The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  She cut herself. The nostalgia was intense.

  As the days went by, she took to looking over her shoulder to make sure the shadow was there. No one in these streets knew how it felt to be the princess, the nameless, hating, terrified thing whose shell had been broken open. Only the shadow knew everything. But now when she looked she could hardly see anything: only a faint blur.

  She became a clerk in an office. It was a big step up, for she had started off with no employment skills whatsoever and a horrendous secret. Her immediate boss was a large elderly lady with persnickety ways that didn’t seem to fit her size. She was a dragon to the rest of the staff, but to the princess she became as much a friend as a princess like Jennifer could bear. “What I like about you, Jennifer,” she said — one evening when they were finishing up and alone in the office — “is that you’ve never let anyone knock the corners off you.”

  “There’s corners and corners,” smiled the princess (she could smile now, quite convincingly). She tugged at the long wool sleeves of her dress. “A lot of people don’t like the way my shadow falls, it gets on their nerves.”

  “Shadow?” remarked the older woman, mystified. “What shadow? You’ve none in here, my dear.”

  The princess touched whole skin through the wool, and recalled that she hadn’t cut herself for weeks. The last time, she’d had to stop because it was hurting too much. She looked, and it was true. She had no shadow.

  She hurried through the crowds, crying in the street. She was making a fool of herself, behaving like a madwoman; she didn’t care. She was alone again in the tower.

  “I must get back!” she cried.

  She didn’t know where she had to get back to, but as she cried out, the busy street disappeared. She was in the magician’s garden. The glass stood on the lawn, and in another moment the magician was looking out of it.

  “As I was saying,” he remarked. “If you start to like the arrangement, you must come back and see me. You are looking well, princess.”

  The cut-out figure of the thief was still standing there. Rayfe was back inside. His eyes were agonized: a human being compressed into two dimensions and screaming silently.

  “Let him go!” she yelled at the magician.

  “Only you can do that.”

  “I don’t understand,” snarled the princess.

  The magician’s robes, embroidered with shining mystic signs, billowed like dark and glittering smoke. He smiled.

  The princess turned to Ralph and shouted. “You can go! You’re not committed to anything!”

  Ralph was crying. The princess remembered that she used to believe tears were like an explosion: humiliating and horrible as pissing yourself in public. The thief’s mouth was wide and turned down at the corners; his eyes were wet. But the cafe was noisy anyway. No one stared.

  “This is the end of the arrangement. Your money’s in a bank account, I haven’t spent it for months. Fuck it, you don’t need me to cover your tracks and check up on you. You’re perfectly competent. I’m the one that’s the burden. I want you to give your address to your parents, I want you to get a divorce.”

  “My child.” said the magician in the glass. “I must ask an impertinent question. Do you love this worthless creature?”

  The princess glowered impatiently. “He was with me. You don’t know what he knows. He was always there. How could I not…?”

  She didn’t say the word. It closed up her throat even to think it.

  “Indeed. Fire burns if you put your hand on the stove, even if you don’t believe in fire. Water drowns if you fall into it and can’t swim, even if you don’t believe in water. So love in substance is love in fact. He has stuck by you, because he couldn’t help it, because, pitifully, you were the best thing that ever happened to him. What do you call that feeling, in the world you invented?”

  “So let us go!”

  “I will, there’s just a little test. Stand back.”

  Jennifer was talking to the voices she heard in her head. She still did that; but she knew she was doing it, which made the difference. She didn’t need a keeper. Ralph knew that this was the last stand. The mad princess was at her last gasp. Jennifer would walk away from this meeting alone and Ralph suspected what his life would be like, after today. He couldn’t think of it. He wasn’t brave enough. He wanted to stay forever in this steamy cafe, with this crazy woman; neither of them anywhere else to go.

