“I only want to see if there is any business we can do together.”
Muller sat back in his chair. He showed the waiter the empty bottle, beckoned for another. I thought about the fact that in an hour I would be as good as dead. I would be better than dead.
“Maybe, in the first place, I am looking for certain minerals. There are deposits in this country which are unique in terms of their density. Let us say they are deep in the Atlas Mountains. There are regions which are difficult to enter, where the tribesmen have rifles. And there are stories about such places which we don’t have to believe but which frighten the local businessmen away. Let us say, in the second place, that I am looking for people. I want the right individuals for certain opportunities. And they must be people who can fit in, like you.”
I saw the clock on the wall. I was out of time. I let my hand flick out and push over the bottle. It spilled on the table and the three of us got up from our chairs. I pointed to the clock.
“I am sorry twice over. Unfortunately, I have to go. It is unavoidable, but if you will give me some way to reach you? I will think about your problem. In any case, I will leave you the private bag number for my company.” I wrote on a serviette the address of a box in Tangiers which was monitored by the Agency. I kept talking, as if to distract him.
“It has been a pleasure. I believe we will meet each other again, even if it is not for professional reasons. Marrakesh is not a big town.”
“So late at night? To have an urgent appointment? I believe you have pumped us for information and now you abandon us.” Muller smiled. He stepped back and mopped the wine from his trousers. He didn’t seem to notice that I was carrying a spade. “Well, I cannot ask to detain you. If you ever need to find me, in turn, you can leave a message at the counter.”
The waiter arrived with clean towels and a bucket of water but I didn’t wait. I was surprised to find myself alive and unharmed outside the Green Dolphin, closing the door behind me.
I saw nobody on the streets except a military policeman, leaning on his rifle, guarding an intersection through which no cars came. He wanted to see my papers before he let me through. In the apartment buildings, the only lights were in stairwells and forlorn rooms where a pilgrim was at his devotions. The private houses were dark in their ranks. High in the sky was a moon that grew larger as I left the center of town. There were no passersby, only dogs baying in backyards.
I ran faster, hardly pausing to catch my breath, avoiding any sign of activity. I had an idea where to go and it led me to a lane in which there was a sentry’s hut at the entrance to the Protestant cemetery. The graves, indistinct in the darkness, were surrounded by flowerbeds and a low masonry wall. They were breathing slowly in the ground.
Nothing to fear. I told myself that the dead of any one period, from a case officer’s point of view, were only waiting for their resurrection in the time before. To others, far off in the restricted centuries where the Agency had never managed to penetrate, I had already joined the endless numbers of the dead, divided to the last atom.
I paused at the back of the guardhouse. Through the half-open door could be seen a man in a long robe, as fat as a barrel, hardly breathing in his sleep as he lay stretched on a bare mattress, his torso covered by a checked black-and-white scarf. A cat lay asleep in the basket at his feet.
Time was short. I took the blue tablet, unlatched the gate, then closed it behind me. The freshest soil was at the far end. I set my tools down and began to dig as quietly as I could.
It was hard work. The ground was full of pebbles and the heavy lacework of roots. After a few minutes, the sweat ran into my eyes. I loosened my collar and redoubled my efforts. My strength was slackening. I could feel the blueness of the pill starting to run in my veins.
It seemed like an eternity before I had excavated a section deep enough for a single person. I settled myself inside, arranging the spade beside me, pulling the tarpaulin over my legs. My breathing was beginning to halt. Every gasp of oxygen slowed down in my breathing pipe as I pulled the ground down on myself. The clods mounted up. The sky was gone, and then any suggestion of light.
I scrabbled at the sides of the grave, hoping to conceal myself in my cool green burrow. I hadn’t yet given a thought to my companions in the ground, the lengths of bone and lingering flesh around me, but soon the reek filled my mouth and my nose and the entire inside of my skull. Strange smoke. Cannibal smoke.
