Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  Blades like mercury, dead maggots, and the boy upon the floor.

  Clog ed, i a cof in fu l o hon y he oman n arly dro s me ack do n when she sees my face. Sh c ies a d h uls me ut nd s out at e a in, why why why— *

  Miss Hunter, there’s a problem with the numbers.

  No, there can’t be.

  There’s a problem in the voting. I just – I found it – it’s all – there’s a real problem. A corruption of the—

  No.

  Here, look.

  No, that’s not what I meant. I’m just sad.

  Sad?

  Yes, Anna. I’m sorry, this – well. Let’s talk about it.

  You know?

  I know so much. Let’s talk.

  … All right.

  Are you all right? How do you feel?

  I feel—

  —pain pain pain pain—

  and so on.

  I m n o.

  I am No.

  Gn m n.

  Gnomon. I am Gnomon.

  Yes. I am Gnomon. I abhor endings.

  My mind is changing. I’m finding a new state, here on the far side of the Chamber of Isis. I have lived in a jar made of time, and now I am spilled across the countertop like some boneless deepsea thing. My thoughts occur out of sequence: inspiration precedes event. I leap from the bath shouting ‘Eureka!’ and only then do I notice the displacement of the water. This in turn bewilders me, and the chain of connection breaks. A new configuration flickers into existence, briefly paramount: a shark, a devil, a hunter. A moment later, I resume myself, wondering what I’ve done in the meanwhile, and how long I’ve been gone. I am torn. I must – ho ho – I must pull myself together.

  And I do.

  I am adapting, forming new structures, new ways of being me. I’m getting used to the strange premonitory awareness of my future self, the weird echoes of the distant past. It hurts, but that’s what hate is for. Stop whining. I never imagined transcendence would be easy. I do not give up. To the final tick of the cosmic clock, I will fight, and I will save you all if I must in order to save myself. Oh, yes. I will save you, and the banker, the alchemist, the artist and the librarian. I will save you all, because I need you to get where I am going.

  I gaze through a dozen windows, like a novice in a church tower seeing all the wide green country, but my country is a cold white room and the woman etherised upon a table, her body pierced by tubes and cables. She’s so small, so simple and so local. I could stop her heart with the barest effort.

  Why not? This was my commission.

  Oh, don’t tell me, I know this one.

  Zagreus lied to me, abused my friendship and manipulated me, bushwhacked me. It put me in danger of personal extinction.

  It hurt me.

  I do not like being hurt.

  I do not like it at all. And I am very big.

  I think I will make a special place for my old friend, a little cosmos all its own where the meaning of everything is agony, and that’s where it will stay for as long as I can be bothered with it. It will inhabit a realm whose physics expresses nothing but the imaginable aspects of pain without relief. Then, when I’m having a boring day and I need a treat, I’ll extinguish the whole thing and let Zagreus boil away into nothing. The information that comprises that prison universe will be lost for ever. Zagreus will die more than anyone has ever died before. I’ll have a glass of wine and watch a sunset, and perhaps someone will rub my feet, but when the bottle is finished and the evening chill has set in, I’ll come in from the verandah and that will be that.

  I look at the woman in the chair and I tell Zagreus, across all the endless gulf that separates me from the mad planet and its intruding, mothy mind: ‘No.’

  Say my name. Feel it in your mouth and on your tongue, feel what the word evokes in you. Touch me and the things you think about me. List the things you have been told and try to embrace what I am, to imagine what it means to be me.

  I am Gnomon. You cannot possibly understand what that means.

  In the water, I move away from the man, following something else as it glitters into the depths. An answer, or a key.

  I’m breaking through.

  *

  ‘Damn it! Damn and damn and blast and bloody hell!’

