Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  “In the afternoon, around four,” Rasmussen said straightaway. “I’d really like to come and see you. I don’t care for those business meals that are all about pretense. I like to see how and where my business partners live. You’re in MacGregor House, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Hiroshi looked around his room. For heaven’s sake, he would have to clean up—and thoroughly at that.

  “Good, I know the place. I will of course return the invitation. Next time you can come to me, and then we’ll do the whole food-and-drink thing. On Saturday, though, I don’t want you to make any special effort; don’t even tidy up. I was a student myself once, and I know how cramped those tiny rooms are.” There was a noise like that of a thick leather desk diary closing. “Good then. I’ll see you on Saturday at four o’clock. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Hiroshi said. The man wasted no time, that was for sure.

  He felt a little as though he had been hustled into it, but there was nothing wrong with that. A person who wasted no time—somehow he had the feeling he could use someone like that.

  Charlotte spotted something twinkling out of the corner of her eye. Reflecting the sunlight on the roof across the street, flashing so brightly that she had to draw the curtain across a little. A little gray dog was trotting along the street, sniffing at all the latest doggie news on the trees and looking around as though waiting for someone or expecting a command.

  She stared at the cursor blinking on the screen in front of her. She had just sat down to work on her assignment with a cup of tea in hand when James had called to cancel next morning’s appointment. Just before he called she had had every line of her paper mapped out in her head, and now she’d forgotten the lot. She sighed. Sometimes it wasn’t easy with James and all his spontaneous decisions. Now he “had to” attend some special training session. As though James Michael Bennett III had ever done anything because he had to. He only ever did what he wanted and always got away with it because of his charm. One of his guiding principles was it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, so he never asked permission in advance. He simply did whatever he felt like, and if you got angry at him he made big puppy eyes until you just had to laugh.

  Like the day he had moved his stuff into her wardrobe. One day he had simply turned up with a bag and declared that since things were getting serious between them, he would have to keep a few things at her place. He couldn’t spend half his time running around in wrinkled clothes and yesterday’s shirt, he told her; he had to think of his reputation. So of course she had made room. She had shoved her own clothes closer together, put some in boxes, and even thrown a few things out. She hadn’t protested—quite the opposite. Recently, she had even taken to doing his laundry along with hers and ironing his shirts.

  And now he had this training session. Whatever that was. Not that she really cared about meeting with the restaurant people—she hadn’t particularly wanted to do that anyway. It was just that…James was altogether too fond of causing upset and confusion. She couldn’t even get her hair done because of him.

  She thought of Hiroshi. He had called several times and finally left a voice mail to ask whether they could get together. She wanted to, but for some reason she hadn’t plucked up the nerve. Why not? The truth was it was because she never knew these days what she was doing from one day to the next, or where she would be next week. How was she supposed to make any plans? It was high time she learned to hold her own against James.

  She closed her computer and got out her map of the Boston area. Then she rooted through her sewing box and found a spool of white thread. She unwound a good length and got to work. Once she knew what she wanted, she called James back and said, “You have to do me a favor.”

  “A favor?” he asked, taken by surprise.

  “I’ll need you to pick me up in the car tomorrow afternoon. Three o’clock.”

  Oh. That seemed to be a lot to ask. “Hey, listen, I don’t know how long the training will last, whether I’ll be done by then—”

  “You’ll manage somehow,” she cut him off and picked up her map. “Listen, I’ll tell you where I’ll be…”

  When the phone rang again, Hiroshi picked up expecting to hear Rasmussen say there was one more thing. But it was Charlotte.

  “Oh,” he said. For a heartbeat he felt some nameless fear grip him, felt almost suffocated. A moment during which he looked into the abyss and felt overpowered by the fear of failure, fear of being inadequate, fear of making nothing of his life however hard he tried. Then he got a grip on himself, and the fear vanished as though it had never been. The abyss closed.

  “Charlotte. We caught one another at last.”

  She didn’t respond directly. She sounded as though she had just been in a rage about something and was trying to take her mind off it.

  “You asked me why I study anthropology of all things,” she said.

  “Yes,” Hiroshi replied.

  “And I said I would have to show you if you were to understand at all.”

  “So you did.”

  “Do you have time tomorrow?”

  Of course he didn’t. For years he hadn’t had a single day that wasn’t all booked up in advance. If he wanted time, he had to make it.

  “Of course,” he said. He could skip tomorrow’s seminar and ask Will Burton from H-5 to fill him in later. He had a meeting scheduled with the technicians who were supposed to work for him once his project was approved, but that could be postponed. And he had an assignment about distributed systems architecture, but he could write that tonight.

  “Do you have a backpack?” Charlotte asked.

  Where was this leading? “Yes.”

  “Hiking shoes?”

  “I only have sneakers,” Hiroshi admitted. “But they’re pretty sturdy.”

  She thought for a moment. “Okay, that should do. Let’s meet tomorrow morning, then. Six o’clock at the John Harvard statue.”

  4

  Harvard’s campus was still empty at that hour of the morning. Hiroshi found himself walking on tiptoe as though students were not supposed to be up and about so early for some reason.

