosis.

  Robert wept silently, angry with himself because he knew that half his wretchedness was just self-pity, exploiting his grief as a disguise. He had to stay honest; once every source of unhappiness in his life melted together and became indistinguishable, he’d be like a cowed animal, with no sense of the past or the future. Ready to do anything to get out of the cage.

  If he hadn’t yet reached that point, he was close. It would only take a few more nights like the last one. Drifting off in the hope of a few minutes’ blankness, to find that sleep itself shone a colder light on everything. Drifting off, then waking with a sense of loss so extreme it was like suffocation.

  A woman’s voice spoke from the darkness in front of him. “Get off your knees!”

  Robert wondered if he was hallucinating. He’d heard no one approach across the creaky floorboards.

  The voice said nothing more. Robert rearranged his body so he could look up from the floor. There was a woman he’d never seen before, standing a few feet away.

  She’d sounded angry, but as he studied her face in the moonlight through the slits of his swollen eyes, he realized that her anger was directed, not at him, but at his condition. She gazed at him with an expression of horror and outrage, as if she’d chanced upon him being held like this in some respectable neighbor’s basement, rather than an MI6 facility. Maybe she was one of the staff employed in the upkeep of the house, but had no idea what went on here? Surely those people were vetted and supervised, though, and threatened with life imprisonment if they ever set foot outside their prescribed domains.

  For one surreal moment, Robert wondered if Quint had sent her to seduce him. It would not have been the strangest thing they’d tried. But she radiated such fierce self assurance – such a sense of confidence that she could speak with the authority of her convictions, and expect to be heeded – that he knew she could never have been chosen for the role. No one in Her Majesty’s government would consider self assurance an attractive quality in a woman.

  He said, “Throw me the key, and I’ll show you my Roger Bannister impression.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t need a key. Those days are over.”

  Robert started with fright. There were no bars between them. But the cage couldn’t have vanished before his eyes; she must have removed it while he’d been lost in his reverie. He’d gone through the whole painful exercise of turning to face her as if he were still confined, without even noticing.

  Removed it how?

  He wiped his eyes, shivering at the dizzying prospect of freedom. “Who are you?” An agent for the Russians, sent to liberate him from his own side? She’d have to be a zealot, then, or strangely naïve, to view his torture with such wide-eyed innocence.

  She stepped forward, then reached down and took his hand. “Do you think you can walk?” Her grip was firm, and her skin was cool and dry. She was completely unafraid; she might have been a good Samaritan in a public street helping an old man to his feet after a fall – not an intruder helping a threat to national security break out of therapeutic detention, at the risk of being shot on sight
.

  “I’m not even sure I can stand.” Robert steeled himself; maybe this woman was a trained assassin, but it would be too much to presume that if he cried out in pain and brought guards rushing in, she could still extricate him without raising a sweat. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “My name’s Helen.” She smiled and hoisted him to his feet, looking at once like a compassionate child pulling open the jaws of a hunter’s cruel trap, and a very powerful, very intelligent carnivore contemplating its own strength. “I’ve come to change everything.”

  Robert said, “Oh, good.”

  #

  Robert found that he could hobble; it was painful and undignified, but at least he didn’t have to be carried. Helen led him through the house; lights showed from some of the rooms, but there were no voices, no footsteps save their own, no signs of life at all. When they reached the tradesmen’s entrance she unbolted the door, revealing a moonlit garden.

  “Did you kill everyone?” he whispered. He’d made far too much noise to have come this far unmolested. Much as he had reason to despise his captors, mass murder on his behalf was a lot to take in.

  Helen cringed. “What a revolting idea! It’s hard to believe sometimes, how uncivilized you are.”

  “You mean the British?”

  “All of you!”

  “I must say, your accent’s rather good.”

  “I watched a lot of cinema,” she explained. “Mostly Ealing comedies. You never know how much that will help, though.”

  “Quite.”

  They crossed the garden, heading for a wooden gate in the hedge. Since murder was strictly for imperialists, Robert could only assume that she’d managed to drug everyone.

  The gate was unlocked. Outside the grounds, a cobbled lane ran past the hedge, leading into forest. Robert was barefoot, but the stones weren’t cold, and the slight unevenness of the path was welcome, restoring circulation to the soles of his feet.