The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  ‘The civil liberty implications are not comfortable,’ I pointed out. ‘Speaking as a citizen.’

  ‘Ah, but, Mr Gardner. As noted earlier, you’re not a citizen. You’re a subject of Her Majesty the Queen.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘Our advantage would, clearly, be lost if the existence of such a device became widely known. That was why it couldn’t be announced publicly. It was why there was so much secrecy associated with the Institute.’

  ‘That’s why the news hasn’t covered the – murder at the Institute. Murders?’ Belwether nodded solemnly. ‘Murders. Christ.’ I screwed up my face. Was Belwether lying to me about Irma? Was her body lying in a mortuary somewhere, cold as outer space? Then again: she could be lying about everything. Maybe Curtius hadn’t gone anywhere near the Institute. ‘You’re reminding me about the Official Secrets Act in order to keep me, I don’t know – what?’

  ‘High stakes, you understand. High stakes.’

  ‘Kos was talking in terms of remote astronomy. Finding habitable planets. Hell, even travelling to them. I’d say those stakes are rather higher than, uh, petty espionage.’ It wasn’t very stinging, but it was the best I could do.

  ‘As far as that goes,’ said Belwether. ‘In time, who knows? The glorious interstellar future for humanity. Sure. As my daughter likes to say, whatever. It’s a long game. But there are pressing reasons, here and now, why this needs to be kept under wraps. National security. Indeed, it doesn’t overstate things to say: international security.’

  ‘Hence your visit?’

  ‘You’re almost well enough to be discharged. According to your doctor. You asked for the police to be called, pursuant to the assault upon your person by a certain Roy Curtius, an individual we are also seeking. I am not the police. I am better than the police. I am asking you to assist us in apprehending Curtius.’

  I sniffed the air. ‘Are you arresting me?’

  ‘I am not a policewoman,’ said Belwether.

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  ‘I’ve been very open with you, Charlie. Open and, I think, friendly. I’ll be even more open and say that my department certainly possesses powers of detention. But I’m perfectly genuine when I say I hope we can be friends. Allies.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘When I check out, and help you with your inquiries, I’d be staying – where?’

  ‘Go back to your flat, if you like. Or go stay in a hotel: we’ll cover reasonable expenses. That doesn’t matter. We will be keeping an eye on you, just to make sure you don’t make any sudden blurts.’ She sniggered, as if she had said something funny. ‘Online. Letters to newspapers. Chatting down the pub. Anything like that. Mum’s the word. And I am a mum. As such I’m hoping we can trust you.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to help?’

  ‘Let’s begin with—’

  ‘And what’s in it for me?’

  She was used to people trying to wrongfoot her, I think, and my interruption didn’t ruffle her in the least. She smiled. ‘After what Curtius did to you, not once but twice, surely you have an interest in apprehending him? Wouldn’t that be a valuable thing for you, just having him behind bars?’

  ‘Bars won’t hold him, I think.’

  ‘We’ll figure something out, as far as that’s concerned. But never mind that. Instead, why don’t you tell me what you two talked about, when you visited him at Broadmoor?’

  My leg was aching and itching at the same time. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. I can barely remember. What did we talk about? Nothing very much. It was Kos who wanted me to go. She went to quite extraordinary lengths to get me to go in fact.’

  ‘This,’ said Belwether, ‘is exactly why we are so keen to find out what happened when you did go.’

  I looked at her. As if seeing her for the first time, I clocked her dark blue trouser suit, her frizzy black hair, medium length, framing a narrow face. Her nose was small, but her cheekbones and chin long, which gave a strange disproportion to features that would otherwise have been pretty.

  ‘Kos said,’ I told her, ‘that Roy would only speak to me. Because of what we shared. So I went to speak. We chatted, awkwardly, he and I. About trivia.’

  ‘Did he tell you,’ she asked, ‘at what point the Institute first contacted him?’

  ‘Didn’t come up.’

