by John Meaney
Or perhaps it was simply that Gavriela was a better grandmother than a mother, getting it right the second time around. Either way, she smiled at the huffing and puffing that came from Brody’s room every day, the occasional thump of weights on the floor, and the vast quantities of milk he drank.
More significantly, the day after Brody received his O-level results, mostly grade 1s, Gavriela despatched Ingrid to Foyle’s – at some point, Ingrid had become more than nurse, simply by setting no boundaries on what she was willing to do to help – to buy the three-volume Feynman lectures, the famous red books which she warned Brody would be too hard for him at first, but inspirational.
‘There’s, er, something else,’ he said one night in the drawing room – a term he found as amusing as she did – while the credits were rolling on the Conan movie. ‘You know those letters . . .’
Gavriela touched the joystick on her wheelchair, rotating a little to face him. Of course she had wondered about the letters arriving three times a week or more, but she had patience.
‘Her name’s Amy,’ he went on. ‘Amy Stelanko and she’s from Iowa and Dad doesn’t like her but I do. Her dad, she calls him Pop, works over here, except they’ll be going back when I’m in the Upper Sixth.’
Gavriela’s friend Jane from Imperial had married the boy she went out with at school, and remained happy. So Gavriela took Brody seriously, instead of dismissing a teen romance.
‘Things will be tough,’ she said. ‘When she goes back.’
And at a time when Brody would be concentrating on his A-levels, or should be.
‘I do want to go to Uni, Gran,’ he said. ‘Mr Stelanko said that if I apply to Cornell or somewhere, then he’ll help me.’
‘Living in a foreign country, that’s really tough.’
‘Oh.’ Brody sank in on himself. ‘Right.’
For the first time he looked like the sulky teenager his father had been.
‘Which means you’ll need my help,’ said Gavriela. ‘And you get that under one condition.’
Brody’s face cleared.
‘You need to bring Amy round here,’ Gavriela went on. ‘I want to meet the thief who stole my grandson’s heart.’
Blushing and laughing, Brody agreed.
Amy turned out to be a wonderful girl, pretty and smart and interested in psychology, and who listened, wide eyed and riveted, as Gavriela told her about meeting Sigmund Freud a long time ago. Then she told Amy she was welcome to come back any time, and she meant it.
When the end of summer came, Gavriela’s sense of heartache grew large as she realised just how much Brody’s presence had brightened her world. With a shock, as he came into the drawing-room dressed in T-shirt and jeans on the evening before leaving, she realised he had turned from a boy into a muscular young man during just six weeks.
‘I’m over two stone heavier,’ he told her. ‘Fourteen kilos, and hardly any fat.’
Clearly the weights and the milk had come at just the right time in his development. They talked over the logistics of getting his boxed-up weights sent home, then the conversation trailed off, until Gavriela found herself saying. ‘We’ve talked about your future, but there are some things I’d like to tell you about. I mean my past.’
‘Dad says . . .’ Brody shrugged his now-bulky shoulders. ‘He says you had a tough time of things, and won’t ever talk about it.’
Gavriela guessed Carl had worded it differently.
‘There’s a great deal I’ve never been able to share,’ she said. ‘My war work was classified, but people are starting to learn about Alan Turing and Enigma, though much of it will stay secret for a lot longer than—’
‘Bletchley Park?’ said Brody. ‘You mean you worked there?’
‘We called it BP, and I certainly did . . .’
It felt good to pass the memories on.
Gavriela stayed away from Carl’s wedding at the start of October. Brooding more than usual, she wondered if Carl might have another child, and if so, whether he would treat this one more kindly. That night in bed, as she closed her eyes, her hands wrapped around her book, she saw in her imagination the note she had written while asleep on a previous notable night, when she learned of her great-niece’s abduction.
That was when dear Rupert was still alive, and he had taken her to the SIS outstation on Chester Terrace, the mansion overlooking Regent’s Park. Its parquet flooring was dug up during renovation, allowing her to hide the note and photograph intended for an unknown future recipient.
You will see three. You will be wrong.
G
P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023; μ∞ = .02289
That was the note, she remembered as she descended into sleep, which she had wrapped around an old photo of herself with Ilse, to act as a form of identification – to the extent her actions made rational sense. It was Ilse’s granddaughter that Dmitri had kidnapped, and it seemed right to use that picture, though the name would likely mean nothing to whoever read it in the future.
The next morning, Gavriela realised she had done it again.
She awoke with the same notebook open atop the bedspread, and a new message written inside. The cruel thing was, the handwriting looked as if she had penned the letter prior to her stroke.
Dearest Lucas,
How wonderful to have a grandson! My words will seem very strange, since we do not know each other and I speak from your past. Still, I must ask you a favour, and be assured it must be this way. Even banks can fail over time, although it is to be hoped that some familiar names survive, so I am forced to contact you in this indirect way, with the hope that you will feel curious enough to investigate as I tell you.
Please, my grandson, look under the parquet flooring, in the right-hand outer corner as you look out the window at the park.
Love,
Gavi (your grandmother!)