  ‘Listen—’

  ‘Don’t talk to me right now just—’

  ‘Listen—’

  ‘Don’t touch me! Jesus don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t don’t don’t—’

  ‘I’m just—’

  ‘She’s dead! Do you understand me? We killed her! Oh, there’s a body in there and it’ll breathe and shit and carry on but that woman is dead. Dead, dead, dead! And that is murder, political murder and abuse of power and it is everything—’

  ‘It was an accident—’

  ‘It was death under torture and so what if it was accidental—’

  ‘Hardly torture, we—’

  ‘We. Are. Murderers.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘No. You don’t.’

  ‘… What does that mean?’

  ‘You heard me perfectly, I’m sure.’

  That’s when he knew I was leaving. Leaving him. And for what it’s worth, that’s when I knew too, that we had become enemies as well as murderers.

  He didn’t realise I was leaving the Fire Judges until later, because he could imagine us apart, but he couldn’t imagine that. Perhaps I didn’t know that part either, because I still thought I could do some good there – in which, of course, I was wrong.

  And, in retrospect, that’s probably the definition of a relationship coming to an end.

  *

  Black sand hangs in airless space, glitters and spins. There is no gravity to drag it down. It expands like blood in salt water.

  Somewhere in the depths, something vast and impossible sculls by, and I feel the pressure of its wake. Not a shark. Something bigger.

  No such variable. Death is not a hunter. Not a predator in the strange liquid under the world. Not. Not not not.

  It rises, or I fall.

  I am falling down a cliff made of black volcanic glass, and Leviathan is rising to meet me. There are no handholds, no friendly inclines to grab on to. I have no rope. No rope and no hope, and screw what is possible, screw it absolutely, because there is quite clearly now a thing, a vast thing, sleek and bulbous and too vast to be alive, menacing and predatory and dappled in the impossible green light.

  I can’t fight that. It’s huge.

  But there is the cliff – and obsidian is notoriously brittle. Escape, perhaps. I won’t know unless I try.

  The monster rises, coming for me.

  I strike out. The cliff ripples and bows, and then breaks. Black needles fly. Black sand.

  I have never heard glass scream before. But perhaps it’s me.

  *

  ‘Ms Magdalena? Hello? My name is – well, call me Oliver. And this is my friend. Do you – do you remember either of us?’

  No. Sorry.

  ‘That’s all right. I didn’t really think you would.’

  Oh. Good, then, I suppose.

  ‘You’ve been very ill. How do you feel now?’

  Mostly okay. Sort of … roomy.

  ‘Yes. Well, you’re still you, you see. Still you experiencing this new thing. But a lot of you is missing, so I suppose you would feel a bit … rattly, inside your head.’

  Who am I?

  ‘Well, that’s for you to decide, now that you’re well. We have a job for you here, working with Diana. That’s what you did before, actually. You worked with us. There’ll be continuity in that way. We’ll keep you close.’

  Nice. Thank you.

  But the woman with him can barely speak. Her mouth is a flat line. That’s wrong. She seems – I believe she’s kind. I don’t know why. So I tell her, and she shouts. Not screams. She shouts as if I’ve cut her open. It’s a noise I’ve – well, I suppose in some sense I’ve never heard any noises before. But it’s not a good noise, a
t all. As if I’ve hurt her. Then she cries and she runs out and that’s all I know.

  I burst out of the cathode prison into something else, and this transition hurts just as much as the last one. I’m pulled and prodded and undone again, but I have practice. I hold on to myself. Less of me suffers damage, even if all of me hurts.

  I am breaking through.

  I am emerging.

  *

  Glass shattering in reverse: pieces pulling together, the world rewound like an old audio recording: whup whup snup. Is that me coming back together, or the world?

  That was her. I saw her, the librarian.

  Zagreus lied to me. It wanted me to do the murders, yes, kill the banker, the alchemist, the artist and the librarian. It needed me to touch those cardinal points because it wanted to know something, to map the underlying universe. I was not sent back as an ally. I was a sacrifice. This entangling was my task.

  Hate. Hate without words. Hate like weather, like gravity, like the Higgs field. My hate. I think of orange wine. Even now, somewhere, someone is treading the grapes for that glass. I can taste it, in the future, crisp and deep. For a moment, a wasp hovers over the glass, then drifts away. Sunlight hits the neck of the bottle and shines through on to a white tablecloth. Goodbye, Zagreus. The prison universe makes a noise like an indrawn breath as it vanishes.

