She slumped at his feet, and as Ringer stooped to help her, unable to see a thing, he heard her moaning softly. ‘Ooooo …’
‘Please don’t start all that again, Laura; somebody will hear us.’
‘-AAAHHH!’
He put his palm over her mouth, but wondered if he risked suffocating her. He let go.
‘Ooooo …’
What if anyone in Red Zone heard? There was only one possible reason why two patients might be making strange noises in the dark. Perhaps, in the interests of not arousing suspicion, Ringer ought to undress both of them.
‘-AAAHHH!’
Suddenly there was light. A painful whiteness filled his eyes, flooding from the slowly opening door as Laura regained her senses and Ringer tried to prepare a plausible excuse for them both. A figure stood in silhouette, motionless, saying nothing, partially eclipsing the vast and sterile chamber of Red Zone that now was revealed. The figure – a man – appeared unperturbed by their presence. In fact he was welcoming them, waving slowly as if in greeting. It was Ringer.
This second Other could not be from the past, Ringer realized, resolving in the space of a second or two the man’s face and his apparel, identical to Ringer’s own. Without a word, the Other was beginning to walk slowly backwards, like a film in reverse, retreating among the control panels and towering equipment until he vanished from view. Ringer and Laura stood up and looked into the great gleaming room.
‘Is this the place?’ he said to her. She nodded, and the two of them walked inside.
There was no one about; the Other was gone, and Ringer began to inspect the rows of computer screens, the metal stairs and walkways, the notice boards and signs warning of high voltage, or the need for hard hats and protective goggles. At the centre of the chamber, a tangle of wires and pipes converged on what, to Ringer, might just as well have been the workings of an enormous refrigerator or air-conditioning unit. Its appearance was industrial yet immaculately clean; and at its heart, Ringer observed, was a huge, tapering white cylinder, like a great whale caught in a tangle of rigging.
‘Is this where you’ve been?’ he asked Laura.
‘I can’t say for certain,’ she told him. ‘But somehow it’s as if part of me has always been here. Look, there’s the door.’
It was marked Maintenance, and lay open at the side of the cylinder like the entrance to a spacecraft. A stepladder took them up to it; Ringer first, then Laura. The two of them climbed inside, and saw at last the vacuum array.
‘Yes!’ Laura whispered with pleasure and satisfaction. ‘This is the place!’
There were hundreds of her, perhaps thousands. Ringer too was reflected in the circular mirrors, each a couple of metres in diameter, at either end of the small chamber they had entered. These were just two mirrors among countless others beyond view, all of a smoothness and rarity that would have delighted an emperor, fashioned from rare metals, polished to perfection, aligned with astronomical accuracy. Not a speck or mote was on them, not a stain or scratch. Gently curved, the mirrors magnified what they reproduced, like the star-catching surface of a great telescope. Yet their curve was no common parabola; Ringer understood this at once with an insight he could not explain, a memory he could not account for, seeing his distorted face first in one mirror, then in the other, and noting how the world itself, by means of these bright sheets, was in some enchanted way inverted. Their figure was a cycloid; beautiful yet monstrous. Time and madness lay within their caustic grasp.
Laura reached out to touch a mirrored surface. ‘No!’ Ringer gasped, and she drew back. The thought returned to him, like a puzzling echo, that the destruction of this perfect machine was the sole reason they were here. ‘It might be dangerous,’ he explained to her. ‘We don’t know if the mirrors are charged.’ The mere breath of his words, floating invisibly close to the mirror beside him, turned the caution he had voiced into a patch of condensation, grey and transiently flickering over a small part of the mirror’s face, clouding for a short moment his own perplexed reflection and all its multiplications. Perhaps it would be safe after all, to place a hand on the polished metal; to leave a fingerprint that would betray them, when the crime became known.
Yet it was surely important that no one discover they had been here. ‘Wait a moment,’ Ringer told Laura, climbing out of the service hatch and back down the ladder.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Stay here. I want to find the best way of putting this thing out of action.’
