by Exurb1a
I turned the corner of the administration building and there, waiting by my car, was Jonathan Hayden, the 'civil servant' from your office, dressed in an immaculate grey suit, his blonde hair combed to within a micron. “Hi!” he beamed.
I approached and tried to stay casual. “Hello.”
“I was just passing through and couldn't help notice your car.”
“Is that so?”
“Some academic business at the university?”
“Student bars are much cheaper.” He was leaning against the driver's door. “I'll need to go now,” I said.
“Just had a few questions, old chap.” He smiled delightedly again as though we were old friends. His eyes bounced supersonically up and down me, scanning for what I'm not sure. “Not looking in the best shape, are we?”
I glanced at my reflection in the car window. I'd been cultivating a beard through laziness. My hair was large and greasy. My eyelids hung lower than they should. “Are you offering makeovers now, Mr. Hayden? I'll take a backrub if it's going.”
He laughed good-naturedly and stopped all of a sudden and fixed me with eyes like some mad snake. “What are you doing at Evegreen University, Dr. Hare?”
“What are you doing leaning against my car several hundred miles from my house and, presumably, yours?”
He leant in close enough to appear menacing, but not so close that it implied violence. In a gentle voice he said, “Have you come to meet with one of your wife's old colleagues? If so, it would be remiss of you not to divulge this to me, considering the position I hold. As you know, any information relating to your wife's disappearance would be extremely welcomed by the British government.”
I remembered Lambert's comment about eras of history and the chats with her colleague. “I came to meet with Professor Phillips, an old friend of mine, not my wife's. Are you going to follow me on every errand? It's going to be extremely awkward next time I try to score some cocaine.”
He glanced down at his phone, typed. “Professor Phillips,” he said.
“Professor Phillips, yes.”
When he looked up again it was not with satisfaction. “I see there is indeed a Professor Phillips in the archaeology department.”
You were always better at this sort of thing: cold and calculated misdirection. I saw it again and again; white and grey lies you told to banktellers, to waiters, whatever needed to be said to ease the wheels of service and commerce. Once, after you told a restaurant it was your birthday just to get free dessert, you asked me why I never lied. Because decency is absolute, I said. You rolled your eyes and gave me a kiss. Fuck decency, you said.
Fuck decency, I thought.
“Blast, left some papers inside,” I said to Hayden. “You'll guard the car from robbers and arsonists if I go back in a moment, won't you?”
Hayden said nothing, only watched me pointedly.
I walked back into the Applied Physics department and strolled up to Lambert's office.
“What the-”
“So,” I said. “I'll ignore the fact that your seminar evidently doesn't exist. I assumed as much anyway. Now, I believe you gave me some advice earlier. I hope you'll permit me to return the favour. In the parking lot is a man who, now I can't be sure, but I'm fairly certain works for the British government in one capacity or another. He followed me here, and while I could certainly let him think it was for innocuous reasons, I'm also not above telling him the real one. I'm also not above mentioning the names of certain academics who work here who may or may not have been previously associated with my wife.”
She took off her spectacles and appeared to be trying to decide between pleading and rage. She settled on something between the two. “You bastard…” she muttered.
“Now I generally don't like making demands, but this is something of a special situation. Unless you tell me everything you know, or at least enough to have made my visit meaningful, I will promptly go downstairs and inform the waiting gentleman of whatever he's inquisitive regarding.”
“You're lying,” Lambert said. I nodded to the window. She peered out at the carpark like a frightened pensioner. “Who's that?”
“I really don't know, but it's quite likely he orchestrated a break in of my house and has been stalking me for the last few weeks. Chances are he's well-connected at the very least. Well-connected enough, I'm sure, to detonate someone's research funding.”
Lambert did a bit more thinking, ran a fevered hand through her hair and barked, “Oh fine, you bastard. Fine.”
She fiddled with her computer a while, put a USB stick in, removed it, and handed the thing over. “If this gets into anyone else's hands-” she muttered.
“It won't. I promise.”
We held each other's gaze for what felt a few thousand years. “This is my life,” she said. “Everything I have. I lied, I don't have a husband, children neither.” She nodded to the papers on her desk. “This is my life. Take this away and you've taken my life, you understand?”
“I just want to find Polly.”
“I know.”
“Where is she?”
She nodded to the USB stick and kept her mouth shut. I went to leave. Almost out of the door I heard her say, “You're the rabbit, aren't you?”
“Sorry?”
Her eyes dimmed. “I…had certain affections for Polly years ago. She let me down gently, said there was a little rabbit to whom she'd already given herself and that was that. Hare, rabbit, it's not so distant, is it?”
I left on that and Hayden was still downstairs, waiting by the car. “Where are the papers?” he said.
“What?”
“The papers you went back inside for.”
“Everything's gone digital, don't you know. Kindly move aside.”
And with that, amazingly, he did.
We were out one morning walking down some Bulgarian country road, the middle of sodding nowhere; your mum's village. There was a Thracian excavation going on just a few miles away and I said something in passing about how neat it was that the Thracians themselves might've walked these same roads thousands of years ago.
“Yes,” you said with a tired voice, “but what built the roads?”
