Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  ‘… all right, everything is fine, and you can relax your breathing because all is well and here, now, everything is safe as you are safe and let it go …’

  —and she was there, the only woman he would ever love for true, long dead and not yet living, his Gavi, his most beautiful Gavi with the crystal smile that grew as he—

  ‘… rising up to become fully awake as I count five, four, three …’

  —cried out as the visions twisted away, dispelling—

  ‘… two, one. Now.’

  —as Roger blinked, shuddering into wakefulness.

  There were tears on Rhianna’s face.

  Afterwards, as they sipped daistral, Rhianna explained: ‘I was in a deeply altered state myself, in full sympathy with you. It’s the fastest way to get someone to relax far into trance.’

  ‘I didn’t figure you for the kind of person to cry easily,’ said Roger. ‘And I was a bit surprised. But why crying, exactly? Did I tell you something sad?’

  His memories of trance had faded. He could feel them waiting, tucked around some corner in his mind, retrievable perhaps in time, not now.

  ‘That depends,’ she said, ‘on whether you were being metaphorical or literal. What you told me was far more … wide-ranging than I expected to hear.’

  ‘Er, do you want to explain that more clearly?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I will teach you how to induce trance in useful ways. You already know how to pitch words within sentences so they act as covert commands. So let’s add to that. Use your peripheral vision to watch my breathing. Do it now.’

  Roger directed his gaze at her face, his attention on the tiny motions of her shoulders.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Now synchronize your breathing with mine, and if your commands correspond to the deepest part of my exhalation, so much the better. Try it now.’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘Just feel confident in what you’re doing.’

  ‘All right,’ said Roger. ‘So relax the muscles around your eyes …’

  That night, Roger dined alone in a small restaurant called The Single Helix. Rhianna was off being her public self … and for all he knew, conducting high-level espionage at the same time. It would have been nice to fly back to Barbour to spend time with – to make sensuous love to – his wonderful Leeja. But then there would be no excuse to return here to Deltaville, where Rhianna had effectively begun a crash course in being an intelligence officer, with an eclectic syllabus geared towards his needs, at least as she perceived them.

  A woman of about his age was eating by herself at a table in front of him. She was not facing him directly, but at a shallow angle: she would be aware of him from peripheral vision. It seemed a good opportunity to practise the non-verbal aspects of the routine that Rhianna had taught him, so he synchronized his respiration with hers, and in various ways altered his body language, forming a resonance between them.

  Her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her head tilted forward, chin down.

  Oh, shit.

  Was this stuff really so powerful? Were the words not even necessary?

  ‘Great food,’ he called to a human waiter across the room. ‘It’s made me come awake. Fully alert.’

  The woman jerked up, blinked twice, and continued to eat.

  That’s just so cool.

  He grinned, leaned back in his chair, and wondered what other mischief he could get up to.

  FIFTY

  EARTH, 1942 AD

  This was what Gavriela wrote in her diary: Today I gave birth.

  It was a small collection of words for oceanic waves of pain, for eighteen century-like hours of waiting and effort, of things tearing inside her, her own core come to frightening, would-be-independent life and rearing to burst free, to rend its way into the world amid the stink of piss and blood, of amniotic fluid, shit and disinfectant. And then, the living form itself: shrunken, with blood-red monkey features, a tiny shock of black, spiky hair, the rubbery limbs, and the raucous wailing as the midwife said: ‘He’s a boy.’

  In her arms then, the most beautiful creation in the universe, her son, and the pain inside her lost the edge of its fullness, beginning its backward ebb into the past, into the has-been. Into forgetfulness.

  Today I gave birth.

  Dividing her life into two: before and after the Moment.

  Over the coming days, neither Brian nor Rupert called on her, but they sent separate congratulatory notes – no sense of ownership or responsibility in Brian’s, no emotional intimacy in either – along with baskets of fruit and even chocolate: black-market goods that no one, in a maternity ward, would pay attention to.

  She was in the Radcliffe Infirmary, and once released she would be living with Mrs Wilson, in her temporary digs from those first few nights in Oxford. The arrangements were Rupert’s doing, and would suffice – he had said in writing – until she returned to work.

  ‘What’s our handsome boy going to be called?’ asked one of the night nurses.

  Gavriela, in the midst of suckling, looked up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  Perhaps it was the aftermath of birth, of that massive effort, but she was finding it hard to be creative in her second language. All the names that occurred to her were German, therefore anathema.

  ‘I like Tyrone,’ called out an Irish nurse.

  ‘Or Clark,’ said the first nurse. ‘Like Clark Gable, you know?’

  ‘How about Winston?’ That was the Irish nurse again. ‘Or Eamon.’

  After Churchill or de Valera, presumably.

  ‘Maybe.’ Gavriela smiled at them. ‘Maybe.’

  When they finally released her from hospital, a friend of Mrs Wilson’s drove Gavriela and her blanket-wrapped treasure to the house, where Mrs Wilson fell in love with the baby on sight. It was a feeling that would only strengthen, for within days he was sleeping through the night and crying only when necessary, never for long.