I didn’t have much time to worry about it. My feet were cold and trembling, the heels caught in an uncomfortable position. The soil was like quicksand around me. I couldn’t move my arms or bend my fingers. My legs turned to stone. I couldn’t move my chest. I was suffocating under the ground. My eyes trembled. The pill hadn’t saved my life.
Between one beat and the next, my heart ceased to beat. The last thing I remembered was the soft footing of the cat above me, searching for a way into my tomb. Then I fell deep into death.
I expected to spend a maximum of twenty-four hours in the graveyard. Agency policy is to retrieve a case officer or an exposed resident within the calendar day, subject to the need for energy conservation. The three equations of historical statistics would be consulted, the three terrible sisters who governed the past of humanity. At the directions of the equations, the planning commission would dispatch a team to retrieve the hibernating body. No body was left in the field for more than a day. But I lay uneasy in the grave.
Underground, I dreamt of the consultants. Their cold brass heads were bent over me. They were monitoring my pulse and temperature, mazes of electronic light forming and reforming in their eyes. One came very close so that I could feel the whirring of his fan. He was as hot as a toaster. With cruel fingers, he inserted a wire into one of my ears and coaxed it through to the other side so he could pull it out again, finding a path through my head.
At the motion, I awoke to find myself held up to blazing sunshine. I couldn’t see anything but the blankness of this golden light. Something was spraying violently into my face. I raised my arms to protect my eyes while the stinging liquid went into my lungs. I was held from behind through a spell of coughing. It wasn’t a harsh embrace. Eventually the spray went off and I stopped coughing.
When my eyes adjusted, I found three shapes around me in a semicircle. Each was surrounded by a capsule of blue light.
One stepped forward and wrapped a padded silver towel around my body. He was wearing a suit like an astronaut’s, a gold-tinted bubble over his head. His face was visible through the visor, a bald man with eyes as big as saucers, his skin stained as beautifully dark as cedar. He was staring at me. I stared back.
“I thought you would never come.”
“We never did. Ah, we never did.”
Tears were streaming down my face. They got thicker and thicker. They made me ashamed. I put my hand on his suit, balancing on my feet without confidence, and saw that there were many thousands of lights in the sky. The ground around us was bare and burnt in every direction. There were no buildings.
The man put the arm of his suit around me. The logo of the Agency was printed on his chest. I couldn’t have been more relieved to see a dark face and feel that I had returned to the embrace of civilization.
“How long do you think you were out, Agent Eleven?”
“I had dreams.” I hadn’t completely woken up. The lights in the sky were as bright as phosphorous. “I don’t know. I had a thousand years of dreams when I was in there.”
I began to cry out loud. The man put his other arm around me.
“You’ve been asleep, in that grave, for a hundred thousand years.”
Manfred, who had embraced me on the surface, was in charge of the expedition. He brought me into their vehicle.
“You show no signs of reflection sickness, Agent Eleven.” He showed me my countenance in a round mirror with a brass rim, an item so familiar I almost smiled. “So you can tell your stor
y in peace. In my experience, it’s better to get it down before the impressions fade.”
I stretched out my arms on the bench. “I’m a case officer. I am not trained to tell my story. On the contrary, my standing instruction is to reserve any information connected to my assignment.”
Manfred shrugged. He put his mirror away. “We work for the same organization. You are a thousand centuries out of your way. The rules don’t apply. Besides, somebody has gone to great lengths to put you here. Or that’s how it looks.”
“You’re saying I was deliberately left to molder in that grave?”
The rest of the team was bringing their equipment on board. Manfred didn’t immediately react to my question. Instead he said, “In my experience, everybody wants to tell his story. Everybody, in the end, wants his story to be told.”
