A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  I went into the workshop, trying not to fall over any of the ailing machines. The robot put the machines behind him when he finished fixing them and they scurried out of a different door, keen to return to their duties on the walls of the dam. A welding arc flickered on and off on the robot’s hand as he turned his attention to the sequence of tasks, moving as quickly as if he were sewing on a button with flashing blue thread.

  I went up to the robot and, without asking his permission, entered the first digits of my prime number on the keyboard panel on his back. He stopped working while I did so and then turned around, lowering his arms, the blue spark of independent volition in his eyes going out.

  The smaller machines settled and waited without obvious impatience while the master of the farm answered my questions. He was a withdrawn machine who answered my questions with obvious reluctance. A fortnight had gone by since he had seen a human being, a group of hikers who had gone in the direction of the mountain. He went blank for a minute, pistons frozen, and came back to report that none of the sensors available to him had identified any member of the Board of Protection. It likely meant that they had a stock of prime numbers sufficiently imposing to screen themselves from electronic surveillance.

  The same machine came outside with me and looked meditatively to the hills in the north. Lights ran around his head. He handed me a pair of binoculars. Through them I saw the black pipes proliferating over the base of the redemption device. The robot produced a car atlas. He gave it to me, marking my potential routes.

  “I will provide you with a cart and an extra battery, Agent. I hope you can make it to your destination without encountering severe threats to your person.”

  “Is that what you were just trying to figure out?”

  “I am obliged to assess the risks of any mission a human being undertakes, in order to offer counsel. Therefore, I was working out the probability of your survival if your assignment leaves you on the surface much longer.”

  “And what is it?”

  “Zero, to the fifth decimal place. I advise you to seek shelter in a protected facility. Given your demonstrated authority, I will nevertheless attempt to assist your mission and increase your odds of survival by keeping you off the main roads and likely evacuation routes.”

  I turned the binoculars in the other direction to find the restrictionist encampment on the opposite bank of the river.

  I sped along the macadam track through automatic farms lying end to end along the mountains. Crops lay in the open air, bright heads moving in the wind. Over the walls of a dam, dragonflies skittered onto the water.

  Now and again came a row of greenhouses holding thousands of pans of radishes and heads of lettuce, tended by pipes in ascending ranks. As I went past, I found in their glass sides no trace of a reflection of a man on the cart. So far, I’d felt no sign of the onset of reflection sickness. On the contrary, I had rarely felt better. The sun lay steady on the endless squares of farmland, alternating like a chessboard between wheat and green cane.

  I set the cart to the highest speed, its engine whining as high as a speedboat. The greenhouses gave way to busy lumberyards and autonomous factories, aprons of tarmac in front of their long sliding doors through which you saw carts and robots bent over their tasks as if nothing could disturb them. Then came a sculpture garden, as announced by a sign, stacks of tires and car parts composed into statues by the pincers of a retired machine that now sat collapsed under an awning.

  I hadn’t seen a sign of a human being anywhere, excepting the restrictionists if they counted, until I stopped to charge the cart at a roadside electric pump. The battery light stayed stubbornly on yellow, barely increasing its level of charge, while I tried one station after the other in the hope of filling up the cart.

  I heard voices nearby, too unsteady to be robotic. They were accompanied by the sound of bells.

  The voices came closer and closer. I went towards them, rounding the bend, and found a column consisting of several dozen women, their serene white faces encircled by black habits, heading in the direction I had come from. Some bore bells hung in bunches of three. Others kept candles burning in dishes, a clean silver smoke coming off, cupping one hand to protect the flame from the wind.

  They would have gone past, barely acknowledging me, but I placed myself directly in their path.

  “You are going the wrong way. You need to find shelter as soon as possible. I beg you. Soon no man or woman, no living creature, will be able to survive on exposed ground. Look up at the sky, ladies. It is already changing. It is already changing and the old world is ready to die.”

  I uttered the words without thinking. The women in their habits didn’t look up, but I did as I spoke, and found the promise of the end of the world in the heavens, the deadly gift of a star which had exploded three thousand years in the past and was now about to assassinate the Earth. The upper regions of the atmosphere turned dark enough to obscure the sun. The air was full of sparks, charged with lightning that jumped into and out of the ground.

  I had often imagined the Day of the Dead, and months and years of the dead which had followed. To my astonishment, I was here to witness the end of the Earth and no doubt to die along with it. The nuns, however, were unsurprised by the dark spectacle God had brought from under his cloak to cover the grave of the world. They didn’t think to look up and fear the end of days and the hold it would take of them.

  The Mother Superior came forward and put her hand out to me. She was as tall as me, her stony-green eyes highly dilated. No doubt she was under the influence of one or another compound meant to enhance the quest for divinity and ready the soul to make a reckoning. The religious orders were legendary for their chemical dependencies. I saw that she had neatly trimmed fingernails, neat as moons.

  “Are you the prophet? We are searching for the prophet.”

