Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  Four.

  Not five.

  When did I decide to generate a fifth? Tracking five identities is geometrically more difficult than tracking four, and a fifth story requires a different rhythm, locks each narrative in place without the refuge of an empty space to move to when the searchlight becomes too bright. It’s bad tactics, like putting your weight on both feet when you need to be nimble. It could pull the temple down on all of us.

  If it really goes bad, it could stuff me back into myself, make this whole effort fall apart. Back down into the honey, and then where are we?

  Oh.

  Oh shit.

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Oh my God. Oliver. It’s Oliver.

  He’s doing something inside my head.

  Gnomon is not my story. I did not decide to write it. I did not create it. Of course not. It possesses that appalling certainty. It is set against the rest of me like a battering ram. It belongs to them. It is the worm Oliver has put in me to kill my helpful ghosts, my shadows. Robert. Make him stop.

  He’s inside my head. And I cannot feel what he is doing. He could do anything. He could sit down and cook dinner, and I would never know.

  *

  Some people can do that. They can just make themselves at home. They can cook a full meal from a tomato and a piece of cheese. One of the things I liked about my husband, when I first met him, was that he knew how to walk uphill with style. I took him, for reasons that now escape me, on an outdoorsy sort of holiday in Scotland. He wasn’t particularly comfortable with things like fishing rods or walking shoes, but he came. Then it turned out that our hotel was closed for another week and that the travel agent had sent a message saying we were coming early and then just gone ahead and decided we were booked in. When we arrived, the whole place – on the tip of a promontory looking out at a black, angry sea – was shuttered and grim. It probably wasn’t the most welcoming spot even in the summer, all dressed grey stone and narrow windows to keep out the weather, but in the cold and dark of a February evening with a storm blowing in off the Atlantic it was like something from a horror film. We sat in the car park and waited, and finally the caretaker came and let us in and gave us weak tea and four candles for light. He didn’t know if the hotel would open for us. It was a Sunday, of course, and in the north of Scotland they still take Sunday pretty seriously. The caretaker was wearing his church best, so he looked like a vampire’s butler. He went out into the storm, coat flapping and snapping, and the door closed with a colossal bang. The candles went out, and of course we didn’t have any matches.

  An hour later the owner arrived. She was young and beautiful and warm and welcoming, with a fine face and perfect lips, and she moved through the house as if it was daylight. She lit the four candles again, and more, so that the lounge and the lobby and the corridor to the bar all glimmered as if it was the Middle Ages, and then she took off her coat and hat and she was completely bald, not like someone who shaves her head but like someone who just has no hair at all, quite naturally. I remembered that I’d read somewhere that more and more people were being born that way, that hair was a waste of energy and a nuisance to us now and we didn’t need it.

  She went away and came back very grave, then made a phone call and finally shook her head. The room was ready, she said. She put her hand – long-fingered and perfectly smooth – on mine as she spoke, and I thought for a moment she would kiss me, and I wondered what I would do if she did.

  But she did not. She regretted, instead, that there was no electrical connection at present, that the refurbishment was not complete. She had a room, yes, a great one, but it wouldn’t be ready really until three days from now, and certainly she could get the men to wire up the generator to the house tomorrow so that we could heat water and she could cook, that would be fine, but she was busy this evening and there was really nothing she could do but offer us a warm fire and plenty of blankets. There was a wind-up gramophone and some old records, 78s. They were so heavy. She set the first one up for us, crackling swing. The music was very loud, but she took a cloth from the bar and explained that this was the origin of the phrase ‘put a sock in it’. You just – the white Celtic hand stroked the inside of the horn – you just pressed a piece of cloth here, and so: all better. Her eyes twinkled. Lovers in such a situation, she murmured, might not find too much to complain about. There was fruit in the room, and she could leave us wine. Her finger trailed along the edge of the chair, like a wet tongue along dry skin.

  Robert just grinned and asked her: ‘Could we possibly have some fish, some foil, and a cast iron pan? And perhaps two large potatoes?’

