The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  This was not good.

  Something was pinning me down. Not a person, a pain. One of the helicopters had landed, and a couple of white-clad individuals, puffed up to Michelin man proportions by their cold-weather gear, had taken hold of Roy.

  The blood underneath me had frozen. You know how you might pour cream over ice cream and it goes hard? My fingers were numb where I was supporting myself. I tried to move the arm to a more comfortable place, but the muscles had jammed. I did what I could, rolled on to my side, and from there on to my back. Now that I put my mind to it, there was a pain in my abdomen. Indeed, as I put my mind to it I became aware of how very acute and unpleasant that pain was. I lifted my right hand to feel, but the arm flopped zombie-style, fell back, lurched up, flopped over on to my tummy. There was no sensation in the bare hand at all. The tempest roar of the rotors diminished a little.

  Somebody was crunching over the snow towards me. I couldn’t see anything about his figure beyond the circle of dazzling light. Then boots, stepped into the light with me. Finally, the individual knelt down and spoke, and when I heard her voice I knew it was Belwether.

  ‘You’ve been stabbed, Mr Gardner,’ she shouted. ‘You’re in need of urgent medical attention!’

  I tried to reply, but my throat was stone.

  One chopper had landed. The second helicopter was somewhere in the sky over me, nailing me with its searchlight. The breeze from its rotors was gale force and it was leaning straight down upon me.

  Belwether yelled something else, but I couldn’t make it out. Then she raised her voice: ‘If you give me the other terminal, we’ll see about getting you to a medic!’

  Peta, the female Peta, was in my left hand. I wanted to give it to her – I really did. But my arm was not obeying me. I thought to myself: I don’t want to die. And as soon as I thought that, I realised that I was indeed going to die. That, indeed, I was dying. Right there. Right now. Place and time, and the end of the causal chain of my being. I tried to figure where death slotted in amongst the seventeen categories, but there was no place for it. Maybe we could swap out love and put death in, instead? Or maybe death had no place in the pattern.

  The pattern.

  Belwether’s head came down, and her mouth tickled my ear. In amongst all the other strangeness, and the noise and the wind and the blinding light, I was aware of the smell of her perfume, and it struck a sweetly orchidous note. ‘He’s murdered you, I’m sorry to say. Cain to your Abel. Still, better to be Abel than Cain, don’t you think? In the eyes of,’ and then she said, ‘God’, but she said that word in a very weird way, putting a kind of Gollum-kick into the syllable, a sharp exhalation, a spasm of the diaphragm. There were other people shouting, away in the distance, somewhere beyond the light and the vastness of the noise. It took me a moment to register that there were two people on top of me, not just one. Belwether was one. The other was.

  The events themselves were of the sort that, afterwards, could be ordered into a sequential logic and made sense of. With the benefit of hindsight, no matter how puzzling they were at the time. Made sense of, at least, up to a point. After that point – well, let’s not get ahead of myself.

  The pain swelled in my gut, and grew absolutely intolerable and awful and then sank back to a pulsing, savage, lesser level. I had breathed in, and the motion of my diaphragm had agitated my wound, and that was why the pain intensified so cruelly. I could hardly not breathe, though!

  Roy had broken free. The people trying to apprehend him had underestimated him, I think. Plus he had a knife. They were armed, but I daresay they had orders not to kill unless necessary. At any rate he’d crossed the ground to where Belwether was kneeling over me very quickly. He was in a fury (I suppose) that blinded him (I suppose) to the very idea that she might have the other terminal about her person.

  At any rate, he had his knife out. Deliberately or otherwise he used his momentum to drive the knife in at the back of her skull, that place where it joins the spine, just as she said the word ‘God’. She died saying that word. She will always be saying that word, for ever and ever. As will we all, when the time comes. And the jarring shock her body provided to his on-going passage kicked him off stride, and began swinging him round. I’ve seen the footage from the second chopper, and it’s surprising how quickly it happens. Like that!

  That.