  He had come along a little early just to be sure. He looked around, shivering. He thought he saw a movement behind one of the windows, but it might just have been the reflection of a bird flying past. As far as he knew, all of these redbrick buildings were freshman dormitories, and the freshmen were surely all still asleep at this hour.

  A sudden noise made him jump. A man in overalls had opened a metal door in the ground floor of one of the buildings and was rooting through a tangle of gardening tools with no regard for the noise he was making. The statue stood in front of University Hall, a venerable old pile in white granite. The sculpture itself was bronze and showed a man leaning back at ease—almost slumped—in an armchair. An open book lay across his lap, but he wasn’t reading; rather, he was gazing into empty space. He looked astonishingly young for somebody who had founded a university. Hiroshi would have expected to see an aged scholar with a long beard, but when he had looked him up the night before, he had learned that John Harvard had died at the age of thirty, just a few months after immigrating to America.

  The toe of the left shoe gleamed. Supposedly, it was good luck to give it a polish before you had an exam. Hiroshi took a step back and looked at the inscription on the plinth. “John Harvard—Founder—1638,” it said.

  “The tour guides call it the Statue of the Three Lies,” said Charlotte behind him.

  He turned round quickly. There she was, dressed in hiking gear with a backpack slung on her back, as though she had popped up out of nowhere. The noise from the man in overalls had probably masked the sound of her footsteps, he decided.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She gave a wry grin. There was still a trace of yesterday’s anger in her eyes. “First lie,” she said without returning his greeting, “John H
arvard wasn’t the founder, just the first benefactor. He left the university his library in his will, all three hundred and twenty books of it, and half his fortune. It was actually founded by a man called Nathaniel Eaton, not in 1638—that’s the second lie—but, rather, in 1636. And the third lie: John Harvard looked nothing like the man in the statue. That was just a student who sat for the sculptor as a model.”

  Hiroshi looked at her. Charlotte was indeed extraordinarily beautiful. Her long black hair fell smoothly over her shoulders, her skin was like porcelain, and her features were regular but too lively to be called doll-like. She was slim, trim, and bursting with energy. But none of that was what attracted him to her; rather, it was the overwhelming feeling that something connected them both, even if Hiroshi couldn’t say what. All he knew was that when they had run into each other again on Saturday, he was a restless wanderer who had found his way back home. He had just the same feeling now. The feeling drew him to her—but shocked him as well.

  “We didn’t meet here to talk about John Harvard?” he asked.

  She laughed a marvelous, bubbling laugh. “No. He’s just an example of what we tend to think is true when in fact it’s just wishful thinking. And of how we so often make a picture of something we know nothing about. There is no surviving portrait of John Harvard. Nevertheless, here we have his statue. And on the campus of a university, mind you, with the motto Veritas—truth.”

  Hiroshi looked at the statue again. There was no question that when he knew all that, he saw it through different eyes. “How curious.”

  Charlotte put her backpack down and opened it. She took out a bottle of water and a plump plastic bag, and handed them both to him. “Here. These are for you. You have to carry your own.”

  Hiroshi weighed the bag in his hand. “Supplies. We’re going on a hike?”

  “Wasn’t hard to guess, though, was it?” Charlotte asked. “After all, I asked you if you had hiking shoes.”

  “No, I was expecting it,” Hiroshi admitted. He took off his own backpack and stowed the lunch bag and water bottle. He had also brought along a couple of the energy bars that kept him going when he was coding all night; he always had a supply. He would give her one later. “And where are we going?”

  “Into the past,” Charlotte declared. She swung the pack onto her back once more and turned toward Johnston Gate, the main entrance to campus. Then she lifted her right foot and took one step forward. “That’s a hundred years.” She stopped, leaned backward a little, and pointed to a spot just in front of her left boot. “That’s when we were born, more or less.” She moved her hand to point maybe half a step ahead. “That was the Second World War. And that was the First.” She pointed to a spot just behind the heel of her front boot. “Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes,” said Hiroshi, nodding.

  Charlotte took a second step. “The Industrial Revolution. Napoleon. The French Revolution.” A third step. “Louis XIV of France, the Sun King.” A fourth. “The Thirty Years’ War in Germany.” A fifth. “The Protestant Reformation.” Six. “Copernicus.” Seven. “The Black Death.” Eight. “Genghis Khan. Marco Polo.” Nine. “The Crusades. Europe is completely Christian by now.” Ten. “The Norman conquest of England. One thousand years in the past.”

  “Okay,” Hiroshi said, walking along beside her skeptically. This could be a struggle, given how little he knew about history.

  Charlotte took another ten steps and was standing in the middle of the tiny lawn in front of University Hall. “Jesus of Nazareth. Roman Empire.” Ten more steps. “One thousand years before Christ. Three thousand years in the past. Iron Age. This is the time of the Pharaohs, Tutankhamun, Ramses.”

  Twenty steps. They had reached the broad avenue that led into campus. “Three thousand years before Christ. The time of the First Dynasty in Egypt. The pyramids haven’t yet been built.”

  Hiroshi counted along with her. She had already taken fifty steps, and now she took fifty more.

  “Eight thousand years before Christ. This is the middle of the Neolithic period. They’re already practicing agriculture in China.”