  She laughed and said of course we could, and Robert cooked over charcoal, on his knees in front of the fire among the flakes of wood and ash. He burned a hole in his spare shirt – he was using it as an oven glove – but to my amazement he produced a creditable fried fish and baked potatoes with an apple sauce, and we ate it with Italian white wine that tasted of smoke.

  That’s how you meet bad situations, I thought. That’s what you do. You don’t make lemonade, you make a full meal. Then you get drunk and celebrate the win in high style, your hand on his chest as you ride him and your eyes locked on his.

  I don’t know why I’m thinking of that. I haven’t, for years. Not since—

  Oh.

  Oh, motherfucker, not already. He’s almost through. That’s a real memory. I’m leaking. If that’s in here, God knows how much they’re getting out there. Oh fuck. Oh.

  Robert. He’s in my head. Right. Now. He can hear me.

  I can taste the wine as if I’m drinking it. It’s great. That was a great day. I could stay there for ever, locked in that one room. And no one could bother us there.

  And behind me, on the record player, I hear my own voice on scratched vinyl. It says: ‘CRASH DIVE.’

  *

  This is the captain. All hands, all hands: CRASH DIVE. I repeat: CRASH DIVE.

  They blow the forward tanks before I’ve finished speaking. That’s the point of all the drill, that when the moment comes it’s so fast it’s done without thinking, without any kind of delay at all. There’s just the order, and then the ship goes down into the dark, one more shadow in the sea.

  Don’t move, but don’t stop breathing. Don’t touch the hull. In the silence, we avoid one another’s eyes. If you meet someone’s eyes you will sigh, or laugh, or whoop, and the destroyers will know where we are.

  The boat shudders as we touch the thermocline, the place where warm water meets cold. You can hide here, from sonar.

  I built this whole thing in my head. My instructors at Burton weren’t happy about it at all, because they wanted me to make an animal. The course guidelines are very clear: something organic is best, something poetic or cinematic, something you can relate to, something that runs and hides. For most people that’s a deer or a tortoise. One girl had a chameleon, there was a kid from Russia who had some sort of mythical goblin that blended into the snow. I had a submarine. I told them I’d watched Das Boot over and over again, that I loved it, that it was my iconic image of evasion. They weren’t happy, but the class brief also said it should be the first thing you think of when they set you the task and this was what came into my head, and that was true and I wasn’t budging. In the end, I think they felt they had to let me try and fail. Which I didn’t.

  Seriously: you want to train me to fight, to do all this stuff, but my guardian angel should be Bambi?

  The idea is that when someone does something in an interrogation that causes your defences to fail, you have a panic button: a trained response that puts you back on to a secure footing and allows you a few moments to think. In the worst case, it’s a cloud of squid ink for the mind, it gives you a moment to gather yourself. In the best, you get clean away into the hills and you can fight your insurgency another day. The difference between those two is measured by how deeply you believe in your image, and how many complex operations you can assign to its structure. That’s why you take the firs
t thing in your head, something that’s deeply rooted in you: if it feels intuitively right for the situation it’s easier to believe in. With an animal, you can generally assign five or six functions to its body – head, four legs, tail. If you’re particularly disciplined you can throw in extras for the eyes and teeth, maybe the pattern of the coat. You can dump your cognition into your five senses, scatter yourself, vanish through the woods. It’s a solid trick.

  I can do rather more than that. My hiding place is an old Resolution-class submarine, 425 feet long. There were only four of them ever made: Resolution, Repulse, Renown and Revenge. Four, and this one, which is perfect in every detail: top speed 25 knots submerged, powered by a Rolls-Royce Vickers pressurised water nuclear reactor, crew of 143. When I began to work with it, I realised that I could give every workstation a function, but for that I’d need sailors, so little by little I dreamed them too: a ghost crew of friends and family and childhood heroes, and now they’re all down here in my mind wearing the uniform I made, doing what I set them up to do, minding the ship, each fragment of me doing exactly what I say. This is my last redoubt, my secret-keeper. The crew down here are the truth. Here, in the place where my muscle memory should be, where I keep my blood pumping, where I tell my lungs to breathe. All that, the machines are going to have to do now, and they will, because Oliver is so very desperate to know what I’m doing here. Oliver wants this ship, more than anything else, and the logs and the codebooks and all the rest. He wants the real me. I think it always upset him that I wouldn’t tell him more about myself.