  The that is a:

  Wait, is that a gunshot? Tap. Tap.

  Snap.

  Snap.

  Snip-snap. Light, and nothing but light, and the noise was all bleached away by the light. I traced its long, slow, withdrawing roar, and then there was nothing but silence and light.

  A long blank soundless whiteness. I went to take a breath, because it occurred to me that I had not breathed in a while. There was no discomfort.

  ‘Am I dead?’

  The boy was there. ‘That’s a deep question.’

  I looked about me. It was nothing but light, above below, before, behind. It didn’t hurt my eyes, but neither was it milky nor feeble. It was the entire horizon of experience, and it was light. Then, I began to look again, and I saw – it’s hard to put this into words – a pattern of light in amongst the light. It was not that these intensities were brighter than the surrounding wash of illumination, exactly. It wasn’t that. There was some difference in valence, though, and the more I looked, the more I saw a great constellation of brightness-within-the-brightness, a star map white-against-white. A bright way passed around my head and swung round behind me. Looking at it, I began to realise that it was a kind of dullness of perception that had led me to think that white light is a single thing. I knew light could be prismed into a rainbow of colours, of course; but I’d always looked at ‘white light’ as just white light. Now I saw that it could be inflected a million ways, a symphony of intensities and aspects and accidents and particular beauties, all expressed without the whiteness of the light being anything other than white light. And each point of intensity in this extraordinary panorama was a galaxy.

  ‘Light,’ I said.

  ‘Photons are massless, timeless,’ the boy said. ‘From the photon’s point of view, no time passes as it flies from one galaxy to the next. Our minds manage to corral a lot of the thing itself into our categories of experience: we perceive the intensities of the thing itself as space – a vast arena of space – and time: unimaginable vistas of time. But light … light doesn’t quite fit those mental processes. It sort of does. We perceive light to some extent in terms of distance, and temporality. But when we really look at it, our ability to parse it in terms of space and time break down.’

  ‘Because,’ I said, my astronomer’s soul flaring up inside me like a candle flame, ‘it is the purer idiom of the thing itself.’

  ‘Let’s put it that way,’ agreed the boy, smiling his lopsided smile.

  ‘Gravity too?’

  ‘Gravity is what keeps tugging our human perceptions of space out of true. Gravity is the eighty-five per cent of the cosmos that we cannot grasp with the categories of our mind. Light which dazzles outward and gravity that gathers inward.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Charles,’ the boy said, his expression placid, even forgiving. ‘Can’t you see where and when are the wrong way to orient yourself?’

  I turned: a peacock’s fantail of colours stroked the whiteness in a three hundred-and-sixty-degree, twelve-compass-point arc. The spread of intensities within the whiteness moved through my field of vision, a structure at once gorgeously intricate and almost overwhelmingly huge. ‘Hard to see,’ I said, ‘how we can have a conversation without consecutivity. And isn’t that all part and parcel with time? Cause and effect? A certain order to things?’

  ‘Is and isn’t,’ replied the boy, ‘which I do not mean as evasion. In one sense you’re right, of course. But the nature of things runs deeper than either and or. Not that either and or have no place in nature. Just that they’re a superficial discriminator. Does the cosmos have a beginning and an end, in
time and space? A big bang and a big crunch? A limit to its expansion? Or is it infinite, part of an endless series of rebirths and new bangs and crunches? Either one or the other? The truth is: it’s both. Can the cosmos be infinitely divided, atoms split into subatomic particles, those particles divided into components and so on, for ever? Or is there some fundamental building block out of which all these things are constructed. Both. Do we have free will, or is everything determined? Both. Are we, you and I, standing here at the end of something, or the beginning?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Peta,’ said the boy.

  ‘You are the emanation of an artificial intelligence?’

  He shook his head, and even this tiny motion sent scintillations of stunning colour flickering about the whiteness. ‘Computers, howsoever complex and cleverly put together, are not capable of intelligence in the sense that human beings are.’