  “I am not the prophet, sisters.” I looked up and down the line of pale women, looking for some sign of doubt, unafraid of their complexion. “I am neither your prophet nor the one you should seek. You should find someone to lead you to safety underground. Someone with a good knowledge of the mines and subways. Although I cannot honestly wish that life upon you either. Indeed, there can be no happy endings for any of us. For the end of this old world has come.”

  The Mother Superior withdrew her hand, and brought out a miniature tripod from a capsule on a chain of tiny gold crosses around her neck. She placed the tripod on her open palm, blowing on it three times to open its recording eye. Three bars in the tripod, two bars in the cross, one unified way of life in the ancient world.

  “My child, I ask you again for the sake of witnessing. Are you certain that you are not the prophet whom we seek?”

  “I am certain I am not your prophet.”

  “In that case, we will continue.”

  The tripod was returned to the necklace and the Mother Superior went back through the procession. The women she passed bowed their covered heads, their faces lit by their strange candles.

  I watched hopelessly as they went past me two by two, their bells sounding into the deserted day. The restrictionists in their path would not lift a finger to help.

  I knew from many visits to the Museum of the Apocalypse what would remain in a matter of hours: silent cities and towns carpeting the burnt Earth. Houses of rubble and ash in their endless ranks around. I remembered the great boneyards which endured decades in the cities of the old world until buried in vast trenches by those returned from the underground. I considered the many thousands of men and women, boys and girls, trapped outside at the instant of the final flash who had left nothing of themselves but a shadow printed on a rock.

  I held out until the procession had advanced a hundred yards further. Then I abandoned my cart where it stood and ran back to the Mother Superior, the nuns moving to the side to avoid my touching the hems of their black habits. She took out her tripod bef
ore I got to her.

  “Mother, I must confess. I am the one you seek. I am your prophet.”

  The old woman had a look of triumph, verging on greed, although she tried to conceal it.

  “I knew all along, my child. For who else would be out here on such a day as this?”

  “How could you know if I didn’t know myself?”

  “But naturally I am familiar with the books of future scripture, my child, handed down for generations in our order. I know that the prophet will deny himself three times before he accepts. I know also that the prophet denies himself to himself, in the secrecy of his own mind, three full times before he will accept. That was the true purpose of my question to you.”

  Looking back on the circumstances, I couldn’t tell how many times I had denied myself or what I had chosen to accept about myself in order to get the nuns on the way to safety. They weren’t in a hurry. Many of them wanted to touch me as I passed, having me stop and bend down to allow them to run their hands over my head.

  I had not much time to pray with them on my knees under the scintillating blue sky, nor to count on their possibility rosaries, on which they fingered their remembrances of the infinite universes in which the living Christ had been crucified or flayed to the bone, buried in mud, dissolved in acid, or drowned in a cage, and revived only to be drowned again. Then they were content to accept my direction and follow the map to the locations registered for evacuation in case of an emergency. I tried not to think what would happen—whether they would keep their skins if they reached shelter.

  The cart was still not charged. I examined it, unclipping and opening the hood, and then the brains of the electric pump house. The reason for the malfunction was clear. In both cases the circuit boards were stained black to the wire, first casualties of the storm above my head. They hadn’t been insulated to operate in the neighborhood of a supernova. It was likely I wouldn’t find a machine of any thinking kind in working order on the way to my destination unless it had taken care to insulate its circuitry.

  I ditched the cart and ran as fast as I could for ten minutes, stopping to catch my breath when I had to. I cut across a hill, gaining a view of the land in every direction already glowing with heat. Fires had started at many places in the woods, producing a haze that hung over large areas. Steam rising over the dams and ponds. Fields turning black and brown before my eyes. There was still no sign of human activity.

  Before I came to the redemption machine, there was a long stretch of open country. Smoke and ash were heavy in the air. It was difficult to see more than a few feet. I came across a pack of dogs lying half in a flooded ditch, panting along their beached bodies, with no recognition for me or any person in their heavy eyes. There were inert cows and bulls, lying with one spotted side pressed on the fence. Their tongues dangled obscenely out of their mouths. Whether they were alive or already dead from exposure I could not say.

  I ran again, lay down when I couldn’t stand, got up and continued to run. Tears ran down my face. I didn’t know whether I couldn’t run another step or whether I could go on until my heart burst in my chest. I could feel my skin tingling at the touch of radiation.

  The smoke cleared, and I saw that through the scorching air, insects had begun to come down in their billions, settling on the ground to make a living carpet, hardly biting or stinging. I shivered and ran. I ran and ran until to my surprise I was near enough to my destination to read the logo of the Board of Protection inscribed on the gate. I could see directly into the compound from the ridge where I had halted.

  The tower extended high above my head. Around it was grouped a set of giant mirrors, many hundreds of feet tall. Each was linked to the others by beams of red light, crossing one another to make a lattice around the tower. The pipes I had seen from afar were large in diameter, connecting the mirrors to the industrial buildings beneath them.

  Activity was continuing underneath the lowering sky, automatic bulldozers pushing blindly at piles of construction material. The claws of unmanned cranes swung from the heights to pinch huge reflecting slabs and slot them into the mirrors.