  He’ll keep me alive for as long as it takes to get down here.

  There is one difference in the composition of this submarine and its crew to what you’d have found in the heyday of the Resolution-class: only I have the firing keys. In the real deal, they’d be held by the captain and the first officer, requiring the presence of both to initiate the main weapons system and fire it. But there’s no reason to do that here.

  That’s the whole point of the exercise, the reason I wanted the HMS Rebus rather than anything else: these boats were part of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent programme, armed with sixteen UGM-27 Polaris A-3 nuclear missiles. From here, I can burn cities.

  Let’s see Bambi do that.

  So come on, Oliver. Come on.

  anomalous

  THE INSPECTOR DREAMS someone else’s dreams, contented and lazy. Her back is warm in a bigger, softer bed, and in her hand is the endlessly bizarre, endlessly fascinating solidity of her lover’s erection. She tinkers with it almost idly, half-drowsing, then – having his fullest attention – eases back so that they can make love. He whispers her name, but she doesn’t hear it properly because there’s too much else to enjoy: the scent and taste of him, the touch of his hands on one hip and one breast, the tension in her and the gathering promise of release. She looks down at herself, then back at him. She moves unhastily, traps his roving fingers and presses them against her, rocks and curls in search of a particular path. There are side roads, each singular in its appeal. Not today. She turns slightly, laughs as she hears the catch in his breathing, feels the same in her own. Then they get it exactly right and tension is no longer the word. Time passes, slow and honeyed. Seconds. Minutes. More. At last she says something in a language she does not know and goes away for a rigid moment, an enduring flash of physical light that wells up from her marrow and settles in her skin.

  ‘Diana,’ he says, lips against her shoulder. ‘Ana, Ana, Ana. My star.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘I love you too.’

  Neith’s eyes open unwillingly, and take in the faint pale gleam of night time in the city, the cracked ceiling of her room. The hairline fracture cuts from one side to the other, in places almost invisible. It isn’t serious, just the legacy of a dry summer two years gone and the resultant shifting of London’s clay. She commands her body to obedience, to modesty and calm. The dream was starkly real, not the muzzy incompleteness of colourless, conjured images but the crystal certainty of waking. She half expects to feel his weight behind her still, and turns quickly to be sure she is in fact alone. And if she were not, what then? Horizontal combat? Arrest and interrogation? Or more sex?

  Oh, Jonathan Jones. Dog-walker. Where are you when I need you? In the numbers behind the screen, of course. Pattern is not presence, but nor is it nothing.

  Jonathan Jones and his slightly wider than the median shoulders. He’s a conflict resolution specialist; hobbies include pottery and cycling. He likes Italian food, doesn’t eat shellfish because he was poisoned as a child. Nothing dramatic, no terrifying close call, he just wouldn’t put prawns in his mouth the same way you wouldn’t chew a piece of roofing felt.

  She knows he has looked at her history as well – quite delicately, as befits a man who makes vases out of wet clay. His touch upon her digital self is in perfect sync with hers upon his. May I? By all means. I want to know—Yes. Perhaps you … ? Yes, of course. And if we did: would it be tea or coffee?

  He likes tea: mostly green or oolong, no milk. No lapsang souchong, which he once described as garish. She’s never tried oolong. He’s never tried civet coffee, but she knows he is willing to learn. They may not be talking to one another, but they are communicating in open searches. Tacit permissions of mutual examination: the subtle body language of a disembodied society.

  Dog-walker. I’m concerned the dog may not take to me.