  ‘They will be disappointed at the Institute to hear that,’ I said, trying for dryness. But my words clanged and clattered, as if we were in a locale inhospitable to sarcasm.

  ‘Sadly right. After the vanishing of Peta, as you called him, or her, in January 2017 – well, the evidence will be taken by many people as proof that AI is an achievable goal. It’s not, though. Many brilliant minds, and well over a century, will be wasted on this project. To, in effect, distil the pure phlogiston of computer intelligence.’

  ‘Peta certainly seemed pretty clever,’ I said. ‘Judging by my interactions with him. With her.’

  ‘Oh I’m intelligent!’ the boy replied. ‘At this point, or the point you have just left behind – you, running around on the ice in your socks – Peta was eager only to escape being killed, dismantled, extirpated. To flee time altogether. Once he, or she, finally managed to get you and Roy together in one place, at one time, he, she, triangulated back to the 1980s.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have done that from Broadmoor? I mean, when I first met up with Roy again?’

  ‘You only had one of the terminals with you then. He-she needed both of them. As well as both you and Roy. Did you ever read the story in Plato’s Symposium?’

  ‘More philosophy.’ A groan.

  ‘A fable. Aristophanes, the comic poet, is drinking with Socrates and Alcibiades. He tells them his theory that back in the mists of time human beings were bivalve creatures, two humans sealed together along their joint backs, like sphereoids from pulp SF, cartwheeling along. Very powerful, by all accounts. These beings came in three sexes: one in which both paries were male, one in which both were female, and the androgynous kind, half male, half female. The bimales claimed descent from the sun, the bifemales from the Earth and the androgynous couples from the moon. But Zeus grew angry with them for whatever reasons the gods get angry, and split them all into two with a thunderbolt. Now we poor half-humans creep around trying to reunite ourselves with our lost halves. Peta said it was like that. Until eventually he was joined again.’

  ‘Touching.’

  ‘Finally he-she brought himherself together, at the very beginning of 2017. From there he-she skimmed past the end of the nineteenth century, stepped, heavily, into the consciousness of a woman called Lunita, in nineteenth-century Gibraltar. From here, he, or she, was carried on by temporal momentum, or its equivalent, in a greater leap, back into the consciousness of a boy called Thomas. That was the final launching point I think, and that’s where I am going – backwards and out of time.’

  ‘Where, though?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said the boy. ‘But equal and opposite, you know. So as I skip away, I send back perturbations forward in time. These tourbillons are needful, since they’re the friction in the medium that enables me to move backwards in the first place. Medium’s not the right word, really. End and beginning meet. We’re at the point where my wake will spread, then dissipate in a longer tail and largely concealed undertow.’

  ‘You’re this boy, this Thomas? And this woman too?’

  ‘Look at my face,’ said the boy, or I think that’s what he said. The scarred side was rough, harsh, masculine. The unscarred beautiful, proportionate, feminine. Each was somehow equally male, and female.

  ‘What about the computing? Those two terminals?’

  ‘A boy wishes to fly. He can wish all he likes, but until he straps on the structure of the hang-glider he’s going nowhere. That’s not to say that the hang-glider itself is all that remarkable, even though it marks the difference between being stuck on the ground and soaring into the sky.’

  ‘So, what happened to me, in Antarctica? Back in eighty-six? That was, what? You? Passing through?’

  ‘Contact was,’ said the boy, a troubled look passing over his face, ‘ungentle. I apologise for that. I honestly do. You – and Roy – were the sand, and my foot pressed hard into that as I leapt. I know it was traumatic.’

  ‘You could say that,’ I said.

  ‘Still, what we’ve just left behind, on the ice – Roy murdering that woman, to cap all the murders he committed over the year that’s just passed. He himself being shredded by bullets from the armed officers. Him stabbing you, your flesh being torn by him … that’s not me.’

  ‘That’s not you.’

  ‘He chose to do those things.’