First he decided he should close the stairwell door which presented such an obvious indication of their intrusion. He walked tentatively towards it, treading as softly as he could on the polished floor, but as he drew near he had to stifle his own startled exclamation. In the shadows beyond the open door, at the bottom of the stairs, something moved. Ringer froze for an instant, then understood. Arriving at the door, he saw the two figures lying at his feet: himself and Laura, only a few minutes earlier. Now Ringer was the Other. Here in Red Zone, time’s loops and contortions were shrunk to mere moments.
Ringer saw himself look up, dazzled by the light. Standing there, confronted by a past that was his own yet now belonged to someone else, Ringer waved to the confused strangers on the floor; a gesture of final farewell before closing the door on them, and on his life. Ringer knew what they were doing now, in the dark stairwell. Soon those two hidden figures would rise and begin to walk backwards up the stairs, growing a little younger with each difficult step. Eventually they would reach a level with light enough to read by; and as their words congealed out of the vibrating air into their mouths and lungs, they would puzzle over whether the map they held was back to front. Thinking in reverse, oblivious to the strangeness of their orientation, they then would go to Laura’s room, and Ringer would walk backwards to his, returning at last to sleep, and to dreams that perhaps, just occasionally, might betray to him the paradox of his existence. And this other Ringer would be released from his clinical prison, to pursue shrinking years that would culminate in the oblivion of his mother’s womb.
This was the life to which Ringer bade farewell; the entertainment of a cosmic projectionist, played in a darkened, empty theatre. Now he had to deal with the vacuum array – but how? He heard a sound: it came from high up, at the far end of a walkway. Someone was entering Red Zone, and this time Ringer felt sure it could not be himself.
He hurried back round to the stepladder that took him into the service hatch. He found Laura sitting inside the vacuum array, cross-legged, her arms bent across her chest.
‘For God’s sake, Laura,’ he whispered, ‘whatever you do, don’t start that “oo-ah” business now!’
The sounds were growing louder; Ringer could hear the metallic clang of footsteps on the overhead walkway, and he could hear a voice, a man speaking confidently, though as yet unintelligibly, to some companion.
The footsteps ceased; Ringer now could make out the man’s words.
‘You’ll be left in no doubt of the medical significance, Dr Blake, believe me.’
‘All I know,’ said Dr Blake – Ringer recognized her voice – ‘is that this machine of yours is possibly what’s been causing the mental disorders in the first place.’
‘That’s wholly unfounded, doctor.’ The footsteps resumed; Ringer heard the two people coming down a flight of steps less resonant than the walkway. ‘You have to appreciate,’ the man continued, ‘that work of this kind will have applications in every area of science. I’m a particle physicist: I don’t care very much about mobile phone networks! But the energies resulting from the vacuum array will produce physics of a kind we’ve never witnessed before, and that’s why I’m all in favour of what the Rosier Corporation is trying to do.’
‘New physics, Dr Chambers?’ said Blake. ‘Like non-collapsible wave functions?’
Chambers laughed. ‘You’ve obviously been doing your homework, but I think you need to be more discriminating in separating fact from speculation. Don’t believe anything
you might have heard from John Ringer or read in his papers – there’s absolutely no risk, as he himself conceded before he fell ill. Just get him back to health, Dr Blake, so that he can carry on his work with us. Rosier are very keen to have him as a consultant.’
Ringer then heard Dr Blake say, ‘I’d find it a lot easier to treat my patients, Dr Chambers, if I could find out exactly what medication was given to them before they came into my care.’
‘What are you talking about? Do you think we drugged them?’
Dr Blake spoke firmly. ‘Both Ringer and Clara have suffered a mental impairment far more devastating than anything I can explain medically. And both of them happened to be involved with your work in one way or another: Ringer was with you at Craigcarron, and Clara was found unconscious here in Red Zone.’
‘She was outside on the mountain!’ Chambers snapped.
‘That’s what you and the Rosier people tell me. I’ve heard otherwise. Which makes me wonder if my patients’ memory loss, so convenient for your need for corporate secrecy, might have had a little pharmacological help.’