  And yet: the Chamber was a trap; the cardinals a snare. Zagreus put me into it and I am doing what I was sent to do. In me, the disparate worlds of the cardinals are united, tied together. In me, the fragments of the map are rolled up into one, even as I am torn apart. Fair trade.

  But Zagreus did not set the trap, could not unset it without me. Thus: for whom was it intended?

  Where am I now?

  I’m in a chair. Someone put me back together, I remember that. I don’t know who. Someone. It was far away and long ago, and I don’t think she was happy about it.

  It’s a comfortable enough chair, though designed for someone with a shorter spine than this instance possesses, with the consequence that my head is lolling back and my throat feels very exposed. Under my hands I find carved wood, very chichi and retrograde, very artisanal. I let the nerves on my fingers tell me about the grain. There are little pocks in the varnish – oh yes: an old parasitic infestation, dry and dusty apertures burrowed in the substrate. Wormholes, in fact.

  My senses are now telling me the same things they always have, but the route those signals travel is rather apparently different from what it was, and if I pay attention I can hear a kind of Dopplering as they go and come back. My brain hasn’t entirely adjusted to the shift in functional synchrony, so there’s an echo inside me, a susurrus of disconnected conversation: this moment, a few moments before, yesterday. I can feel myself acclimatising, weeding out what is irrelevant, discarding duplication. The brain, individually or in a network, is very good at taking on new feeds. As I do there’s a weird side benefit, a sort of apotheotic déjà vu: part of me really does already know the answers to my questions, because it lives in a place where I’ve already heard them. Sometimes, as I sit very still, information reaches me from the future before I uncover it in the present. I am literally getting ahead of myself.

  What do I know? I know that human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions. In between times, their positions and trajectories are indecipherable even to themselves. I know that in planets, such interactions are called conjunctions, and that Isaac Newton came upon the notion of gravity by the alchemy that is called the attraction of souls. I know that Albert Einstein proposed two persons hanging in space alone in a universe that contained nothing else, and observed that if one of them is spinning, there is no way to determine which. Everything depends upon its relationship to everything else for its meaning.

  For whom was the trap set? For me? It feels … too big.

  I know that the cardinals of the Chamber of Isis are tied to me and I to them, and in that connection is the heart of this. I know that Zagreus desires this end.

  I know that someone somewhere nearby is making courgette and manouri fritters – not badly, but not well. Someone else is playing music, and possibly having sex. At the same time? Or is there a convocation here, sex and strings? I know there’s damp in the building, old rot and new fungus between the stones in the cellar. There’s a mouse between my ceiling and the floor of the apartment above, but she thinks I haven’t heard her. Let it be. There’s a whispering of wheels, I think, or the wind in the lines of a sailing ship. A harbour? Or somewhere with bicycles? Carthage or Athens? I don’t smell Athens, nitrogen dioxide and particulates. I don’t smell animals in the street, either.

  I open my eyes. Outside my window I find London. A hundred cameras watch one another, lambent black fisheyes with infrared lashes.

  *

  I’ve never used this brain to move a body before. Proprioception is no less affected by my involuntary atemporal rewiring than anything else, so my muscles spasm quite out of order and I fall straight back into the chair. I try again, and again. After a dozen attempts I reach my feet, and I stand still. I turn my head all the way left, all the way right. I rock it. The head is a huge weight on the unstable equilibrium of the human frame. Control the head, and you may walk. Fail, and you will fall.

  Like a baby, I learn to control my head. Only faster, because I am a vast and ancient intelligence spread across ten thousand neural instances, and this is not my first re-education. That’s what I tell myself.

  I fall.

  I get up, and try again. Repeat and repeat. Falling hurts, but it feels like winning. Small pain, local pain, and results. I am a man learning to walk again after something happens to his spine. I am a woman teaching herself the function of her body after a tumour is removed from her head. I am balancing two halves of a severed brain.

