The Chaos Code

by Justin Richards

  Further along was a faded, sepia-toned photograph hanging under a wall light. Matt had to stand at an angle to see it through the glass as the light reflected back at him. It showed two women standing outside the manor house porch where Matt had just come in. But they had been there a hundred years ago or more. One of them was young – maybe only Matt’s age. Her hair was arranged in curls and was jet black. Matt could only imagine her blue eyes. The other woman had white hair and was very old. Grandmother and granddaughter perhaps.

  It looked like the same girl in the last painting in the corridor. But the date in the corner beside the painter’s signature was 1833, which Matt reckoned must be before photography. The grandmother as a girl maybe. And with her was another girl of about the same age, but with fair hair and pale green eyes. There was a similarity between her and the woman in the little picture on the table, Matt realised. Not as close as the dark-haired girls, but a resemblance nonetheless.

  ‘I bet the holiday snaps are just as interesting,’ Matt muttered to himself and stepped out of the corridor into the enormous room beyond.

  Matt had once spent an especially boring afternoon with his father at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He had been expected to amuse himself quietly while Dad examined books that were so old they looked like they’d fall apart if he turned the pages too quickly. The only thing that had come close to impressing Matt had been the size of the library.

  Venture’s library seemed even bigger.

  Matt was shocked to find such an enormous place at the back of an old country house. Part of the effect was because it was all pretty much one huge circular room. Though, in fact, when Matt looked more closely he realised the room wasn’t round at all. It was made of so many flat sides meeting at shallow angles and lined with bookshelves that it just seemed circular.

  The domed roof high above added to the effect. Matt felt giddy looking up, and his feet tingled. There were several spiral staircases leading up to higher galleries lined with yet more bookcases. He guessed that there was probably a way into the upper levels from the upstairs floors of the house as well.

  Directly under the dome was a large circular table surrounded at intervals by high-backed chairs. The table was made of dark wood, so highly polished that looking down at the surface, Matt could see the dome and the galleries above reflected – as if he was looking into a deep, dark pit. He pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, angling it so he could look all round the room. Books and papers, so far as he could see. No sign of a computer though. But there had to be one somewhere, because Aunt Jane had said so.

  ‘You look lost, young man,’ a voice called to him.

  Startled, Matt looked round. There was no one there – the room was empty.

  A laugh. ‘Lost and confused.’

  Matt looked round again. Still no one. But there was movement, a flicker of light deep in the ‘pit’ of the table. He looked up and found that there was a man looking down at him from the gallery above. The light had been his reflection as he moved, walking towards the nearest of the spiral staircases and coming down to join Matt.

  He was a tall man with short dark hair wearing a suit, but with no tie. His shirt collar was folded back outside the suit jacket so that he looked both smart and comfortable. His eyes, Matt was not surprised to see, were a startling blue.

  ‘Julius Venture,’ the man said, holding out his hand as he approached.

  Matt stood up and shook hands. Venture’s grip was firm and confident without being tight or intimidating. ‘I’m Matt Stribling. And I like your library.’

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ Julius Venture agreed, looking round as if he’d not really noticed before. ‘Though I do wonder if it’s going to be big enough. I seem to acquire so many books. As well as other things.’ He fixed Matt with his blue eyes. ‘Do you read much?’

  ‘A bit. But actually I was looking for the computer. I wanted to check my email.’

  Venture nodded. ‘There’s no substitute for reading, you know. Well, actually reading is a means to an end – to several ends. Knowledge, enjoyment, understanding.’

  ‘You can get that off the Internet now.’

  Venture laughed. ‘I can see that you still have a lot to learn.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not mocking you. I think maybe we have different perspectives, different ways of looking at the world, but that’s hardly surprising.’

  He was walking across the library, and Matt followed. Venture led him towards an opening which Matt had not noticed before between two of the bookcases.

  ‘Robin said that you were pleasant enough but a bit weird.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Matt said. It was a description he’d have applied more readily to Robin than himself, he thought. Different perspectives again.

  The gap between the bookcases was actually a doorway, and Venture led Matt through into another room that seemed to be formed out of bookcases. It contained a desk on which was a flat-panel screen and a keyboard and mouse. The computer system unit must be inside the desk, Matt thought, hidden behind a door or fake drawer fronts.

  Venture gestured for Matt to sit down. He leaned over and moved the mouse gently, bringing the screen to life. There was a prompt for the password and a box to type it into.

  ‘Aunt Jane said there was a password,’ he murmured.

  ‘Did she tell you what the password is?’

  He hadn’t thought Venture would hear him, so Matt was surprised. ‘Er, no. She said it was a secret.’

  He seemed amused. ‘Did she? Are you sure that’s what she said?’

  ‘Yes,’ Matt protested. The man’s amusement annoyed him. ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘Exactly what she said? Think back, carefully. Hear her voice in your head.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As I said, you have a lot still to learn. It’s time you made a start. What is the time, by the way?’

  Matt could see that Venture was wearing a watch, so it seemed an odd question. But he checked his own watch anyway. ‘Three seventeen.’