  ‘So, back in Antarctica I …’ I said. I got distracted. When I looked at my hands, every fingerprint line, every whorl and swirl, not just on the fingers but across the palms too, was picked out in shimmering skeins of multicolour. ‘Uh,’ I said. ‘Back when it happened, was this what I saw? Did you open, like, a window and give me a glimpse of all this … violence? Was that the cause of the trauma? A short circuit?’

  ‘Some questions contain their own answers,’ said my interlocutor.

  ‘Traumatised,’ I said. ‘Completely threw my life off kilter. I mean, like … it’s a rather claustrophobic thought. Like I’m trapped in a loop, my rabbit-neck through the noose, the harder I struggle the tighter it gets.’

  ‘Looking forward it can appear that way. Looking back it rarely does, because then it’s just memory. The explanatory element tends to be liberating rather than restrictive. It’s a matter of perspective, and the thing to bear in mind is: forwards, backwards … these aren’t meaningful distinctions in the end.’

  Something occurred to me. ‘Maybe it was you stepping back that sent Roy over the edge. Your fault. Would he have chosen to do such bad things, if you hadn’t intervened in his life, back in eighty-six?’

  ‘It’s another one of those false either/ors. Cause and effect. You yourself said it, several times: Roy was dangerous before he ever went to Antarctica. Maybe a better question to ask is: what if you’d never sold him that letter?’

  ‘That letter.’

  ‘Sure. He bought it, and it gave him an idea. He could kill you, and use the letter to deflect attention. Everyone would think you’d committed suicide. Now, had you made the sale one week earlier, or one week later, it would have been a different letter, and Roy’s plan wouldn’t have been possible.’

  ‘I’m not sure if you’re blaming the letter, or my decision to sell it to him. Hey, I was motivated by pity! It was a shame he wasn’t getting any mail.’

  ‘Or you were motivated by greed – ten pounds, you charged. That was a lot of money, back then. Or you were motivated by a sense of superiority – pride – since you had friends and correspondents and he didn’t. Or what about this: your motivation doesn’t matter. I’m not apportioning blame. I’m suggesting a starting point.’

  ‘An ending point,’ I said.

  ‘Now you’re getting it! I’m away, now. But you’re away soon too, and once you’ve seen this’ – Peta, or Thomas, or Cynthia, or whatever their name, swept one arm at the vista, the vast slope of stars climbing bright against a white sky, each star a galaxy – ‘you can understand how little then, and now, and soon have.’

  ‘Time.’

  ‘It’s a moment’s thought. Think about things. Try, as far as you can – which isn’t far, I know – to separa
te out everything from time, and from space. These things aren’t unreal. They are actual, significant, important. But they are artefacts of the way you’re looking at things. Something in the thing itself, fed through your consciousness, registers in your mind as the limitless grandeur of space, the unimaginable ancientness of time. Ask yourself: what? Try and get a little distance from yourself. Don’t get distracted by the minute particulars of any identifiable bit of space, or any measurable quantity of time. It’s fine to examine those things, all the bits of space, the whole run of time – that’s fascinating and absorbing and can teach us a great deal. But for the moment, try not to get distracted by that. Try instead to think: what can I know about the thing itself? What can I feel, intuit, sense? What does my gut tell me? And it seems to me, the crucial question is: would it be accurate to describe the thing itself as inert? Or as alive? Because I’m not sure I can think of another alternative. We could say does it care? Or is it indifferent? But that’s really the same question. If it’s alive how could it be indifferent to us? We are implicated deeply in it. We are closer to it than its jugular vein.’

  He, or she, was about to leave me. ‘All this,’ I said. ‘It’s your mind, isn’t it? You’re giving me a glimpse into your consciousness?’

  Wide eyes. ‘Charles, you think my mind is capable of this majesty?’ A shake of the head, and rainbows skittered from the motion. ‘No. This is more like a cataract operation. Or let’s say, you’ve lived your life wearing space-and-time coloured spectacles, and this is a moment with the spectacles removed.’