Then Ringer heard a change in Chambers’ voice. He spoke politely but with unmistakable menace. ‘Dr Blake,’ he said, ‘if there were any truth in what you were saying, and if you chose to say it to anyone else, then you might expect to be next in line for some “pharmacological help”.’
She laughed in nervous disbelief. ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘On the contrary,’ Chambers reassured her. ‘Surely only a mentally disturbed person would make the sort of ludicrous accusations you’ve just aired – hypothetically of course – against the Rosier Corporation.’
Both fell silent. Ringer waited inside the vacuum array, surrounded by the endless reflections of himself and Laura.
‘Now,’ said Chambers briskly to his companion. ‘Let me show you what all the fuss is about. This is the main control panel – look, it’s all in test mode. Then we click on “standby”.’
Suddenly Ringer heard a new sound; a deep humming that sent its vibrations through the entire machine, and through himself. It was the sound of a great animal slowly coming to life.
‘The safety procedures are absolutely foolproof,’ Chambers said, continuing his presentation for Dr Blake. ‘This check here, for instance, screens for any maintenance personnel who might happen to be doing work inside the array. We wouldn’t want to go shutting someone up in there, would we!’
Now Ringer was sure he was about to be discovered. Should he simply lunge at the mirror and shatter both it and himself? But before he could even decide what to do, he heard another sound, close at hand and whining disconsolately, as if aware that no protest could possibly overwhelm the great rumbling of the dormant array itself. Beside him, Ringer saw the origin of the noise. The service hatch was sliding shut. The safety procedures were far from foolproof.
Taking the last of the outside light with it, the hatch closed with a judder and bump. Ringer and Laura were sealed in total darkness within the array. He could no longer hear the voices outside; instead there was only the constant hum of the machine. Then it too ceased.
All was silent. Perhaps the control panel had, after all, detected the human contaminants trapped between the mirrors. Ringer waited, hearing his own rapid breath and Laura’s beside him, which was slow and calm. He was terrified, and he envied her. He reached out and put his arms around her.
‘It’s all right,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t worry.’
Then there was light. It came from all around them: a dull, red, uniform glow, as in a photographer’s developing room. It was suddenly warmer, too, and the thought occurred to Ringer that their tomb might be no more than a grandiose microwave oven.
‘We’re going to die,’ Ringer whispered.
‘No,’ said Laura. ‘We’re about to be born.’
She was free of fear; as if she had seized her fate in all its multiplicity, and had conquered it. What he had previously considered apathy was to be her soul’s final mercy. In the blood-red light, Ringer saw the endless reflections on either side; and among the numerous figures, now that dizziness and faintness were beginning to rescue him from terror, he began to discern curious differences. The reflections, he noticed, were not all synchronized. There was a gap of time between them, which was growing larger.
‘Something strange is happening,’ he said. ‘Can you see it?’
‘It’s always like this,’ said Laura.
There he was, a few minutes ago. He saw it – one of the closest reflections – himself, walking across the smooth floor. Beyond lay earlier times; he was in the hospital corridor, or back in his room. And as his eyes grew more accustomed to the dull glow, he saw the reflections move closer to one another, like the folding of a deck of cards. He supposed the mirrors must be sliding together; the space between them was shrinking. Perhaps Ringer and Laura would be crushed before being boiled alive. Whatever the outcome, Ringer realized that, in the accepted manner of the doomed, he was seeing his life before him, in infinite, time-lapsed layers. At the furthest distance, almost invisible, he was a child.
‘We’ve always been here,’ Laura told him. ‘This is why we’ve existed.’
Their lives had been sucked from empty space, and to the same void they would be returned. A sudden loud hiss engulfed them; the chamber was whipped by wind.