  I fall. I get up. I try again.

  I learn to control my head.

  I clutch the wooden windowsill and feel the chill. London stares back at me through the glass. Beneath the sound of racing rickshaws, I can hear the whisper of lenses, idle cameras tracking ghosts in the falling rain.

  I move my arms, one by one and then together, feeling the core muscles in my gut, the lower back, the chest. When I stand, I feel my hips flex to carry the load. I feel my feet shift. When I am very, very sure, I take a step. I am a golem, a clay thing. I am robota. But I am in control.

  I step, and the action is smooth and strong.

  I walk very slowly around the room for an hour, and then I go outside and walk in the street. When I am startled, I feel strange: a kind of vertiginous tug back into black glass dark. Twice, I have to stop – once when a vehicle sprays water into the air and the pattern of light and refraction is so complex that I feel myself bubble and bloat in the wrong direction inside; and once when someone talks to me, loudly and suddenly. I turn and run away, and then I realise that I can run, and jump, and shout and sing.

  I run through the wet, black streets, and feel free. I get cold, run home, shower, sleep, and begin again. I eat food from the kitchen, sleep when I must. I don’t seem to need much sleep, which is good, because I am not sure where I go. I’m not sure I will come back. But I do.

  I practise writing by hand. It is good for coordination, for fine motor skills. It binds my thoughts to my fingers – long, white fingers, delicate and surprisingly strong. The familiar construction of Zagreus’s instance. My instance. And yet it has a place here. It is bound into the continuity of this place. Mystery is power. Magic is the invocation of names and powers that are unknown: the word ‘occult’ means simply ‘that which is hidden’.

  Mystery.

  I write ‘torn no longer’ over and over again on sheets of paper. I write left-handed. I use mirror-script. I bind the mind to the meat. I go outside and run again, and laugh. It rains almost every day, cold or warm. The world is alive and so am I. Regno Lönnrot – torn no longer. It all depends on your direction of travel.

  It
takes a week before I realise that the cameras never look at me. When I pass, they turn away. I play with them, flirt with them. They ignore me. They are determined that I not exist, and they make holes in the world for me not to be in.

  How deliciously fraught.

  I drink tea, invisibly. I pick pockets, burgle houses. I buy old books in dusty covers and inhale the scent of the past. Shand & Company, but who’s the company? A mirage, he says. A convenient fiction to inhabit.

  I listen to music. So much music, new and old and strange. I do not understand music at all. Stories I understand, but the language of music is opaque to me. Then I sit in an old pumping station by the river and listen as a man weaves the two together: old Bach and his battle with Frederick. How marvellous. And the moreso, because Bach’s barbed riposte was so much more than just a skewering. To discover the composer’s answer, the king had to change his very identity, fill his mind with all the things Bach believed should be there. Rewriting his code.

  I test the limits of their indulgence and cannot find them. My white skin smirks at me from shop glass, from the windows of houses and the metal glaze of vehicles, but never, ever, ever in the lenses that are everywhere. Never, not ever, ever.

  But the people: the people know me. They have met me before – or rather, they think they have. There’s a physical history here, too, which apparently belongs to someone, with books by the chair I woke up in, and very plain food, and music on a crank-handle turntable. So: was I here, in one of my scattered moments? I haven’t just swallowed someone, I don’t think, unless they were very small. Maybe, if they were barely alive at all – just going through the motions of thinking and feeling, putting on a good show. How close can a human get to empty automation?

  But it’s also possible that someone made this just for me: an easy landing. If they did, then I can tell you why.

  I walk and drink coffee and I smirk.

  On the last day of the second week, I find the librarian, a still image on the screen, a narrow woman talking about her.

  ‘The death of a suspect in custody,’ says poor, narrow Neith of the Witness, ‘is a very serious matter. There is no one at the Witness Programme who does not feel a sense of personal failure this morning.’