Luminous

by Greg Egan

  I called the police from a public phone; the synthesized voice of my notepad spoke for me. I left an anonymous message for the cop who’d interrogated me, giving the code which would unlock the data in the microspheres. Forensic would have found them almost immediately, but extracting the information by brute-force microscopy would have taken days.

  Then I waited.

  Five hours later, around three a.m., the two men I’d followed left in a hurry, without replacements. I took out my photo of De Angelis and inspected it in the moonlight. I still don’t understand what it was about her that held me in her sway; she was either a thief or a fool. Possibly both. And whatever she was, it had killed her.

  I said, ‘Don’t just stand there smirking like you know all the answers. How about wishing me luck?’

  * * *

  The building was ancient, and in bad repair. I had no trouble picking the lock on the front door, and though the stairs creaked all the way to the top floor I encountered no one.

  There was a tell-tale pattern of electric fields detectable through the door of apartment 712; it looked like it was wired-up with ten different kinds of alarm. I picked the lock of the neighbouring apartment. There was an access hatch in the ceiling – fortuitously right above the sofa. Someone below moaned in their sleep as I pulled my legs up and closed the hatch. My heart was pounding from adrenaline and claustrophobia, burglary in a foreign city, fear, anticipation. I played a torch-beam around: mice went scurrying.

  The corresponding hatch in 712 was guarded just like the door. I moved to another part of the ceiling, lifted away the thermal insulation, then cut a hole in the plaster and lowered myself into the room.

  I don’t know what I’d expected to find. A shrine covered with icons and votive candles? Occult paraphernalia and a stack of dusty volumes on the teachings of Slavonic mystics?

  There was nothing in the room but a bed, a chair, and a VR rig, plugged into the phone socket. Vienna had kept up with the times; even this dilapidated apartment had the latest high-bandwidth ISDN.

  I glanced down at the street; there was no one in sight. I put my ear to the door; if anyone was ascending the stairs, they were far quieter than I’d been.

  I slipped the helmet over my head.

  The simulation was a building, larger than anything I’d ever seen, stretching out around me like a stadium, like a Colosseum. In the distance – perhaps two hundred metres away – were giant marble columns topped with arches, holding up a balcony with an ornate metal railing, and another set of Columns, supporting another balcony … and so on, to six tiers. The floor was tile, or parquetry, with delicate angular braids outlining a complex hexagonal pattern in red and gold. I looked up – and, dazzled, threw my arms in front of my face (to no effect). The hall of this impossible cathedral was topped with a massive dome, the scale defying calculation. Sunlight poured in through dozens of arched windows around the base. Above, covering the dome, was a figurative mosaic, the colours exquisite beyond belief. My eyes watered from the brightness; as I blinked away the tears, I could begin to make out the scene. A haloed woman stretched out her hand—

  Someone pressed a gun barrel to my throat.

  I froze, waiting for my captor to speak. After a few seconds, I said in German, ‘I wish someone would teach me to move that quietly.’

  A young male voice replied, in heavily accented English: ‘ ‘‘He who possesses the truth of the word of Jesus can hear its silence.’’ Saint Ignatius of Antioch.’ Then he must have reached over to the rig control box and turned down the volume – I’d planned to do that myself, but it had seemed redundant – because I suddenly realised that I’d been listening to a blanket of white noise.

  He said, ‘Do you like what we’re building? It was inspired by the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople – Justinian’s Church of the Divine Wisdom – but it’s not a slavish copy. The new architecture has no need to make concessions to gross matter. The original in Istanbul is a museum now, and of course it was used as a mosque for five centuries before that. But there’s no prospect of either fate befalling this holy place.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re working for Luciano Masini, aren’t you?’

  I couldn’t think of a plausible lie which would make me any more popular. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Let me show you something.’

  I stood rigid, prepared, hoping he was about to take the helmet off me. I felt him moving as the gun barrel shifted slightly, then I realised that he was slipping on the rig’s data glove.