  ‘Thank you. So precise,’ Venture said. ‘And so wrong.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Venture leaned forward, and said quietly, as if he was revealing a secret: ‘Digital watches don’t really work, you know.’

  Matt checked his watch again. Sure enough, the seconds had progressed. As he looked at it, the 17 became 18. ‘It’s working fine.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. You see everything as numbers, just like a computer. It deals in ones and zeros. You see digits, flicking from second to second. As if time is granular, as if nature is made up of bits and pieces – bits and bytes.’

  ‘But it’s accurate.’

  ‘Is it? What happens between the seconds? I know, I know – you could have a watch that showed the tenths, the hundredths, even the thousandths of a second. But still it’s click click click as the numbers change.’

  He sat down beside Matt and showed him his own watch. ‘I don’t pretend it’s entirely accurate,’ he admitted. It was an expensive, heavy watch with a segmented metal strap. It had a traditional analogue dial with numbers round the edge.

  ‘So?’ Matt said, not seeing the point.

  ‘So the second hand moves smoothly between the numbers. On some clocks the second hand jumps between the seconds, but even so it has to pass through the space between. In your digital-computer-world you’d try to break down the intervals into smaller and smaller pieces, and time – the world isn’t like that. In your model, if I can use that word, the next second will never come. The world …’ He stood up again and shrugged. ‘… stops’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that before you can get to the next second you have to get to the next tenth of a second, right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘And before you get to that next tenth of a second you have to get to the next hundredth, yes?’

  ‘OK.’ He was beginning to see where this was leading.

  ‘And before that
you need to get to the next thousandth. And before that, the next ten-thousandth …’

  ‘And the next millionth and ten-millionth.’

  ‘Exactly. You see the problem? You can go on forever breaking down the second into smaller and smaller pieces. So, mathematically, you never get anywhere.’

  ‘I see,’ Matt said, though he wasn’t sure he’d got exactly the point that Venture was trying to make.

  As if knowing what Matt was thinking, Venture said: ‘Just don’t rely on the numbers. Look around you, see it all properly. There are more things in heaven and earth than are digitised in your computer.’

  ‘But computers are useful,’ Matt protested.

  ‘Of course. But you have to be aware of their limitations. They don’t allow for ambiguity or misunderstanding. Imprecise input won’t give you an approximate answer, and there’s no sense of interpretation. You need to know the difference between data and information – between the numbers and what they are actually telling you. And don’t expect them to be as accurate as your senses.’

  Matt laughed at that. ‘Computers can be faster and more accurate than you can,’ he said.

  Venture laughed as well. ‘You think so? Does the computer know the value of pi?’

  ‘To more decimal places than I do,’ Matt told him. ‘Henry in my maths set learned pi to a hundred decimal places. A computer can go further even than that.’

  ‘Well, that’s impressive,’ Venture said levelly. ‘Over a hundred decimal places, eh? You see, you’re thinking in numbers again. Granular, and imprecise.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that the computer can rattle off pi to as many million decimal places as it likes. Yet I only have to look at the table you were sitting at in the library, and I see pi exactly. More exactly than the computer can ever know. A computer, relying on pixels on the screen and digits in its brain, doesn’t really know what a circle is. It can only ever approximate.’

  Matt stared back at him, disconcerted at the thoughts that were beginning to form at the back of his mind. ‘I see.’

  ‘You’re beginning to,’ Venture agreed. ‘Which is good. A good start. Now I have work to do, so I’ll leave you to it. Help yourself to anything you want.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘You’re very welcome here, did I tell you that?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘As I said, you’re welcome.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Matt called quickly. ‘The password?’

  Venture paused in the doorway. ‘Password? Oh a computer would never work it out. But you will. Remember what Jane told you.’

  Then he was gone, leaving Matt looking at the empty password field on the screen, and the realisation that he had not mentioned his dad. Though he didn’t know what he should have said, or what Venture might have been able to tell him. Matt did his best to push his irritation from his mind and concentrated on solving the more immediate puzzle. Aunt Jane had told him the password was a secret, he knew she had. So how could he ever work it out. He looked round the room for clues – a book title perhaps. But which one? There had to be a thousand books just in this one small room.

  Venture had told him to hear Aunt Jane’s words in his head. Was it something to do with the way she’d said it – her inflection? But Venture wasn’t there, so how could he even know?

  ‘The password for the computer is a secret,’ he heard her say in his memory. But there was something wrong with it. It didn’t sound quite right. Because, he realised, that wasn’t what she had said.

  What she had actually said was: ‘The password for the computer is secret.’

  Matt typed ‘secret’ into the entry field, and the computer came to life.

  There was an email from Alex saying he’d tried ringing Matt and just got his mum’s answerphone saying she was away. Matt didn’t have a mobile, since they weren’t allowed them at school, and he couldn’t remember Aunt Jane’s number. So he emailed Alex his address as best he knew it and told him the number would follow and that he’d check his email.