  She growls and goes to the bathroom to splash water on her face, avoiding her own eyes in the mirror. As always when she wakes like this – not that she ever does, not like this, but from dreams and in the middle of the night – she leaves the lights off in her flat so that she does not wholly transition to a daytime state and find herself unable to go back to sleep. The dark is a welcome one through which she moves with familiar confidence. Bare feet know the gaps between the floorboards, the knotholes and the protruding nail two feet outside the bedroom door. Scuff at it with your heel for good luck or to be sure you’re where you think you are, but don’t tread on it. She touches the frame of the door, hears a murmur in the corridor outside. Late revellers coming home. Through the window, she sees the lights of Piccadilly, the digital boards celebrating something in Chinese or Hebrew, some alphabet she does not know – Hindi, perhaps, or Sanskrit. A picture of a woman against African mountains, then a perfume bottle, then more illegible text. She turns away, into the bathroom.

  She twists the taps and scowls as nothing emerges: cowboy Victorian builders. Then after a moment her attention is diverted by a creak, inside. She knows it’s not inside-inside, not here, with her. She knows, but her heart speeds again anyway, in mistrust.

  Foolishness. It is the pipe in the west wall, the furnace in the basement coming on for heat, period radiators pressed into service ironically meaning that only new furniture can survive here: the good stuff buckles and warps in the sudden shifts in temperature.

  She gives up on the tap – no doubt when the pipes have finished doing whatever they are doing in the meantime, the airlock will break and she will have water again – and tilts her head, listens to the sound of mice scuttling, or even rats; to the wind tapping at the windows, the opening of the street entrance three floors down and a chill seeping into the flat despite her draught excluder. Hairs rise on her legs. Paranoia whispers that that was a little too much cold air, that this room should be immune unless her front door has been opened. She isn’t sure if that’s true.

  She is an Inspector of the Witness on a high-profile case. It is not unknown for that to be an unpopular line of work. She does not allow herself to ask, at this moment, with whom her investigation might be unpopular. Perpetrators, say. Or villains. Villains are always unhappy with coppers. There’s no reason to imagine Lönnrot, specifically, scuttling like a white spider along the hallway wall.

  Perhaps I can walk through walls.

  Slowing her breathing and opening her mouth, she listens.

  Silence.

  Well, of course: silence.
But of what sort? How does one distinguish from one another the vacant silence of an empty home, a woman standing quietly alone in the night, and that of a space now occupied by two mortal enemies, each reaching out for some sign of the other?

  The heating begins to clink, the sound rising up steady and even from the deep like a prisoner banging on the pipes with a shoe. It is loudest in here, which means that Neith is deaf. Does it also mean that an assassin would come this way to check the source of the noise? Or would he, or she, continue with their chosen pattern, knowing the nature of the sound? That creak, say, might be a predatory step in the kitchen. That muffled flutter might be pigeons – or it might not.

  She must move. Or she must stay put. She must attack or she must escape. It is vitally important that she does something, even if it is nothing. To be surprised by death while dithering is failure.

  She glances off to one side and in the same instant feels a breath of wind on her lips, is abruptly afraid to look back and see what is in front of her. She imagines Lönnrot barely an inch away, black eyes wide and wrongful jaw ready to bite her. Sexual predators bite. So do prison fighters. So do animals. Which is Lönnrot? None of the above.

  She puts out her hands and finds nothing, then feels the arachnoid tingle in her spine and wonders if that means an unseen companion has moved around behind her, into the dead space between her shoulders. If she moves her eyes she can look in the mirror, but if she looks in the mirror she will see what is happening. And what if she does see Lönnrot, floating pale and ghostly, but only in the reflection? White hand reaching out from the green-tinted silvering of the glass. White teeth smiling.

  She lets out her breath and looks, sees exactly that and jolts back, then, sitting up, finds herself predictably alone and equally predictably still in bed.

  She gets up, turning on the lights, and makes coffee. What is the use of a dream check, the Inspector growls at herself, if you don’t remember to check it when you’re dreaming? And then, as she lifts the cup to her lips, she remembers, and actually grins. Nightmares or not, she learned something last night. Smith and Hunter. Hunter and Smith. The interrogation, yes. But also before. She called him Oliver.