  He pointed his hand, and moved my viewpoint; blindly for him, which impressed me. I seemed to slide across the cathedral floor straight towards the sanctuary, which was separated from the nave by a massive, gilded latticework screen, covered in hundreds of icons. From a distance, the screen glinted opulently, the subjects of the paintings impossible to discern, the coloured panels making up a weirdly beautiful abstract mosaic.

  As I drew closer, though, the effect was overwhelming.

  The images were all executed in the same ‘crude’ two-dimensional style which I’d derided in Masini’s missing baseball card – but here, together en masse, they seemed a thousand times more expressive than any overblown Renaissance masterpiece. It was not just the fact that the colours had been ‘restored’ to a richness no physical pigment had ever possessed: reds and blues like luminous velvet, silver like white-hot steel. The simple, stylised human geometry of the figures – the angle of a head bowed in suffering, the strange dispassionate entreaty of eyes raised to heaven – seemed to constitute a whole language of emotions, with a clarity and precision which cut through every barrier to comprehension. It was like writing before Babel, like telepathy, like music.

  Or maybe the gun at my throat was helping to broaden my aesthetic sensibilities. Nothing like a good dose of endogenous opiates to throw open the doors of perception.

  My captor pointed my eyes at an empty space between two of the icons.

  ‘This is where Our Lady of Chernobyl belongs.’

  ‘Chernobyl? That’s where it was painted?’

  ‘Masini didn’t tell you anything, did he?’

  ‘Didn’t tell me what? That the icon was really fifteenth-century?’

  ‘Not fifteenth. Twentieth. 1986.’

  My mind was racing, but I said nothing.

  He recounted the whole story in matter-of-fact tones, as if he’d been there in person. ‘One of the founders of the True Church was a worker at the number four reactor. When the accident happened, he received a lethal dose within hours. But he didn’t die straight away. It was two weeks later, when he truly understood the scale of the tragedy – when he realised that it wasn’t just hundreds of volunteers, firemen and soldiers who’d die in agony in the months to follow, but tens of thousands of people dying in years to come; land and water contaminated for decades; sickness for generations – that Our Lady came to him in a vision, and She told him what to do.

  ‘He was to paint Her as the Vladimir Mother of God, copying every detail, respecting the tradition. But in truth, he would be the instrument for the creation of a new icon – and She would sanctify it, pouring into it all of Her Son’s compassion for the suffering which had taken place, His rejoicing in the courage and self-sacrifice His people had shown, and His will to share the burden of the grief and pain that was yet to come.

  ‘She told him to mix some spilt fuel into the pigments he used, and when it was completed to hide it away until it could take its rightful place on the iconostasis of the One True Church.’

  I closed my eyes, and saw a scene from a TV documentary: celluloid movie footage taken just after the accident, the image covered with ghostly flashes and trails. Particle tracks recorded in the emulsion; radiation damage to the film itself. That was what Hengartner’s ‘scratch’ had meant – whether it was a real effect which appeared when he photographed the icon with a modern camera, or just a stylised addition created by computer. It was a message to any prospective buyer who knew how to
read the code: This is not what the commentary says. This is a rarity, a brand-new icon, an original. Our Lady of Chernobyl. Ukrainian, 1986.

  I said, ‘I’m surprised anyone ever got it onto a plane.’

  ‘The radiation is barely detectable now; most of the hottest fission products decayed years ago. Still, you wouldn’t want to kiss it. And maybe it killed that superstitious old man a little sooner than he would have died otherwise.’

  Superstitious? ‘Hengartner … thought it would cure his cancer?’

  ‘Why else would he have bought it? It was stolen in ’93, and it disappeared for a long time, but there were always rumours circulating about its miraculous powers.’ His tone was contemptuous. ‘I don’t know what religion that old fart believed in. Homeopathy, maybe. A dose of what ailed him, to put it right again. The best whole-body scanners can pick up the smallest trace of strontium-90, and date it to the accident; if Chernobyl caused his cancer, he would have known it. But your own boss, I imagine, is just an old-fashioned Mariolater, who thinks he can save his granddaughter’s life if he burns all his money at a shrine to the Virgin.’