‘We’re decompressing!’ Ringer saw it as another kindness; to be unconscious before the end. The reflections by now had detached themselves altogether from the unflinching geometry of the mirrors. He could see Laura with her husband and children; he with people who must once have been his own family. At exactly the same time, elsewhere, she was Helen, and he was someone who thought he loved her. Beyond, in the same limitless moment of non-being, she was being hypnotized by the swinging pocket watch of a man in a waistcoat; and as the reflections increased in number and variety, there were other men, other women. All of them, perhaps, throughout human history, were the spectral images of this captured couple at the end of time.
‘I am Life – creator of worlds.’
It was the last thing he heard before the attenuating air of the hull they lay trapped in attained the emptiness of outer space, and they passed beyond the bounds of mortality. The mirrors were quickly spattered and ruined, the machine was whirring itself to destruction; but the reflections would live on, their ebb and flow traversing the cosmos. The array was erupting in a brilliant whiteness; a vast ball of radiation that might one day faintly illuminate a distant sky, a twinkling amendment to a constellation. The infant fireball was still only taking its first steps during the split-second that saw Red Zone evaporated, Blake and Chambers dissolved, Burgh House Hospital turned to atoms, and with it the story John Ringer had written and left beside his incinerating bed. It was called Harry’s Tale; and on the small planet that now melted as swiftly as a snowflake, none survived who might have read it.
HARRY’S TALE
‘I ordered a book,’ he was saying to the T-shirted youth behind the till.
‘Uh?’
‘I’m here to collect it. My name is Harry Dick.’
There were few other customers in Rosier Books; though enough, apparently, to make the lanky teenage assistant too busy to be of immediate help. ‘Hang on,’ he said, consulting the computer screen on his desk while Harry idly gazed at his surroundings. Founded in the nineteenth century, the grand old shop had retained its original name even throughout the Time of Restructuring. Then came the Change, and six years later the place had been saved from bankruptcy by Rosier Media, who had refitted it as a branch of their retail chain.
‘Yeah, here we are,’ said the assistant. ‘Professor Faust. I’ll go and get it for you.’ He came out from behind the counter and loped off in the direction of a door marked Staff only. Probably paying his way through a university degree in television studies, Harry supposed. Better than tossing burgers.
‘No service?’ a voice said behind him. Harry turned to see an elderly gentleman.
‘He’ll be back in a moment,’ Harry explained. His companion looked nearly old enough to remember the Patriotic War, but still had a youthful twinkle in his eye.
‘It’s just not the same, is it?’ he said to Harry. ‘This place, I mean. Look at that big pile of cookery books they’ve got beside the door. That’s where the history section once was.’
‘I remember,’ said Harry. ‘Though you surely aren’t nostalgic for the Cromwell Edition we used to queue for.’
The old man shrugged. ‘No worse than cookery or gardening, if you ask me.’
There was still no sign of the assistant. ‘I seem to have caused him a problem,’ Harry remarked. ‘I ordered a copy of Professor Faust.’
‘Oh yes,’ said the old man. ‘Heinrich Behring: a fine writer. I remember reading him at school. Totally out of fashion now, of course.’ He waved his arm, indicating the surrounding shelves with their countless books. ‘One minute you’re in; the next, you’re out. Like you never existed. Stalinism didn’t die, it only got a new name. “Dictatorship of the free market”.’
Harry was beginning to feel uneasy. His elderly companion was evidently some old Party man; a former union official or civil servant perhaps, or a retired secret policeman who’d once made a good living spying on his neighbours. He hoped the absent shop assistant would hurry back.
‘I’m meant to be meeting my wife soon,’ Harry said, glancing at his watch. He took out his mobile phone. ‘I’d better call her.’
The old man watched as Harry pressed the phone to his ear. ‘Don’t go frying your brain with that thing,’ he said, his eyes still gleaming with mischief. ‘Haven’t you heard of AMD?’
Harry was getting no reply. ‘AMD?’ he said, deciding to text her instead. ‘What’s that?’
‘I read about it in the paper,’ his companion told him. ‘People lose their memories, make things up. They’ve got a hospital somewhere studying it. There’s a theory it might be caused by these new phones.’
Mobius Dick Page 23