  I approached the gate without hesitation. It opened at the instruction of my prime number, rising into the air on magnetic shoes, and allowed me into the courtyard. The space inside was dominated by the roar of bulldozers and the whistle of the chains above, so loud and nearby I wanted to throw myself on the ground to avoid an accident.

  I steadied myself to continue through the construction area. The heat was stifling. The sky was hot and fluorescent, a lid on the planet. From below, steam rose out of the riveted floor.

  To avoid being scalded, I used my number and went through the airlock door of a three-story dome, entering a labyrinth of deserted corridors and control rooms. Nobody was around except for a fire extinguisher loping along the walls in search of sparks to smother. It followed me for a minute and then branched off in another direction. I went through door after door, neglecting to hide myself, clattering along walkways which led around the circumference of a great rocket engine, its thrusters burrowed into the Earth.

  The next room overlooked the buried engine: an auditorium with banked seats and a holograph of the complex turning steadily in the front. I could hear voices from outside, and I thought I could identify almost every one of them. One of the men was Keswyn Muller. My old friend the doctor was arguing with a consultant. The computer possessed that even rhythm of explanation which, for superstitious reasons, nobody outside the Agency had ever thought to alter in a machine.

  Next, I overheard Shanumi Six replying in some fashion to Muller and the consultant. I should have been angry to meet her again, to think she had sentenced me to lie in the ground for a hundred thousand years. That my Six had betrayed the Constitution under which we prospered. That a Six had me placed in a cage, put in a way to lose the skin off my back. That she’d then claimed to have saved my skin. Yet I wasn’t half as angry at her as I had been at the restrictionists. For some strange reason of the heart, even if she were preparing to murder me or make me her accomplice by means of neural coercion, I felt nothing but relief to know that my Six was around the corner.

  I recovered my breath and considered my best course of action. Before I could decide, I heard another woman’s voice in the auditorium. I hadn’t heard her speak since Rio, and she sounded, as usual, almost out of breath. But she was also more efficient and authoritative than she had been under the chandelier of the Naval Club.

  Because I could visualize her face without coming under its spell, I understood a fact of a certain significance about Soledad which had waited till the Day of the Dead to be revealed.

  I had always known Soledad and yet I had been unable to tell myself why. She was familiar to me, even and already at a dim table in the Green Dolphin under the smoky gaze of a kerosene lamp, because she bore the countenance of the wife of S Natanson. She was the woman who would come back to warn the nations about this day. Her portrait in three dimensions hung at the heart of the Museum of the Apocalypse, alongside the grainy image of her husband in the great mall set in remembrance of the former nations. Yet I had never thought to compare Soledad with the icon I knew to revere. I had been so close to a founding figure of our dedication that I could have put my hand in her beaded hair and kissed her on the mouth.

  I was so daunted that I sank to my feet and felt my heart beating out of control. Dots whirled in my vision and I doubled up, pain in my stomach. I knew that I was crying again, but still I couldn’t explain my tears. I had been descending through dreams since Morocco, each level dissolving into the next without leaving a trace, until this trapdoor opened in the dreamtime. I wept openly, tears running over my face onto my hands. Panting like the dogs dying in the blue sunshine, I knew that I was about to faint and, if I ever woke up, it would be on the day subsequent to the end of the world.

  Before I went out, however, I was pulled roughly to my feet. It was my Six who
had surprised me.

  “You found your way here. As it has been predicted, so it will be. The books of the consultants never lie. Congratulations, Eleven. You are even better than I expected. Let me help with your condition. You are weak. I will make you strong.”

  I was paralyzed for another minute. My tongue was unable to choose the words. I lay against Shanumi Six, her body like another door I had never been able to open. She poured something into my mouth and then with no further ceremony inserted a tablet under my tongue, holding it there until it dissolved.

  The effect was nearly immediate. I recovered my strength. My head cleared all its worries in an instant, as if a steady scientific light had been placed on my situation.

  I pushed Shanumi away and wiped my face on my sleeve, trying to recover my dignity. She pushed back so that I went flying into the auditorium and only just managed to stay on my feet by holding onto a railing. I had forgotten how strong she was. She was so tall I had to crane my neck when she approached me again.

  Shanumi took out a radiation pistol, although she didn’t point it at me. She looked weathered, as if something unhealthy had blossomed in her flesh.

  “Let’s meet the others. They have been waiting for the last one to arrive.”

  “I am the last one?”

  She motioned with the pistol, pointing down. “According to the information I have, yes, you are. The cast is complete for the enactment of the redemption. You have seen a portion of the proof. I will show you more of the holograph if that is what is required to convince you. If only you had come with me from the underground. If you had come to us in Rio, instead of going out into the cold, I could have helped you understand and join the movement.”

  “You went out into the cold, Shanumi. You were the one who abandoned us.”

  “In another century, Enver, I would argue with you concerning who is the real traitor to the past. Believe me, I would welcome the opportunity to put my case to you. To justify the activities of the Board of Protection. Today, however, at the culmination, this is no time to split hairs. It is a time for action.”