“Err – people?”
“And the land?”
“Oh I see. Here we go again.”
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. It was never amazing to you that humanity was so old, was never impressive that we lived at the top of time's pyramid; hundreds of thousands of descendants beneath us; hundreds of thousands of years of just eating, sleeping, screwing, of trying to stay alive; never remarkable that the ground we walked on at that very moment was probably rich in their detritus, a time machine right beneath our feet. Because all that, you reminded me again and again, was built on nature, and She was the real prize. That smugness poked its head out every now and then, especially after a few drinks. I could've held ten PhDs in archaeology and it still wouldn't have been a real field by your estimation. Because it was arbitrary and stupid.
I got furious out of nowhere. The sun was unbearable and the road was unending and I said, “You're like a stupid little hummingbird, just darting about, trying to feed on any nectar it can find and ignoring everything else.”
“Uh huh,” you said.
“Fuck anything even a little miscellaneous, right? It's all just pseudo-science.”
We'd never really done the yelling thing before. You went quiet a while. We turned onto a path leading up a hill. Twenty minutes was long enough for me to start feeling guilty, but I was too prideful back then to apologise. You sat down in the wheat or whatever it was and patted the spot beside. I joined and we both laid down.
We looked out through a tunnel of crops; the sky sitting infinitely in the distance.
“I like hummingbirds,” you said. You were grinning a little. “They have to keep eating or they die. Silly little things…”
“Well biology's just another dumb footnote to physics, right?”
You blinked to signify a lazy y
es, something only Bulgarians seem to do. Then you said, “I don't think archaeology is silly though.”
“What then? Pointless?”
“No.”
God damn, I almost screamed – I just want you to take my work seriously. I want you to ask about mine like I do yours all the fucking time. I want to feel purposeful, I want to feel like a man, I want to feel respected, but I can't for as long as the woman I love looks down on my field like it's a dumb waste of time.
The crops swayed. The sun stroked us with little marmalade fingers.
“Yes all right, I'll be a hummingbird then,” you said. “I'll fly about up high drinking nectar with my big long beak, examining the tall things and the abstractions to find out where everything came from.” You kissed my nose. “And you can be a rabbit, Benjamin Rabbit, bounding about down in the grass, looking for your silly pots and skeletons to find out where everything's going.” You began to unbutton your dress. “Better than that, you can be my rabbit, Benjamin Rabbit.”
Funny how memory works. I can't recall the next day. Or the next. But I remember snapshots, the fragments that apparently mattered: finding you crying on the sofa when your grandmother died, getting bored during a movie and pretending to have a fight in the cinema, the morning you had vodka for breakfast, and the evening when you told me everything, or as close to everything that makes no difference, about your childhood. Your first kiss was with a Romanian boy in the field behind your parents' house. Your hamster was called Brody, after Adrien Brody – who you fancied back then, I suppose – and one day he was shivering. You picked him up and knew it was time for him to die, and he did die, there in your hand. When his little black eyes were closed, you wrapped him up like a Christmas present with a bow and everything and plopped him in the village river and watched him sail off.
Then you grew up and life happened. Lots of it. Somehow I weedled my way into those bits like a stowaway.
I cannot bring myself to believe that it was all for nothing, even if everything is for nothing anyway. I cannot bring myself to believe that screwing in that field, or our marriage, or all those quiet Sunday afternoons together were just a phase matter went through, and then wandered off to be a rock or a shoe instead.
You took fourteen billion years to make, and you won't happen again. Your ghost is everywhere now.
I haven't checked the USB stick. It's three in the morning and I know whatever I find will just lead me on to the next development in what is becoming a horrible fucking saga. So I'll sleep now, I think.
Love from me and the cat. She sends her best.
B x
14.
Argie explained her unusual tier privileges and insisted on busting Lambert out of her incarceration.
“Young lady…” The Navigator murmured.
“It’s fine,” Argie said.
And it had been easy. Argie simply requested that Lambert went free and Lambert went free. The scientist examined her hands as if in disbelief, stared at Argie, stared back at her hands. Then quietly: “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a gift,” Argie said. “You’re going to show us around Lemuria.”
Lambert raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“Yes. Your privileges can be revoked at any time.”
A pause. “And if I help you, you’ll let me keep my freedom?”
The Navigator turned on Argie. “If the Lemurians hear of this, they won’t take it lightly…”
Lambert murmured, “I don’t think they’ll give too much of a damn.” Before them appeared a wasteland, abandoned houses, abandoned complexes, some falling apart, others almost burned to the ground.
“Lemuria,” Lambert said. “Or, a version of it you would understand. No one here is barbaric enough to live in sapien structures, but I think you get the idea.”
“What’s happened to the population?” Argie said.
“Fled,” Lambert said and nodded to beyond the houses. There was the black pulsing lung again, approaching slowly, but approaching nonetheless. “They’re calling it the Mergerment. It’s already eaten a few million Lemurians. The rest made for the outskirts of the tier.”
“You can’t stop it?”
“As I told you before, no. Nothing affects it. So you see there is very little to show you, even as an accomplished guide like myself.”
“Take us inside Lemuria.”