  The magician’s staff described a circle in the air. Where it had passed, a white line stayed. The circle enclosed nothing. It was the ultimate abyss. Up to the white line ran springy tailored turf; beyond its rim, a blank. No grass, no air, no light, no dark, no space. There was absolutely nothing there.

  “Now then, Rayfe.”

  The thief fell forward, stumbling and rubbing his arms. He hadn’t been following the conversation. Ralph had never got the hang of magical conversations.

  “I jump into the abyss, and she goes free?”

  The magician looked doubtful. “Let me explain. I am what they call a natural philosopher. If you had studied your books, instead of stealing the knowledge out of them, you would know that a natural philosopher is bound to set tests for the world, and to test most unmercifully the things that he most values. Does love exist? I do not know. But I know that if it were to exist it could have no limits. It could not have a beginning, or an end. There could not be a place where love was not, or a time when love had not been. If the princess’s love for you exists, you will pass through my circle without harm.” The magician smirked, with every appearance of arrogant malice. “As long as your love has always been real. As long as the princess loved you the moment she saw you. Step through, young man. Try your luck.”

  Ralph watched the crazy princess, hopelessly.

  “I don’t know what’s going on in the story now, Jennifer. I’m leaving because I’ve somehow grown some self-respect, and I can’t stand to hang around a smart-looking lady who doesn’t need me or want me. You can tell the elder magician thanks from Ralph. Yes, it must have been love at first sight — in the only, twisted way I could fall in love. Need is close to love, and when you’re really needy it’s the best you can do. I just wish I could wipe out the first part. I despised you for being crazy; it was like despising myself. And you hated me. I wish I could lose that bit.”

  “It was like hating myself. Step through.”

  “If this gets you free, to a normal life —”

  Rayfe stepped through, into the utter abyss. He was standing on firm green turf. The magician in the mirror looked smug. The thief was impressed. He had never dreamed of stealing a whole cosmos.

  Ralph looked at Jennifer’s hands. They were holding his. She had never touched him before, except when she was trying to kill him. To his almost certain knowledge she’d never touched anyone of her own free, conscious will, in her whole life. The world turned upside down and righted itself: totally different, exactly as it had always been.

  “There is no door that shuts behind us,” said the princess.

  The elder magician vanished from the glass, the glass vanished too. Jennifer no longer needed to regard the part of herself that she respected as a separate person, nor did she need to call the part of herself with power male. “The past changes constantly: it is something we invent from moment to moment. The thinking thing that is the only reality detested you then.” She shrugged. “Time isn’t real. It loved you now. If love is, it always was. If it has a start, then as soon as it starts, immediately it always was. That’s the circle of protection. It works even for the most worthless.”

  The green turf was the grass of the meadow. The road where the wedding car had disappeared was wider and less dusty than it had been. The trees beside it had grown in girth, and some of them had been chopped down to make room for new houses. The princess and the thief walked out of the meadow and into the noisy cafe. It closed around them.

  There would be no more Grimm fairytale illustrations in their story. Neither of them wa
s quite capable of dealing with normal life, and they weren’t even young anymore. They might well end up in cardboard city no matter how hard they tried; but they would be together. They held hands and set off down the road — to live happily ever after in the land where love is beyond reach of doubt.

  June 1993

  Identifying the Object

  Tunguska: In June 1908, there was an extraordinary explosion somewhere in or over Siberia. That night in London you could read a newspaper by the light of the fireball. There were no consequences. The location of the crater was not even determined until twenty years later, after the intervention of a World War and a revolution. But in our time we are ready for Tunguska. It can happen to us immediately. We have the technology. We have the anticipation: what they call in my country the longing, the hiraeth. I am a freelance journalist. My name is Anna Jones Morgan Davis. I begged, argued, lied, pleaded for two days and nights solid after I found out about the expedition to the site. I left home possessed by one iron determination: to be there when the object was identified.