X X X
If Carl named a future son Lucas, then that would be the final indication, to Gavriela’s satisfaction, that she was not insane, that this phenomenon of information propagating backwards in time was real. This letter seemed to be a logical piece in a very illogical puzzle.
She had hidden the previous note and photograph, information that might prove useful against the darkness, beneath the floor in an out-station of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was the safest of locations, yet it had also seemed insane – how would the intended recipient even find the thing? This new letter was more explicit, to the extent of naming an unborn grandson.
It carried other implications: that she might never see the new baby, and in any case would never get to know him as an individual.
Should I have gone to the wedding?
Somehow, this unknown Lucas – he would be Lucas Woods, she presumed – would need to receive this letter, which in turn would enable him to retrieve the secreted note and photo. Not knowing what else to do, she folded up the new letter and tucked it inside Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book she had been reading when she fell asleep.
How do you send a message to the future?
Runes could be carved in stone with relative ease, the advantage of such angular futharks, the alphabets. But what was the modern equivalent of scratched lines?
‘There’s nothing simpler than a bit,’ she muttered.
There was a tap on the bedroom door, and Ingrid looked in.
‘I thought I heard you say something.’
‘Nothing important, but I am awake.’
‘Let’s get you to the bathroom, then.’
Accepting Ingrid’s assistance was better than using a bedpan or commode. It seemed so unfair that you could fight for so long and life would come to this; but fairness was not a characteristic of the universe, only of humans at their best.
Philosophy while you go to pee.
When the humdrum details were finished and she was settled in her wheelchair, wrapped in her dressing-gown and ready for breakfast, Gavriela made a detour into her ground-fl
oor study – Rupert had called it his writing-room – where her Compaq lay switched off.
During operation, at any instant, every location in the computer’s memory register would be either true or false, one or zero. Right now, while it was off, the state was what Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called mu.
It was nothingness; it was neither-nor.
And it struck Gavriela as more profound than she had first thought.
‘Gabrielle? I’ve poured your tea.’
‘Ich komme jetzt, Ingrid.’
‘Also gut, Frau Doktor.’
Gavriela smiled. It was not just Ingrid, it was both of them: speaking in the old language brought the old habits of courtesy. The Inuit might not in truth have thirty words for snow – Schade, such a pity – but Whorf and Sapir were surely correct in pinpointing the constraints of language on intellectual concepts, witness Pirsig’s borrowing from Japanese to come up with—
‘Gabrielle?’
Natürlich. Of course.
‘I need to make a phone call.’ She steered her wheelchair out into the hallway. ‘Could you fetch the phone book, please?’
Ingrid pulled it out of the occasional-table drawer.
‘Let me find it for you. Whose number do you require?’
Gavriela looked up at the old grandfather clock. Ten to nine. Edmund Stafford, who as a young man had brought her books to read in Oxford while she was largely housebound after Carl’s birth, still went in to work every day, despite his emeritus status.
‘The Computing Laboratory at Oxford,’ Gavriela said. ‘It’s written as Comlab in the book.’
‘Also gut,’ said Ingrid, flicking through pages. Then she went to the phone, dialled the number for Gavriela, and held out the handset.
‘Danke sehr, Ingrid.’
Edmund had known Turing before the war. If anyone had a notion of how to transmit electronic runes into the future, he was the man.
She smiled, glad that life still offered interesting challenges.
FORTY-EIGHT
MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
It might be infinitely long, but Borges Boulevard appeared to be packed with revellers. The Battle of Mandelbrot Nebula had ended the Chaos Conflict in one sudden phase transition to peace, at least for now, and that was worth celebrating.
Meanwhile, Roger and Corinne knew, the Admiralty Council members were engaged in a series of secret planning sessions, as if the current festival meant nothing. The reason was simple: direct war against the renegades was inevitable at some point, but it might not be for decades yet, even centuries. The urgent administrative question was whether to maintain a war-ready fleet, using the command structure they currently possessed, or to stand down the combat squadrons and revert to a normal mode of existence.
Of the most senior officers, only Dirk McNamara, war leader extraordinaire, was required to leave those Admiralty sessions in order to appear in public. Every population needs a figurehead as a focus of communal triumph, even among Pilots.
‘We’re still primates.’ Roger held a goblet of something fluorescent that fizzed and popped like fireworks. ‘When it boils down to it.’
‘Damn,’ said Corinne, leaning against him. ‘You mean like primitive emotions overruling logic, kind of thing.’
A thousand Pilots were jumping in time to pounding music on the stretch of boulevard before them.
‘Doomed to enjoy stuff like wild, uncontrollable sex,’ Corinne went on, sliding her hand down Roger’s abdomen, while the pandemonium of celebration continued. ‘How awful, that we just can’t help ourselves.’
‘Bloody hell, Corinne.’
‘Simply tragic.’
‘People can see—’
‘Jealousy’ – she licked his ear – ‘won’t help them.’
‘Ayee ah . . . Probably not.’
Kissing her deeply, he tumbled them both through a fast-path rotation into an isolated pocket of reality, a slowtime layer with respect to mean-geodesic, which meant they could take for ever and still be back in moments. And afterwards they were, back in the victory festival, in the midst of celebration, satisfied and exhausted.