“Your mind is too small to understand it.”
“I’ll set up a perceptual converter, make it possible for an idiot like me to grasp.” Argie did so. There was no sense of the world shifting. Arcadia was gentle in this way.
“Suit yourself,” Lambert shrugged. She vanished, leaving transport coordinates behind.
The two of them alone now, The Navigator said quietly, “She can’t be trusted.”
“We don’t need to trust her.”
“Argie…”
“The tier is in turmoil. So what if she tries something stupid? I’ll just trap her back here as the Lemurian reception lady.”
The Navigator thought this over a moment, went to say something, then thrust his hand suddenly into Argie’s head.
Images exploded in her mind, whirling colours, a dream against her will. The picture focused suddenly. Lambert appeared, much younger – according to her tags. She stood on a great observation platform. Below were hundreds, no, thousands of figures, some chained, others bound in rope. They were screaming incoherently, and others not so incoherently: Let us out, please, God, let us out. Lambert smiled delightedly to herself. With a wave of her hand more figures appeared below, bound in new fashions, seared over fire, trapped in ice. Argie looked closer. Some of the figures resembled Lambert, she realised. No, all of the figures resembled Lambert. Dear God, one screamed. Please, stop. The wailing increased in intensity, a choir of agony, the scene a mess of blood and flayed body parts, of severed limbs.
The Navigator pulled his hand back. The world normalised. “You see?” he said. “That’s who we’re dealing with. She cloned herself just to torment them, excusing it with some bizarre scientific justification.”
“Don’t ever do that again,” Argie spat.
“You do not ask a tiger to lead you into the forest, understand? What if she takes a copy of our selfsenses and does the same thing to us?”
“It wouldn’t be us…” Argie murmured.
“Idiot, of course it would be. By that logic you’re not the same person as two cycles ago if you’ve changed in any sense at all. It’s a stupid way of thinking. She’ll torture us forever given half a chance. They stopped her once. You’ve just let her back out.”
“She’s powerful. If it comes to it, she’ll fight for us. She values her freedom too much.”
“You're a child. No, dumber.”
Argie put up a hand and growled, “We’re here for my daughter. That’s all that matters. We’ll take whatever risks we need to. Got it?”
The Navigator scoffed and followed Lambert’s coordinates, vanishing. Argie did the same.
They found themselves on the Lemurian plane. The air stank of a recent fire. The ground was scorched in places. Lambert stood off in the distance kicking at rubble.
“How close is this to the real Lemuria?” Argie shouted to her.
“As close as your tiny mind is getting,” came the reply.
Lambert ascended into the air and began to fly over the plane. Argie and The Navigator followed. They passed over abandoned villages and cities. Statues stood at their centres, hypershapes, some in four dimensions, some in five.
“Welcome to the bustling heart of Arcadia,” Lambert chuckled. “Where everything has gone to hell.”
A scream sounded in the distance, a bass warble that seemed to echo through the valleys. “What's that?” Argie said.
“Residual selfsense,” Lambert said. “Pain itself, absorbed into the ground.”
“My god, what happened here?”
“Panic. The Mergerment is coming. You wanted to see Lemuria, no?”
Argie
and The Navigator exchanged a glance but said nothing. They passed over an ocean of multicoloured tiles, over deserts and swamplands. In the distance, finally, they came to an enormous swirling hypershape. Lambert approached without caution and they followed. “You know,” Lambert said whimsically, almost singing, “I found a selfsense surgeon some time ago willing to restore my sapien memories. He did a fine job. I recall life back then, some of it. Nasty, brutish, and short as the adage goes. But if the sapiens could have seen this…”
“What is it?” Argie called.
Lambert didn’t answer, only flew them closer. Figures were discernible below and judging by their tags they were denizens, not mere noncons. Argie, The Navigator, and Lambert descended. An alarm rang out the moment they touched ground, screeching like a bird. The figures turned and approached, bounding across the land at an absurd speed. A man arrived first, followed behind by several unsexed denizens and an entity presenting as a hypercube. “What is she doing out of her enclosure?” the man barked, staring at Lambert.
“I wanted some air,” Lambert said.
“Bind her,” the man said. His entourage approached.
“Wait,” Argie said. “I let her out. It was my doing.”
The man regarded her coldly. “Why?”
“She’s clever. She could be useful. The tier is falling apart, isn’t it? You'll need clever folk now.”
The man stared a moment, looked back to his entourage, then burst out laughing. The rest of the group joined in. Then presumably having checked Argie's tags he said, “Spoken like a true ape-fucker. Do you know where you are, little girl?” He pointed to the huge whirling artifact behind them. “That is one of the pillars of the Lemurian project, the Temporal. You’ve heard of the pillars at least, I assume.”
Argie shook her head, embarrassed.
The man burst out laughing again. “It’s like this,” he said.
“No,” The Navigator said protectively. “I’ll show her.” He put his hand to Argie’s head, but hesitated. “I’ll be gentle, all right?”
Argie nodded cautiously. Her mind whirled. This time it was not a moving scene but notions, thousands of them, all separate at first, then cohering into a sensible whole. All at once she understood.