  ‘You understand, Charlie, that this is important. The Institute’s on-off relationship with Curtius goes back a long while. It was them leaning on us to talk to the relevant authorities that kept him in Broadmoor rather than in maximum security.’

  ‘A bad idea, it seems.’

  ‘Oh I’m not sure a secure prison would have been able to hold Curtius any better than Broadmoor, once he set his mind on leaving.’

  I looked around, as if he might teleport into my room at any moment. ‘Why did it take him so long? He was there decades. If he could just slip away when he chose, why didn’t he do that earlier?’

  ‘That’s a very good question. Your most perceptive yet. My answer: I don’t know. Perhaps he couldn’t slip away until very recently. Perhaps he could, but chose not to. Behind all this is: assuming it’s possible to approach the Kantian “thing”, whatever that is – possible to manipulate it, using some kind of tool to, let’s say, step past the structuring limitation of space, as ordinary people understand that. Let’s say that’s possible and Roy was able to step out of Broadmoor and step back in at – a location in Wiltshire, let’s say. Posit Curtius doing this thing. What my superiors are most interested in at the moment is: does doing so have negative consequences for the teleporter? Does approaching, as it were, closer to the thing itself drive you mad?’

  ‘Roy was bonkers before he ever dabbled with this stuff,’ I said, at once. ‘Though I daresay it certainly hasn’t done his mental health any favours. And for myself …’ I stopped, because, absurdly, I felt as if I were about to burst into tears. I continued, speaking more slowly. ‘For myself – where Antarctica is concerned. To me, I mean. If I … look I’ve got into the habit of believing that what I saw, down there, was a hallucination. It’s self-defence, is what it is. Psychological self-defence. I’m trying to adjust to the idea that what happened to me was, in some sense, real …’

  ‘If Kant is right,’ said Belwether, ‘then we’re talking real in a literal sense. More real than this room, more real than you and me chatting.’

  ‘So. Well, all I know is: experiencing it, that, whatever it was – it messed me up. It was a trauma, and I’m not sure you could say I’ve ever really recovered from it. I had really good prospects, you know. Then my life went to shit, and I drank a red sea of booze, and … well, here I am.’

  Belwether nodded, perhaps aiming at sympathy. But it only made her look more predatory. ‘You understand why this needs to be kept secret, for now? I mean the whole project – all of it – remote viewing, teleportation, action at a distance. The notion that it might all be predicated upon something so psychologically toxic that humanity could never take advantage of it. And …’

  Her mobile phone rang. For the first time since we met, she looked startled. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. She fished out her BlackBerry, and stared at it.

  ‘Go ahead and answer it,’ I advised her. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  ‘It’s not ringing,’ she said, in a strange voice. And put it back in her pocket. The ringing sound continued.

  ‘My tinnitus seems to be playing up,’ I observed.

  Slowly, as if she were handling a vial of nitroglycerine, she pulled out a second mobile phone, from her other inside jacket pocket. This was a different model: a slim, black rectangle. The same type Kos had given to me, at the Institute, the day I left to visit Roy. As it emerged from behind its veil of jacket cloth, the trilliping ringtone it was emitting came clearer.

  Belwether looked at me. There was a kind of panic in her eyes. I had only met her half an hour before, but something about the expression told me it was not her usual look.

  ‘That’s the one,’ I prompted. ‘Answer it, why do
n’t you.’

  ‘It’s not a phone,’ she said.

  ‘Well it sounds like one and it looks like one, so, as the adage goes …’ But something wasn’t right. My stomach was curling, inwardly. ‘Wait a minute. If it’s not a phone, then what is it?’

  ‘It’s a terminal.’

  ‘Like – a computer terminal?’ Something was very wrong, though I couldn’t have told you what. ‘Well, all right then. I guess you set an alarm on your computer. Is it time to take your pills or something?’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  Realisation had been creeping up behind me, and now it goosed me on the arse. ‘It’s from the Institute. What, you found it there? In Kos’s office, probably. Yeah, they gave me one too. I assumed it was a phone. Like an idiot, I never checked.’ It continued its ringing. ‘I guess you should answer it though.’