In the end, I told it. I told Manfred about Shanumi Six and Keswyn Muller. Soledad in the Green Dolphin. The blue pill and the black pill. The elusiveness of the main enemy who had never been rightly identified. The disturbance at the Agency, just as we’d arrived in Marrakesh, which had stranded us in thin air. I even told Manfred about the librarians at the bottom of the archive of the past and the future, their bronze shoulders touching in the near darkness, who whispered to each other in unknown algorithms.
Why did I talk? I was a case officer but I was also a human being. I was a hundred thousand years from my point of origin. I was a hundred minutes out of the grave, my skin as scaly as a lizard. I had been brought back into the world and I had an overwhelming desire to talk about what I had seen. So I kept speaking while the rover ran high over the rough ground, pitted with the remains of farm dams and windmills, suspension bridges gleaming among their broken cables over dry riverbeds, motorways covered with silt and broken branches.
After I stopped from exhaustion, Manfred reached under the bench and found me a pair of binoculars. The sun was going down across the mountains, exiting a cloudless evening. The binoculars brought me to a corner near the moon where the constellations were obscured by myriad points of light. Shooting stars ran in a river to the horizon. I drew a breath, tried to understand what I was seeing.
“It’s quite a show. The last days of Earth. In this universe at any rate.”
I said, “I didn’t come out of the grave to listen to riddles, Manfred.”
“This is the first act of a new planetary bombardment, Enver. Rocks originating in the Kuiper Belt are descending to the surface. By the time the bombardment ceases, the Earth will be stripped of her crust. Lava on the surface. A Venus-like atmosphere for the first time in four billion years. Neither photosynthesis nor respiration.”
I couldn’t have described my feelings to hear Manfred’s confession if I had spent a lifetime on the virtual stage. I could hardly breathe, lying back on the bench until I was more in control of myself. “Everything we fought for, day to day, everything contained in the library of the past and the future, was about eliminating threats to our way of life. How could this happen?”
„We’re not prophets, Enver. Our ability to decipher the predictions is as limited today as it was in your time. You know why that is, the mathematics of permutations and combinations. The only way we could ever solve it would be to embrace the horror of calculating across many separate universes and splitting ourselves into many contradictory pieces. And that is contrary to our fundamental assumption.”
I must have done something to express my impatience at having the basic dogma explained to my face that caused Manfred to stop. He looked out at the surface, considering something as the rover ran along a collapsed road, the rounded husk of a solar power station passing on the right.
He went on after a minute, taking a different tack. “Then there’s the question of relative causes. Out in the Kuiper Belt, it doesn’t take much to send a cascade of rocks in one direction or another.”
“So you believe this is a coincidence? First a supernova. Then, a fraction of an instant later in cosmic terms, a planetary bombardment. You would be more likely to win the continental lottery a hundred times in a row.”
Manfred flipped a series of switches on the side of the rover and, along with the two members of his team, started to remove his gloves and overalls. “Maybe a conspiracy against the Earth exists. But I cannot prove it, my friend. I cannot put a name and a face to whatever is stirring among the rocks and stones of the Kuiper Belt, let alone what power could alter the heart of a star. In your time, the Agency suspected that there were too many coincidences against us. But they were unable to prove the existence of the main enemy. More than that, I do not wish to say at present.”
The rover entered a tunnel. Bars of light passed above us, decelerating as we descended into the station.
In the bay there were no other vehicles. A tracked machine descended from a pulley in the roof and approached. It assessed the outside of the rover, a single black eye turning to consider the damage. Its probes and antennae looked as finely worked as those of an insect.
Everybody showered in a long red room on the side of the bay. I was uncomfortable for a minute and then forgot myself in the ecstasy of very hot water and steam. The others took their leave. Manfred waited and found me a gown. He put his arm around my shoulders for a minute.
“I am curious, Eleven. Before the Morocco expedition, how much did you know about your future Six?»
“I knew Shanumi’s reputation as a case officer, which was why I was glad we were assigned to each other.”
“Her reputation?”