  Maybe he thought he was goading me; I didn’t give a shit what Masini believed, but a surge of careless anger ran through me. ‘And the courier? What about her? Was she just another dumb, superstitious peasant to you?’

  He was silent for a while; I felt him change hands on the gun. I knew precisely where he was now; with my eyes closed, I could see him in front of me.

  ‘My brother told her there was a boy from Kiev, dying from leukaemia in Vienna, who wanted a chance to pray to Our Lady of Chernobyl.’ All of the contempt had gone out of his voice now. And all of the pompous scriptural certainty. ‘Masini had told her about his granddaughter. She knew how obsessed he was; she knew he’d never part with the icon willingly, not even for a couple of hours. So she agreed to take it to Vienna. To deliver it a day late. She didn’t believe it would cure anyone. I don’t think she believed in God at all. But my brother convinced her that the boy had the right to pray to the icon, to take some comfort from doing that. Even if he didn’t have five million Swiss francs.’

  I threw a punch, the hardest I’d thrown in my life. It connected with flesh and bone, jarring my whole body like an electric shock. For a moment I was so dazed that I didn’t know whether or not he’d squeezed the trigger and blown half my face away. I staggered, and pushed the helmet off, icy sweat dripping from my face. He was lying on the floor, shuddering with pain, still holding the gun. I stepped forward and trod on his wrist, then bent down and took the weapon, easily. He was fourteen or fifteen years old, long-limbed but very emaciated, and bald. I kicked him in the ribs, viciously.

  ‘And you played the pious little cancer victim, did you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was weeping, but whether it was from pain or remorse, I couldn’t tell.

  I kicked him again. ‘And then you killed her? To get your hands on the fucking Virgin of Chernobyl who doesn’t even work any fucking miracles?’

  ‘I didn’t kill her!’ He was bawling like an infant. ‘My brother killed her, and now he’s dead too.’

  His brother was dead? ‘Anton?’

  ‘He went to tell Katulski’s goons about you.’ He got the words out between sobs. ‘He thought they’d keep you busy … and he thought, maybe if they were fighting it out with you, we might have a chance to get the icon out of the city.’

  I should have guessed. What better way to hunt for a stolen icon than to traffic in them yourself? And what better way to keep track of your rivals than to pretend to be their informant?

  ‘So where is it now?’

  He didn’t reply. I slipped the gun into my back pocket, then bent down and picked him up under the arms. He must have weighed about thirty kilos, at the most. Maybe he really was dying of leukaemia; at the time, I didn’t much care. I slammed him against the wall, let him fall, then picked him up and did it again. Blood streamed out of his nose; he started choking and spluttering. I lifted him for a third time, then paused to inspect my handiwork. I realised I’d broken his jaw when I’d hit him, and probably one of my fingers.

  He said, ‘You’re nothing. Nothing. A blip in history. Time will swallow up the secular age – and all the mad, blasphemous cults and superstitions – like a mote in a sandstorm. Only the True Church will endure.’ He was smiling bloodily, but he didn’t sound smug, or triumphant. He was just stating an opinion.

  The gun must have reached body temperature in the pocket of my jeans; when he pressed the barrel to the back of my head, at first I mistook it for his thumb. I stared into his eyes, trying to read his intentions, but all I could see was desperation. In the end, he was just a child alone in a foreign city, overwhelmed by disasters.

  He slid the barrel around my head, until it was aimed at my temple. I closed my eyes, clutching at him involuntarily. I said, ‘Please—’

  He took the gun away. I opened my eyes just in time to see him blow his brains out.

  * * *

  All I wanted to do was curl up on the floor and sleep, and then wake to find that it had all been a dream. Some mechanical instinct kept me moving, though. I washed off as much of the blood as I could. I listened for signs that the neighbours had woken. The gun was an illegal Swedish weapon with an integral silencer; the round itself had made a barely audible hiss, but I wasn’t sure how loudly I’d been shouting.