Perhaps a few among the crowd noticed their reappearance and grinned for a moment.
Roger kissed Corinne softly. ‘You’re pretty wonderful.’
‘Likewise.’ She tapped her turing, and frowned at a her-eyes-only display. ‘Listen, we’ve been committed to non-commitment, or something like that, since Tangleknot. Do you think we could ever—?’
Scarlet flashing light overlaid Borges Boulevard and the dancing crowds, and for two or three seconds it appeared to be part of the triumphal pageant, but then the low throbbing of alarm tocsins caused the music to die away. For those who could hear, there was the voice of Labyrinth itself, more urgent than ever before.
=An invasion fleet approaches.=
How many thousands of Pilots exchanged stunned looks in that moment? How many cursed the trickery of Zajinets, those alien betrayers that should have been fought against since the first contact with Earth, before they gained a foothold in the human dominions . . .?
=They are Pilots. Renegades led by Boris Schenck.=
Corinne shut down her private display.
‘There can’t be more than two hundred of them,’ she said. ‘If Schenck thought our fleet would still be occupied with the Zajinets, he’s going to have one hell of a—’
=Half a million ships at least. And there may be many more.=
Schenck was no fool, then.
Roger took Corinne’s hands in his.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I’m not ready.’
Had he realised this was farewell, he would have chosen different words. But he was summoning a dangerous rotation, and as he released her hands and looked into her jet-on-jet eyes for the last time, the fastpath engulfed him, spacetime swirling; and then came ejection – so very dangerous – into mid-air above that most beautiful hull, strong and black, webbed with red and gold. She was already responding to his presence.
I’m—
Falling through the chill air of the great docking bay, several thousand ships inside its concave expanse. Falling towards the dark opening melting into existence in her hull.
Caught you.
Tendrils had snapped out to slow his descent and guide him inside. Then she was sealed back up, ready to fly.
We don’t know where to engage the—
That’s not where we’re going.
They plunged into full conjunction trance, more deeply than ever before. Roger’s first thought had been that he was not ready; but together, as one, ship-and-Roger were clear on what they needed to do.
Ultra hellflight, then.
More than that. The graveyard.
Already they were turning away from the docking promenade and tumbling towards the vast cliff-like wall that led outside. It might have appeared dangerous, but Labyrinth knew everything. An opening appeared as Roger-and-ship began to soar.
I love you.
Golden space burst into being all around, the infinitesimal-point energy of the continuum itself providing power for glorious flight, magnificent and infinite. Distant black stars were inky fractal snowflakes, elegant and fine, while curlicued nebulae were strewn like fresh rivulets of blood. This was existence at its most beautiful, magnificent and heartbreaking.
They had done it once before, Roger-and-ship, making a more-than-hellflight near the insertion context of the real-space galactic core, a dangerous place from which to enter mu-space. This time the destination was less critical, granting more freedom in their choice of geodesic; but duration was everything, the effort awful and agonising, and if they survived they would be forever changed, while if they died it would be simply one more Pilot and ship lost, and in the imminent fight there would be so many deaths: that was obvious.
I would give my life for Labyrinth.
Once that had been Roger’s thought alone; now it belonged to both of them.
&n
bsp; Half a million renegades, and maybe more.
The past four years, or perhaps ship-and-Roger’s entire existence, led up to this.
Time to prove ourselves.
Hellflight, and more.
Schenck’s timing was better than first appeared, for the fleet was depleted: exhausted from battle, some gone to recuperate on realspace worlds, most celebrating in Labyrinth, their determination low. At the same time, their ships remained massed together, one of the very few occasions when such a huge number would be located in the same place, therefore a target for a single, massive, all-out strike from nowhere.
Sen sen no sen: seizing the initiative.
It seemed Schenck was a better war admiral than anyone had reckoned. Far better. And with half a million ships! Even more, if the approaching force was just a vanguard . . .
Ships fled from Labyrinth in panic.
Abandoning her.
Dirk McNamara was disadvantaged by the stupid ceremony he was engaged in, on a floating platform surrounded by holostreamers in the midst of several thousand revellers, celebrating one victory while innocently setting themselves up for defeat by Schenck and his unexpected all-out strike, and with a fleet that was at least thousands of times larger than it should have been, perhaps even greater, and how the hell had the bastard managed that?
Not far from the ceremony’s location, some five subjective years previously – though decades by mean-geodesic time – Dirk had killed a previous Admiral Schenck: that odious, treacherous fucker who had not been able to back down from a duel, and had nearly won through the most devious of tricks.
Covert femtoscopic weapons had been floating in mid-air, set as booby-traps by Schenck inside hidden layers of reality, programmed to take out Dirk by manifesting directly inside his heart and brain while he fought; but Dirk’s perceptions were finely tuned to danger always, and he had read deception in the bastard’s eyes and outmanoeuvred him, before taking his revenge in the most appropriate way: causing spacetime to slide apart in shards, wrenching Schenck apart, while twisting the maze of rotations hard, to the mathematical limit.