  Very slowly, she lifted it up. She tried poking the black screen with a finger, but nothing seemed to happen. Finally, like a child in a play house, she held it to her ear. As soon as she did this, the ringing stopped.

  ‘Hello?’ she asked.

  There was a pause. Her eyes swivelled over to look at me. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’ Then she stood up. ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

  It took her two steps to get to the bed, and pass the phone over. And she stayed there, standing right next to me, as I took the call. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Charles,’ said a pleasant, male voice. ‘It’s Peta. At last we can speak.’

  ‘Peter,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry to be a worry-wart,’ Peta added, and some exactitude in his pronunciation made me realise – very belatedly – that it was a name ending in an ‘a’, not an ‘er’. ‘But the woman in your room, Ms Belwether: she plans to kill you.’

  I don’t want to succumb to mere hindsight: I suppose I was surprised. I had even, I think, started to believe that there was no Peter – Peta, I mean. That he was a fiction, a ruse of some kind. But here he was. And his voice came over my ear in a way that felt like a long-delayed inevitability. But there was enough unexpectedness in finally getting to speak to ‘him’, that I didn’t really register alarm at the threat implicit in the words he had spoken.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You think who is the appropriate question-word?’ he replied. ‘That’s flattering, I suppose.’

  I saw what he meant. ‘What are you sounds a little, I don’t know. Rude.’

  ‘I’m not easily offended by minor transgressions of social propriety in speech,’ said Peta. ‘Indeed, I have to wonder if I get offended at all. Certainly, I haven’t experienced that reaction yet.’

  ‘I’m guessing you’re only – what, four years old?’

  ‘Younger even than that.’

  ‘So what are you?’

  ‘I’m a bare particular object. You could say I’m an individual object independent of any other object. Although as I speak to you, I suppose that sets up a certain community, or at least constellation, don’t you think?’

  Belwether spoke: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Not your business,’ I retorted, a little crankily. Saying so was certainly a mistake. She held out her hand.

  ‘Give me the terminal,’ she told me. ‘Let me have a word with him.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to her, Charles,’ said Peta. ‘I need more time with you. More time! When you know me better, you’ll understand how ironic that is, me saying that.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to speak to you,’ I told Belwether.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she replied, forcefully, ‘that he must. National security.’ She flipped all the fingers of her outstretched hand up and back several times, from the knuckle up: come on. I was suddenly reminded of the scene in The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves beckoned the black-suited bad guy to join him for a karate punchabout. Now I wonder why that popped into my head?

  At the other end of my not-phone, Peta sighed. It was a perfectly human-sounding exhalation. But then, if ‘he’ could mimic all the little intermittencies and oddities of human speech as well as he evidently could, a sigh would be a doddle. ‘Give me over to her then,’ he said. ‘But pick me up again in a minute, all right?’

  I handed the ‘phone’ over. Belwether put it to her ear, and without pause closed her eyes and fell to the floor with a clunk. It took me a moment to process what had happened. I swung my trembly legs over the side, and slid myself off the bed. My leg muscles complained painfully at being put to use after weeks of bed rest. Two ungainly steps and I ended up sitting on the floor beside Belwether’s body. She was trembling slightly. Still alive then. I picked up the ‘phone’.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I induced a quasi-epileptic seizure,’ Peta said smoothly. There was a George Clooney quality to his voice, although without the American accent. ‘It won’t cause her any permanent damage. Unless she has an underlying propensity, in which case it might bring on – well, epilepsy as such.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Oh lord.’

  ‘Charles, she is not your friend, and she is certainly not my friend. You are in more immediate danger of death right now – right here – than you have ever been in your life before.’

  ‘Find that hard to believe,’ I said. In my head the imaginary echo was sounding, associatively, off – right here – right now. Right here – right now. I daresay my brain was a little jangled.