  I’d been wearing gloves from the start, of course. The ballistics would confirm suicide. But the hole in the ceiling and the broken jaw and the bruised ribs would have to be explained, and the chances were I’d shed hair and skin all over the room. Eventually, there would have to be a trial. And I would have to go to prison.

  I was almost ready to call the police. I was too tired to think of fleeing, too sickened by what I’d done. I hadn’t literally killed the boy – just beaten him, and terrorised him. I was still angry with him, even then; he was partly to blame for De Angelis’s death. At least as much as I was to blame for his.

  And then the mechanical part of me said: Anton was his brother. They might have met, the day he was killed – at Anton’s place, or the apartment with the thin blonde girl. Trodden the same floor for a while. Wiped their feet on the same doormat. And since that time, he might have moved the icon from one hiding place to another.

  I took out my notepad, knelt at the feet of the corpse, and sent out the code.

  Three spheres responded.

  * * *

  I found it just before dawn, buried under rubble in a half-demolished building on the outskirts of the city. It was still in the attaché case, but all the locks and alarms had been disabled. I opened the case, and stared at the thing itself for a while. It looked like the catalogue photograph. Drab and ugly.

  I wanted to snap it in two. I wanted to light a bonfire and burn it. Three people were dead because of it.

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  I sat on the rubble with my head in my hands. I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know what the icon meant to its rightful owners. I’d seen the church they were building, the place where it belonged. I’d heard the story, however apocryphal, of its creation. And if talk of divine compassion for the dead of Chernobyl being channelled into a radioactive Christmas card was meaningless, ludicrous bullshit to me, that wasn’t the point. De Angelis had believed none of it, but she’d still blown her job, she’d still gone to Vienna of her own free will. And I could dream of a perfect, secular, rational world all I liked, but I still had to live, and act, in the real one.

  I was sure I could get the icon to Masini before I was arrested. He wasn’t likely to hand over all his worldly goods, as promised, but I’d probably be able to extract several billion lira from him – before the kid died, and his gratitude faded. Enough to buy myself some very good lawyers. Good enough, perhaps, to keep me out of prison.

  Or I could do what De Angelis should have done when it came to the crunch, instead of defending Masini’s fucking property rights to the death.

/>   I returned to the apartment. I’d switched off all the alarms before leaving; I could enter through the door this time. I put on the VR helmet and glove, and wrote an invisible message with my fingertip in the empty space on the iconostasis.

  Then I pulled out the phone plug, breaking the connection, and went looking for a place to hide until nightfall.

  * * *

  We met just before midnight, outside the fairground to the city’s north-east, within sight of the Ferris wheel. Another frightened, expendable child, putting on a brave front. I might have been the cops. I might have been anyone.

  When I handed over the attaché case, he opened it and glanced inside, then looked up at me as if I were some kind of holy apparition.

  I said, ‘What will you do with it?’

  ‘Extract the true icon from the physical representation. And then destroy it.’

  I almost replied: You should have stolen Hengartner’s image file instead, and saved everyone a lot of trouble. But I didn’t have the heart.

  He pressed a multilingual pamphlet into my hands. I read it on my way to the subway. It spelt out the theological differences between the True Church and the various national versions of Orthodoxy. Apparently it all came down to the question of the incarnation; God had been made information, not flesh, and anyone who’d missed that important distinction needed to be set right as soon as possible. It went on to explain how the True Church would unify the Eastern Orthodox – and eventually the entire Christian – world, while eradicating superstitions, apocalyptic cults, virulent nationalism, and atheistic materialism. It didn’t say anything, one way or the other, about anti-Semitism, or the bombing of mosques.

  The letters decayed on the page, minutes after I’d read them. Triggered by exhaled carbon dioxide? These people had appropriated the methods of some strange gurus indeed.

  I took out my photo of De Angelis.

  ‘Is this what you wanted of me? Are you satisfied?’