  After surfing the web a bit and playing an online game called Udder Worlds – where you had to herd cows into a milking shed before aliens kidnapped them and sent them on missions on other planets – Matt was getting bored. He logged off the computer and went back through to the main library, surprised to find how overcast it had got. Where pale light had streamed through the windows round the top of the dome despite the rain, there was now the gunmetal grey of gathering storm clouds.

  Incongruously, Matt saw, the library was lit by candles. A large candelabra with half a dozen candles stood in the middle of the round table, casting flickering light that was reflected back off the table top. The light reached barely further than the table itself so that the edges of the room were lost in shadows – the table could have been in the middle of a black void, or stuck in a field for all you could see.

  Matt made his way carefully and slowly to the table, straining to see where the door out of the room and back to the corridor might be. In the worst case, he thought, he’d simply walk round the edge of the enormous room until he found a way out. Or a light switch. Or take a candle from the table to light his way.

  But then a door opened opposite him, across the other side of the table. An elongated rectangle of light fell across the wooden floor. Framed in the doorway, light shining round her so that she was barely more than a silhouette, was Robin.

  ‘You’ve finished, then?’ she said.

  ‘I’m done,’ he agreed. ‘I was just looking for the door.’

  ‘You were busy earlier.’ She waited in the doorway for him.

  ‘You were checking up on me?’

  He could see her face now as she stepped back into the light to let him through. ‘If you like.’

  Matt wasn’t sure what to say to that. So he just nodded. ‘Hang on, where are we?’

  The door didn’t lead back to the corridor he’d come along earlier. It gave directly into another room. This one looked more like a museum than a library. There were glass-topped display tables and glass-fronted display cabinets on the wall. A statue of a woman dressed in a toga stood on a low plinth in one corner of the room, an ancient grandfather clock ticked away the moments in another. The second hand clicked from second to second, and Matt wondered if it was this clock that Robin’s father had in mind earlier.

  There were other items displayed on tables and shelves, but too many for Matt to take in as Robin led him across the room to another door. ‘Jane left a while ago, I said I’d tell her when you were done with the computer. I didn’t want her disturbing you if you were busy.’

  ‘Well, you know,’ Matt said. ‘What is all this stuff?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s just stuff. Dad can’t resist collecting things. He tries not to these days, but it sort of accumulates over the years. It’s the same with the books.’

  ‘Imagine what the place’ll be like when he’s sixty,’ Matt said.

  She smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Imagine.’

  ‘But what are they all for?’ He pointed to the nearest display table. Inside, protected beneath a glass lid, was a pile of gold coins. ‘I mean, where did these come from?’

  ‘They’re Russian,’ Robin said, as if that was obvious. ‘All that remains of the five tons of gold and silver that Admiral Kolchak took from the imperial treasury to fund the Tsar’s cause in 1917.’

  What happened to the rest of it? Matt wondered.

  Robin opened the door and Matt could see that it led into the corridor. Opposite was the little table with the picture of the fair-haired woman standing on it.

  ‘He had it tipped into Lake Baikal. It must have been so sad, standing on the narrow roadway that ran along the cliffs at the side of the lake, watching all their hopes and aspirations, their only chance of victory sinking out of sight in the deepest lake in the world. Perhaps Kol-chak wept, or perhaps it was just the cold wind stinging his eyes and making them water. But they knew by then it was all over
and they wanted to deny the Communists anything they could. A small victory, perhaps.’ Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. ‘Kolchak was captured soon after,’ she said as she led him back to the hallway. ‘They executed him, poor man.’

  Matt said goodbye, and stepped out into the dark, windy evening. He stood in the protection of the porch for a few moments before setting off down the drive. ‘Pleasant enough, but a bit weird,’ he said out loud.

  The lights were on downstairs in the cottage. As he approached, Matt could see through the front window into the living room. Aunt Jane was sitting in an armchair beside the fire. He watched her for a few seconds. She was facing away from him, but he could see that she was looking at a book.

  It was a big book, and she turned the pages slowly and carefully as she examined them. There were pictures and news clippings glued to the pages. A scrap-book, containing memories and keepsakes. Matt couldn’t make out any details.

  The front door was locked, so he pressed the bell. He could hear Aunt Jane moving about inside – a door banging, and hurried footsteps.

  ‘Hello, Matt. I hope you’ve had a nice time.’ She stood aside to let him come in. ‘Goodness, it’s got cold, hasn’t it?’

  He hadn’t noticed. He didn’t notice now. He was more concerned with Aunt Jane. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine, fine. I’m fine.’ She sniffed. ‘Just the beginnings of a cold, I think. Nothing to worry about.’

  But it didn’t look to Matt like the beginnings of a cold. Her eyes were moist and her cheeks stained. Her face was blotchy with embarrassment or emotion. It looked to Matt like she’d been crying.

  He closed the door behind him and went and sat in the chair opposite Aunt Jane, close to the fire. There was no sign of the scrapbook.

  Chapter 5

  Aunt Jane had tea keeping warm in the oven – lamb chops and vegetables with new potatoes. She asked Matt how he had spent his time in the library as they ate in the little dining room, but she seemed distracted, and Matt wondered if she was listening at all. He had to ask her twice for the salt.