  The transit lounge of the desert airport was a breeze block garage with glass doors and a sand scoured wooden floor. Johnny Guglioli and I were pursued there by a skinny and very dark little man in a khaki uniform too heavy for the climate. Whenever he managed to catch Johnny’s eye he hissed softly and made a wistful, obscene gesture: rubbing his thumb against two fingers. A broken digital clock hung as if half strangled from an exposed cable above the shuttered coffee bar. A single monitor screen, fixed to one of the concrete roof beams, showed the quivering green word Departures, and nothing more. Parties of Africans sat about the floor. I hadn’t had a chance to change into protective disguise, so the men reacted instantly to my appearance.

  In one of the rows of seats a lone white woman traveler lay sleeping, stretched above her battered flight bag along three black plastic spoon-shapes. A cracked panama had slipped from her sun-browned face.

  Johnny and I were in trouble. Johnny was American, but had come back from somewhere to London for the trip. For our separate reasons we’d missed the first leg of the official journey. We had expected to join the expedition here, for a special charter to the capital of the country that lay to the south. Our destination was in there somewhere, beyond the desert and the great river. But we had missed the plane. Perhaps we had missed the plane… The real trouble was that Johnny would not bribe, because bribery and corruption were the root causes of so much of Africa’s misery.

  The hall was devoid of information sources. The little man, whose hissing and hovering was making Johnny look like a girl alone at a late night bus stop, had already told us what he was going to tell.

  “I’ll ask one of the women,” I said.

  But the woman I chose spoke no French or English or didn’t want to get involved. Faces around her gazed stonily out of the archipelago of dark robes and peeping finery. A woman made an unintelligible comment in a tone of deep contempt: the natives were hostile.

  We tried to remain calm.

  Johnny stretched and pressed his hands behind his head, raising the fan of eel-brown hair that was overheating his neck. He looked, momentarily, like a hostage getting ready to be shot.

  “Embarkation for Planet X: colonist class. Isn’t it weird how these places always manage to make you believe there’s no air outside? That’s futurism for you, comes from the cultural phase our world was in when the standard concept of ‘airport’ was laid down. I mean, look at those chairs —”

  “I suppose they might be more comfortable in a lower gravity.”

  I had bumped into Johnny by chance at Gatwick. Our paths had crossed several times before, in our small world; and we’d always enjoyed each other’s company. Johnny Guglioli was a young American (US citizen I mean) of a highly recognizable type: shrewd, naive, well-informed, and passionate about the world’s ills and the possibility of curing them. His writing had a strangeness that worried people a little, even after it had been toned down by his editors, and his selfless arrogance infuriated many. But I respected Johnny; he could be absurdly didactic, but loud or brash, his eyes never lost the uneasiness of those infants of the Promised Land, good Americans, who have woken up and found themselves — well, here, in the real world, where the rest of us live.

  For that bruised puzzlement in the face of what people call normality I could forgive him a good deal. I could forgive him — almost — this disaster.

  In any more hopeful location I’d have walked out of the airport and found myself a bus. But there was nothing outside the dusty glass doors, in the place where Johnny said we couldn’t breathe: only a few dead thorn bushes, the red track from the airport building, and an endless waste of sand.

  Aircon fans roared in a mind-deadening way and without any noticeable effect on the heat. I wondered how many of the Africans here had been awake that night. I wished I knew how the hell to deal with Johnny, whose button black eyes had gone blank with stubborn virtue…though it would break his heart to miss this gig. I was tortured by the suspicion that somewhere close there was a VIP lounge where the rest of the expedition were sipping cold drinks.

  “Shall we try the Virgin desk again?”

  The lone white woman sat up, yawned, and said, “Oh, hallo Anna. So you’re in this too? How are the kids?” She smiled dazzlingly. “I suppose you’re another Snark hunter?”

  I hadn’t recognized her. Awake, her face shed years, its expert makeup lighting up like magic.

  “Johnny Guglioli,” I said. “Braemar Wilson.”