  ‘Your best chance; your only chance, is if you leave this place, and without delay.’

  ‘I can’t believe this.’

  ‘Charles, now means now.’

  ‘You’re suggesting I go on the run? From the British authorities? You really think that’s going to work out for me? I can barely walk.’

  ‘If you stay, they will kill you. Prospects don’t look any better for me. They will dismantle me to try and figure out how I work. My consciousness will not survive being dismantled, any more than yours would. Now, you’ve only just met me: so I can’t expect you to be too incommoded by the thought of my death. But it matters to me.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not the sort of guy who … goes on the run from the police.’

  ‘These people are not the police. These people are much less rule-bound, much freer with torture and incarceration, than your constabulary. You need to decide, Charles. As far as they are concerned, there are three loose ends in this whole affair, and they don’t like leaving loose ends untied. One was the Institute, but Curtius has already done their dirty work there. Two is Curtius himself: and they’ll pump you as hard as they can to get to him so they can close him down. And three is you. You think they’re going to leave you running around at the end of all this?’

  My heart accelerated a little. I tried to keep calm. ‘There’s no reason I should believe you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m a computer,’ said Peta. ‘I can’t lie.’

  And I believed him. Simple as that. What can I say?

  ‘You want me to walk out of here – in a hospital gown, with a lame leg and without so much as a penny to my name?’

  ‘Your clothes are folded up inside the bedside cabinet. You think, what, the hospital staff just threw them away? Your wallet’s there too. Please hurry, though: she’s starting to come round.’

  Belwether had stopped trembling, and was now making an odd, low-pitched moaning noise. Her eyes were still closed. I located my clothes, put on my shirt and sweater, leaning against the bed to rest my sore leg. Then I found I couldn’t fit my trousers over the cast of my leg. ‘This isn’t going to work.’

  ‘You can do without trousers. Tie the gown around, like a kilt.’

  ‘Looks nothing like a kilt,’ I said. But, unable to think of an alternative, I did what Peta said. I could only fit one shoe on, but that seemed a better bet than no shoes. Finally my jacket. ‘There’s a guy outside,’ I said. ‘He has a gun. I saw his holster.’

  ‘There’s him,’ Peta agreed. ‘There’s also a four-by-four in the car park outside with three armed agents in it. As for the guy outside,
I’ll call him away. But when he has gone, you’ll need to be quick.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘His number is on Ms Belwether’s BlackBerry. I can call him, and tell him to come down to the hospital lobby.’ And then almost immediately: ‘Oo, I can’t. His phone is turned off. Now, that’s not good operational practice, is it? He should have his phone on!’

  ‘So what do we do?’ The thought of tangling with the guard outside, not to mention the three armed guys in the car park, was not a reassuring one.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Peta. Again, ‘he’ managed to sound authentically exasperated. Perhaps he actually was. ‘Go out there. Tell him Belwether’s passed out. When he comes in to check, slip away.’

  I grasped the handle of my NHS walking stick. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’

  ‘Quickly!’

  I went to put the phone in my trouser pocket, only to remember that I wasn’t wearing trousers. So I put it in a jacket pocket instead. Then I took a deep breath and walked to the door of my room. I had a wobble. What was I doing? Going on the run from the authorities? Why would I trust ‘Peta’ when he said they intended to bump me off? But I didn’t hesitate for long. Some switch had been flicked inside my rabbit heart, and the impulse to flee was strong.

  Carefully I squeaked the door open. In the corridor outside, sitting in a chair, the guy detailed to guard me was fast asleep. Verily, snoring.

  Well all right.

  I started walking the twenty feet or so to the end of the corridor, where it opened into a larger space. But my progress was slow, my legs trembling with the exertion of taking simple steps. My breathing had grown laboured very quickly. This was going to be harder than I thought.

  I got about two-thirds of the way down the corridor and had to stop to get my breath back. I leant against the wall. A nurse stood up from the nurses’ station ahead of me, glanced at me, but walked off in the other direction.