  ‘If only my Peter had been like that,’ Mrs Wilson would say.

  Her son, friend to Rupert during their schooldays, was serving in North Africa. Occasionally he would send a photograph of a camel or people in Bedouin dress, trying for lightheartedness, his letters unmarked by the censors because he steered away from military details.

  ‘Have you decided yet?’ Mrs Wilson would ask each morning at the end of breakfast.

  ‘Sorry.’ Gavriela would smile.

  The question of the baby’s name was beginning to vex her visitors: two of the Radcliffe nurses, who sometimes popped in as they came off duty; once, Rosie, who came by train all the way from Bletchley; and a nervous young Balliol man called Stafford, who on his first visit brought a letter that served obliquely as an introduction, straightforwardly as an explanation of the books and papers he had lugged from college for Gavriela to read.

  Perhaps you might like to keep your mind exercised. I know I would, in your circumstances.

  Best,

  AMT

  For a codes-and-ciphers expert, it took a too-long second to realize it was from Turing.

  ‘He’s from the other place,’ said Stafford, ‘but we’ve met at conferences and so on, becoming … friends.’

  The other place meaning Cambridge. Learning English had been one thing, but Oxford had a culture all of its own, one that intrigued Gavriela but did not entirely attract her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘My brain seems to have melted. These will help me mend it.’

  Stafford blushed, as though even this indirect mention of childbirth was unseemly.

  ‘Let’s look at what we’ve got,’ she added. ‘Does Alan realize I’m no mathematician?’

  It was a logician’s treasure-trove: papers on symbolic logic, lambda calculus, abstract groups, and quantum mechanics; while among the books were the Russell and Whitehead Principia, commentaries of Gödel’s work, and Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung. Only in Oxford could someo
ne carry a German book without raising suspicion. Slightly less challenging were Russell’s Why I Don’t Believe, H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World, something by Dorothy Sayers, and a first edition of The History of Mr Polly, a Wells novel she had never read.

  ‘The Gödel material,’ said Stafford, ‘is not entirely irrelevant to Alan’s disposal of the deep Entscheidungsproblem.’

  Gavriela felt a wide grin spread across her face.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘For assuming I have a brain capable of more than baby talk.’

  Stafford blushed again.

  ‘One takes it for granted,’ he said.

  His Entscheidungsproblem remark pointed out the relationship between Gödel’s proof that some truths cannot be proven and Turing’s proof that the computability of some problems cannot be decided in advance of working the problem through. Neither those proofs nor any of the material here was classified, but no matter. This was challenging enough: her brain could cope with more than baby talk, but not much more, not yet.

  With a grin, Stafford added: ‘In the other place, they still don’t allow women to graduate, did you know that?’

  ‘I presume they consider themselves the last bastion of civilization.’

  ‘Last bastion of a broken empire,’ he said, ‘along with ourselves. And that’s assuming we survive the war. An empire that fails to defend itself without assistance is doomed. Continuing to groom young men to rule such an empire is going to become, well, irrelevant.’

  ‘An empire spanning the globe, and containing a quarter of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘Surely rebuilding is possible.’

  ‘That’s what everyone seems to think. Personally, I believe Hitler’s done what Communism and economic depression failed to achieve: begun the dismantling of our rotten class system.’

  ‘But …’ Gavriela wanted to point out his patrician accent and manner, but in some way that would not offend.

  ‘Oh, I’m as rotten as the rest of them.’ Stafford’s laugh was both girlish and self-deprecating. ‘Believe me, I’m aware of it.’

  He rose then, and promised he would come again next week. Gavriela said she would look forward to it, and meant it.

  When Stafford was gone, Mrs Wilson took the baby for a walk around the house, meaning she carried and rocked him as she perambulated, humming and talking softly, then came back, and said: ‘He’s told me he wants to be called Algernon.’

  Gavriela smiled.

  ‘Really,’ she said.

  Twenty miles into his prayer run, Kanazawa’s mind was as close to mu-shin, to no-mind, as he could achieve at his current level. The heavy straw sandals slapped at the stones of the winding path as he came out of the woods and onto a clear stretch of high wall overlooking the valley. Behind him rose the slopes of Mount Hiei, the clean lines of the temple buildings obscured by the mountain’s bulk.

  He accelerated past a tiny pond into which water dripped from a bamboo pipe.

  The world ripples.

  The water is still.

  Every stride of his run was a prayer of deep devotion, just as much as the ritual words recited at every shrine en route. His spiritual discipline was now twenty-seven miles of daily running in his gathered-up white robes, this being the thirteenth consecutive day. The paradox was this: in freeing his mind of thought, he was following a path that was his alone, not laid out for him by superiors in school then the Navy, not even by his parents. Even though the other monks followed the same rituals, it was different from the enforced uniformity of his earlier life.

  It was his parents who had first shown him the mountain monks running their devotions, though they were arguably modernists: Father had been among the first volunteers to have the top-knot shorn. But Mother and Father had liked to watch the monks, as had so many others. Today, though, few spectators waited along on the route: times were different.

  Something rippled among the treetops below.

  No.