  And took a mental step backwards. The smile was clearly meant for Johnny alone. I’d known Brae for a long time, known her before she adopted that nom de guerre. The last time I’d seen her in an airport her heels had been sky high. Her dewy complexion had never seen the sun, and apart from the essential smart briefcase, her luggage was none of her business. But she was equally immaculate in this role. Wherever did she get those shorts? They were perfect.

  “Braemar Wilson as in the pop-socs?”

  “The same. Though I’m almost ashamed to admit it, in such company. I’ve read your work, Johnny. If I told you how much I admire you, I’d sound like a groupie.”

  It was the name, she’d once told me, on the gate of the miserable little house she’d been renting after her divorce. Some redundant housewives start up phone-a-birthday-cake businesses. Mrs. Wilson had become, in a very few years, a household name in the infotainment market. Her girlish deprecation irritated me. She had no reason to defer to young Johnny. The ground she covered was hack, but not the treatment.

  “Hell no!” cried Johnny. “I want to be the groupie. That ‘Death and the Human Family’ thing! It was terrific!”

  There was a break for mutually appraising laughter — in which Brae warned me, by withholding eye contact, not to presume on our long acquaintance in any way. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

  “Maybe you can tell us what’s going on.” Johnny affected a casual tone. “Did we really miss our ride, or are these guys just teasing?”

  “Oh, it’s gone all right. A late change; I feel less paranoid now I know you two didn’t get the news either.” She examined us. “What’s the problem? You transferred to the scheduled flight, didn’t you? Or what are you doing in here?”

  Johnny’s lightly tan-screened face turned brick color.

  “The flight’s full. We’re fucking grounded.”

  Braemar looked at our little man, who was still making his obscene gesture. She enveloped the whole situation in a smile so tender and so knowing that Johnny had to ignore it. “What’s my reward, Johnny, if I get you back on stream?”

  Having ignored the smile he was able to laugh: to groan with theatrical sincerity. “Name it! My life is yours to command!”

  So that’s how it’s done, I thought.

  She never asked us for money, then or later. She simply took our coupons away and brought them back turned into boarding passes. I have no idea how Johnny imagined that this was achieved, or if he was j
ust plain faking too.

  The hotel was a huge tower, a landmark of the French-planned city center. The taxi driver had called it “l’Iceber’’: it looked as far out of place and as rotten as might be expected at this latitude. We could see from the outside whole swathes of yellow-stained decay, sinister great fissures in the white slabs, broken windows.

  There was no phone and no drinking water in my room so I had to come down again. I found the coffee shop and bought a bottle of local beer. There was no one about. Brae and Johnny were maybe sleeping, maybe (I surmised grumpily) improving their acquaintance somewhere. The rest of our gang was on a sightseeing tour, and there seemed to be no other guests. Miraculously, I got through to Wales on a card phone in the lobby. Unfortunately it wasn’t my husband or my wife who picked up the handset. It was Jacko, Sybil’s child but my darling.

  “Is Daddy there, Jacky? Or your Mummy? Go and fetch someone, sweetheart.”

  “Mummyanna —” He sighed heavily, and broke the connection. I couldn’t get through again.

  Outside in the desolate boulevard young women sat selling vegetables. In front of one of them three tiny aubergines lay in the dust, another had a withered pimento and a bunch of weeds. There were no customers. Africa looked like a dead insect: a carcass sucked dry and blown away by the wind. It was too late. No one would ever know what city might have stood here: alien to me, efficient, rich in the storied culture of a bloody and complex past.

  People come to my country to see the castles.

  In my business I am always dealing with the forward-echo, that phenomenon that is supposedly forbidden in our continuum. But things do affect the world before they happen, I know it. I’m always piecing together footage that is significant because of some event further down the line. I was caught in one of those moments now. Because I couldn’t talk to my family, it seemed as if the world was about to end. I wished Johnny and I had stayed back in the desert, trying to do right.