I hesitated, noticing myself in the mirror set above the sink, a man who had been left to moulder. My spider sense was tingling. “Not just the highlights, I mean. Not just the glory, not just the courage of a true daughter of the continent. She had a very refined side. She was on good terms, for example, with the painters and composers of the Edo period in Japan.”
“You call it glory. Birmingham, Alabama, with Martin Luther King.” Manfred counted on his fingers. “Leningrad. Stalingrad. Birkenau. The Second Congolese War. Negative highlights. Negative infinities. Some might say that your Six had an affinity for terror.”
I didn’t reply at once to Manfred’s accusation. For it came to me that I was so far from home, my replies could be deemed to have archeological significance. I should watch my words, especially when it came to Shanumi Six. I knew there was something in the case I didn’t comprehend.
Manfred led me to an elevator. It descended into an endless shaft, down and further down into the Earth. I lost track of how long it took amid the acceleration. Information flickered on the walls.
I turned to my companion. “If you’re asking me to interpret for Shanumi Six, I can only do so to a limited degree.”
“I’m listening.”
“She admired periods of great imagination and productivity. They just happened to go together with social upheaval, what you mean by terror. She liked to quote from somewhere, about a peaceful country like Switzerland taking five hundred years to invent the cuckoo clock.”
For the moment Manfred seemed to be satisfied with my answer. At any rate, the doors opened, releasing us into the depths of the planet. To my surprise, our destination was as light as a starship: greenhouses in huge globes and bronze refrigeration chambers connected by winding walkways which disappeared into space. The air was crisp. There were no machines, no computer consultants in sight.
Manfred brought me to a suite of rooms adjoining the central corridor. In the first room was a table with a chessboard, the spectral pieces arranged in midgame three inches in the air. No chairs or sign of an opponent.
Floating along the high wall were shelves housing my host’s collection of objects. He left me to examine them for a few minutes. There was no evident rhyme or reason behind the selection: soapstone statues of gods and goddesses on lily pads sat next to black-ink vases with pictures of garlanded bulls on their sides and amber drops containing preh
istoric insects. Then there was a series of seashells mounted under a lens. I thought of the ocean starting to boil and forced myself to remember days on the seaside with my father, hot sand and salty water.
In the next room there were ornate couches on gold feet and oil paintings on the walls. I sat opposite Manfred. He brought up recordings of burnt libraries and data centers. The debris of a long-ruined civilization.
“There’s the apparent reason you were buried so long. Somebody burrowed into the Agency and obliterated the filing system. They couldn’t locate their own case officers and bring them back into the fold. And it was your friend, Keswyn Muller, that minor figure from a discredited continent, who seems to have been the guilty party. Who happens to have been the target of your first approach in the field.” Manfred sat back and examined me, his face flickering as the causeless images of death and destruction continued in the air between us. “I would like to know your assessment of that constellation of facts. One case officer to another.”
I said, “I have no assessment. I am too implicated in the facts to see them objectively.”
“You are implicated, Eleven. Somebody sent you out of the way and, by gum, we are going to put you right back in the middle of it and you are going to evaluate the situation like a good case officer.”
The images faded in the space between us.
“Do you plan to send me back a thousand centuries? That would cost more than a national energy budget.”
“We have a power station on Jupiter. I am familiar with your personnel file, which happens to have been preserved. I hope you can conquer your fear of heights.”
My hours in Marrakesh, not to say the days which followed my time with Manfred, ran so hot with the fever of conspiracy and intrigue that I remember the four days at the bottom of the shaft as a holiday.
I was left to myself. The members of the archeological team were busy on the surface, returning only to log their finds and replenish their supplies. I was never invited to join them at a meal, although occasionally Manfred would come down and share a bowl of blue-green coffee, looking into the algal grounds in the bottom of his cup as if they had some secret to reveal to a dedicated officer. He didn’t tell me anything more about himself or his collaborators, but on more than one occasion he inquired further into the phenomenon of Shanumi Six.
A Spy in Time Page 5