  Something dark.

  Let the thoughts go.

  It was something he had glimpsed before: a symptom of his earlier wrongheaded life. But if anything the illusion was stronger now that he was following the spiritual path.

  Keep to the path.

  Yet reality was an illusion that the Buddha called maya, while his true path was not a physical route but something deeper. He would have thought it should lead away from darkness; but something told him he needed to descend towards it, the enemy. Pine needles and soft soil meant his approach was soundless. The thickness of the trees was enough, perhaps, to hide his robes.

  ‘—to you, Moscow is safe.’

  ‘Not thanks to me, but Dmitri. He’s off doing something else now.’

  The voices were Russian, only just comprehensible.

  ‘And you’re the most important part of the network.’

  Moving to catch sight of the men, Kanazawa understood his mistake. The darkness, twisting and rippling, had been something associated with the other gaijin of the pair, the two westerners he had spent time with – including the day he witnessed the dojo death that changed everything. One of those two gaijin was here; but it was the assistant, the judo man. Perhaps contaminated by his master, he showed touches of the darkness now. But it was the other, his contact, who manifested the greater abomination: twisting black, impossible perspectives.

  My path is devotion.

  He stepped out from the trees, still upslope from the two men.

  ‘What’s this? A monk?’

  ‘Looks like … I think I know him. Is that you, Kanazawa-san?’

  Their faces were a blur, though they were only ten paces below him, maybe less.

  ‘But he’s like us. Like Dmitri.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Or maybe’ – the man pulled out a pistol – ‘I should say he’s our mirror image. He can see it but he does not hear. Does not feel.’

  More words followed, but they were faint, as though pulled off into a great distance. Beyond the men, beyond the abrupt drop and far downslope, a mountain stream – perhaps the same one that fed a trickle into the pond above – shone white and fierce in its descent.

  The way is peace.

  And then he ran, as he was born to do, the discipline becoming him and he the discipline, hurtling downslope.

  ‘—him, you fool!’

  Accelerating. Arms outstretched as if to embrace, and the impact against their torsos.

  Yes.

  The world ripples.

  Taking them with him beyond the edge.

  The water is still.

  Into the inviting void.

  In Gavriela’s dream, she spoke in vacuum to a man of living crystal.

  —If you had a son, what would you call him?

  —I’ve never thought about it, Gavi.

  —Could you think about it now, for me?

  Light refracted strangely through his features.

  —I’d name him after my father, I guess.

  The airless hall and moonscape melted away with the ending of the dream.

  She had decided that today was the day. Mrs Wilson and Stafford accompanied her to register the birth. The registrar was too young for his brush moustache and round glasses. If he found the delay in registering to be procedurally lax, he did not reveal his thoughts. Instead, as Gavriela sat down in front of the mahogany desk, he asked: ‘And what is the baby’s name?’

  Mrs Wilson craned her neck to look at Gavriela; even Stafford looked interested, intrigued not by the naming but the mystery: Gavriela had given no hints what it might be.

  ‘His name is Carl,’ she said. ‘Carl Woods.’

  The registrar held his pen at the ready.

  ‘That’s a little … Teutonic, Mrs Woods.’

  ‘Spelt with a “c”,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm, well. If it’s good enough for the king’s bodyguard …’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘King Harold’s carls, don’
t you know. Viking bodyguards to help him fight the Norse invasion. Then back down south to fight the Normans, of course. More Northmen, when it boils down to it.’

  Stafford smiled. So did Mrs Wilson.

  ‘And the father?’

  Thinking of Rosie’s fiancé, she said: ‘Jack Woods, deceased.’

  ‘Oh, I’m very sorry.’

  There were a lot of widowed mothers these days, not to mention unmarried mothers assuming the guise of widowhood to avoid pariah status for themselves and their bastard children. In her case, Rupert could create a full fictitious biography, should it ever become necessary.

  The registrar filled in the names, first and last, writing in a careful, clear script, making it final.

  FIFTY-ONE

  MU-SPACE, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

  It did not begin as a hellflight, the pursuit, but that was how it ended: with Max-and-ship tearing along the most extreme of geodesics deep into golden void, while his nine pursuers pushed hard, one of them faltering at the edge of a crimson nebula, spinning away, all control lost. Max could not tell if recovery was possible. It was perhaps the first fatality.

  I can’t lose them all.

  The point was to keep the leaders with him, close enough so they believed his capture to be possible – so they would not give up – while ensuring he remained ahead of them and free.

  Lightning spat past his hull.

  Take me if you can.

  Ship-and-Max screamed through a Koch cluster of black, infinitely branching stars, then twisted onto another geodesic, equally hard, the shift itself causing wrenching vibration, and another pursuer fell away.

  Seven ships pursuing him.

  Better.

  He increased acceleration yet again.

  Jed’s nerves were howling, a voice in his head screaming the question: why was he doing this? But Davey Golwyn was flying alongside even more recklessly, and the whole thing had become a challenge Jed could not set aside. Mulling things over was not an option: a lapse in concentration would mean losing the fugitive’s trace. It was a binary choice: follow or give up.