  Another thirty paces. Now they were standing almost exactly beneath the arch of Johnston Gate, the main entrance to Old Yard. “Eleven thousand BC,” Charlotte said, pointing straight down at the ground. “Signs of grain cultivation in Mesopotamia. This is the age of Jerf el Ahmar and Göbekli Tepe, the oldest known temples of humankind.”

  Hiroshi looked at the distance they had walked from the John Harvard statue to where they stood now and nodded, impressed. “So this is where the story ends.”

  “Oh no,” Charlotte said. “This is just the beginning.”

  She turned around and walked through the gate out into the street. On the other side of the tarmac strip was a little park, where a curious church tower thrust up into the sky. Charlotte pointed off to her right. “We’re going further backward. Now we’re in the Würm glaciation.”

  James swung his 4x4 into the parking place right by the front door Charles had kept free for him, as promised. There was even a sign with his name on it. He hoped Terry had noticed that. He bounded out of the car and swung his golf bag out of the trunk. He was fifteen minutes late—just as he had planned. He mustn’t look like he needed her. He didn’t. He could sleep with Charlotte anytime he liked, or with a dozen other girls from his address book for that matter. No, what he liked was the thrill of the chase. Stalking the prey. Getting the scent. And then the warm body down in the grass. He liked a little resistance.

  In a word, he liked a challenge.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bennett,” said Will the porter as he walked into the clubhouse. Will was a young black guy, not as deferential as his predecessor, but still okay.

  “Good morning, Will,” he replied. Of course, James had a club membership card, but he liked not needing to use it. His face should be enough to open all doors.

  Terry was already there. He spotted her as soon as he walked out onto the fairway—and man oh man did she look hot. She was dressed all in red—to the extent that she was wearing anything at all—and showing a lot of skin. He couldn’t have asked for more. She was standing with Charles by a golf cart while he showed her the various clubs. Even from a hundred feet away, James could see how the old fox was holding the clubs so that he had an excellent view of her cleavage as she bent to look.

  James put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. That put a stop to their cozy little chat. She all but jumped in the air like a cheerleader, instantly looking up from the clubs and waving excitedly as he strolled over. She really was excited! Very good. James grinned. The battle was half-won.

  She looked even better up close. She was wearing bright red shorts that left little to the imagination. He could see everything, the curve of her buttocks, and then in the front…Was she even wearing any panties? It certainly didn’t look like it.

  She was wearing ankle socks inside her red sneakers, and a baseball cap that topped the whole thing off. Her ponytail poked out through the back of the cap and shone in the sun like pure gold. Her shirt was the only false note in the whole outfit, a cheap-looking thing with sequins and a crazy pattern somebody presumably thought was stylish. Never mind. It gave him a view of her bosom that made his balls as hard as…well, as golf balls. And, in his view, that was what shirts were for.

  What a day! The sky was deep blue and shining, with barely a cloud; the grass glowed a lusty green; flocks of birds wheeled and sang as they hunted their own small prey. Even at this hour he could feel it would be a hot day, so early in the year. Wasn’t life wonderful?

  On their way up to the tee he asked her what she knew of the rules and scoring. It looked like she had done her homework. She knew all about handicap, par, score, a hole in one, bogey, and so on.

  “What’s your major?” he asked.

  “Art history,” she replied, tossing her head so that her ponytail flew. “I
like the finer things in life.”

  “Well what a coincidence. So do I,” said James, grinning. That’s the way it always was; the hottest women always studied art history and steered clear of the sciences. Apart from Charlotte, of course, but she was the exception who proved the rule. No point thinking about her now, though.

  “And where are you from?” he asked.

  “Ohio.”

  “Ohio’s big.”

  She sighed. “It’s a one-horse town, but it has a name. Not that you’ll ever have heard of it. Believe me, you’ve missed nothing.”

  “Okay,” said James. As if he cared where she was from. “How about family?”

  “A brother. Though to be honest, I really don’t want to talk about my family right now.”

  “That bad?”

  She pouted. Maybe she thought she looked tough, but she just looked cute. “Such narrow-minded people. I can’t talk to them. They don’t understand that I have what they would call liberal opinions. That I want to enjoy life.”

  Liberal opinions. Enjoy life. A good plan, Terry my little mouse. Let’s start right now.

  “So you’re the black sheep of the family,” James declared, parking his golf cart next to the tee. “Or the red sheep, so to speak.” He looked her up and down, letting his appreciation show.

  She giggled and gave a little shimmy that made her boobs bounce delightfully. “A sheep? Is that what you see when you look at me?”

  He made an I’m-thinking-hard face. “A little lamb, then?”

  “And that makes you the big bad wolf?”

  “You’ve seen right through me,” he declared and got busy finding the right club. “Sure, I just had breakfast, but you look like you could make a pretty little snack. I just have to make you break a sweat. A lamb needs a little sauce, you know.”

  She tittered again. “I had no idea you were such a joker.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He decided on the driver. A classic choice. “Okay, now I’ll take the first stroke and you just watch what I do.” He put the ball on the tee and took up his stance, concentrated. This first shot had to be a good one.