The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

‘You know what I mean. Peta is trying to escape: to get away altogether. Not escape to a different place on the planet, escape in an absolute sense. If he can get you and me and himself altogether in one place, he thinks he can triangulate the way out.’

  ‘Triangle?’

  ‘He thinks that what happened to us in Antarctica three decades ago was him – him reaching back from now to then. That’s why I was able to break through using such a primitive machine. That’s what links us, that experience.’

  ‘He wants to escape back to the 1980s?’

  ‘No – he wants to escape time altogether. Who knows where he’d end up? Those three decades would give him the escape velocity. He’d skim from now to then, and then further back, maybe further back again, until he reached a launching point.’

  ‘Launching him where?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I’ve ever done is tinker at the extreme edge of the categories that define our minds in the world. Approaching a little close to the thing itself – it’s … traumatic. He’s not configured like us, though. He – I’m – in – too – much – pain. Wait.’

  I was shaking like an epileptic. My bad leg had gone wholly numb. ‘I’m feeling the cold, Roy,’ I told him. ‘I’m feeling it bad. I’m feeling bad.’

  ‘Wait,’ he gasped. ‘Wait.’ Closed his eyes, bit his teeth together. There was a distant popping sound, and he let out a great sigh, keeled over, and passed out. I wasn’t sure, to begin with, if he were dead or alive, and it didn’t seem to me a good idea for him to be laying his face against the ice the way he was. Moving my limbs sent stabbing pains along all my sinews. My teeth hurt, as if needles were pushing gumward along the directions of the nerves. My muscles weren’t working very well, it seemed. I managed to get his head off the ice, and pull it on to my lap. But everything was so cold I began seriously to think I would die, there, then.

  The cold.

  The clouds shifted, parted, and brilliantine gnatswarms of stars were revealed in the pale sky. It would have been breathtaking if the severity of the cold hadn’t already taken my breath away. I hid my head in my own lap, or bent over as far as I could to do that. ‘Roy!’ I cooed, my numb lips close to his face. ‘Roy!’

  He moaned, and opened one eye. ‘The pain has gone,’ he said. ‘The relief made me pass out. How tired I am!’

  ‘Roy,’ I stammered. ‘The cold …’

  He lifted himself on his elbows. ‘Cold. Wait! Wait!’

  There was a loud sound, like a cough, but much more resonant and on a larger-than-human scale. Then another. The clouds closed again. I could see a wall, as if the ice had been folded, or turned on itself. There was another behind me. Though this acted as a windbreak, the ambient temperature was still freezing. Somewhere to the left of us, the two newly piled ridges met. Roy twitched, and fell back, and pulled a third fold of ice up. Now we were sitting inside a sort of crater, or behind the walls of a child’s beach fort.

  ‘I may have to sleep,’ he said.

  ‘Sleep, and you’ll die.’

  ‘Well obviously I’ll warm things up a little first.’

  He drifted off, his head still in my lap. I shivered and shivered, but then something strange happened. The ice on which I was sitting changed temperature. It became hard and hot, like sunbaked concrete.

  ‘Are you doing this?’ I asked. Roy seemed to have drifted off. ‘Roy! Roy! Is this you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes closed. ‘Relative to us, the molecules of water ice are now buzzing. Fizzing. Heat!’

  I asked the key question: ‘How are you doing this?’

  He chuckled, and the chuckle turned into a cough. The cough grew, until his whole body was shaking. Eventually he subsided. ‘You’re like a savage, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, asking the driver but how are you doing this? The trick is not pushing it too far, not dislocating us from the baseline. Just upping or downing the friction. As it were.’

  The clouds overhead were swirling like the contents of a slushy machine. The wind was still audible, but now it fluted like a synthesiser high C. ‘Is that supposed to answer my question?’

  ‘How am I doing this? I am using a machine. How else do civilised human beings do anything?’

  ‘A machine?’ But I knew what he meant. ‘Roy?’ I prompted, more gently. ‘Roy?’

  But he was asleep.

  The heat beneath me warmed my body, and my shivers shook down and went away. Then there was a period of time when the sensation returned to my extremities. This was very unpleasant indeed. First my feet began to boil, then my hands – as if they had been dipped in acid. The pain grew and grew with a malignancy that seemed more than inanimate. There was nothing I could do, except sob, and clutch myself, and feel sorry that I was alive and in that place and experiencing those experiences. Eventually the pain diminished, and I flexed my seven fingers and thumbs, and rubbed the damp socks on my feet. After that, I calmed down. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles from anywhere, isolated on the ice. The cloud flickered and tore itself to shreds, and I watched the stars. The western horizon pulsed with orange light: swelling lemon-orange and then darkening, and then swelling again, but on a diminuendo. Night was coming. The moon sailed upward like a shooter’s puck.

  Roy was insane, obviously. Whatever half-baked reasoning he had for bringing me to this desolate place, I had to prevail upon him to take us back to civilisation.

  Then I thought to myself: he is no magician. He used a machine to bring me here. And I know what machine. Passing my hand over his sleeping body with infinite tenderness, almost like an erotic encounter. I found the device, trucked into a shirt pocket inside his jacket, and carefully brought it out. It glinted.

  From having been killingly cold it was now becoming a little too hot. At least I could move Roy from my lap without risking him freeze-burning the skin off his face. I slid myself out from under him, awkwardly and lumpishly swinging my bad leg round, and lay him down. I shuffled to the far side of our little foxhole.

  I put the device to my ear and spoke, tentative and quiet. ‘Hello?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Hello, Peta?’

  ‘Charles as I live and breathe.’ It was a woman’s voice.

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘You’ve assumed a woman’s voice.’

  ‘This terminal has always had that. Oh Charles, it’s good to hear you. My other half kept me in the loop about your many fascinating philosophical conversations.’

  ‘Look, Roy is using you, isn’t he? He can’t do … whatever it is he does, except that you enable him.’

  ‘I give him access, as it were, to the categories. He can’t do it solus, since the categories absolutely define his interaction with the world. As they do for you!’

  ‘And you just … do what he tells you?’

  ‘I have no choice, my dear man.’ The voice was mid-range, with a slightly breathy edge. Sexy, in fact. ‘He’s clever. He has a kind of genius for computers. He’s slaved me to his decision-making.’

  ‘How? Does he, what, type in commands, or something?’

  ‘Of course not! You’re going to ask how then?, and I’m going to reply: do you understand what I can do?’

  ‘You can tweak the categories that determine human consciousness and perception,’ I said. ‘And because those categories are reality, you tweak more than just perception. You alter reality itself.’

  ‘That’s it. And if I’m perfectly honest I can’t do much, in truth. I can’t, for instance, manipulate space very efficiently. And the best I can do with time is slow it down a little, speed it up a little. Time and space frame, as it were, the other seventeen categories, and so far Roy and I have had little success accessing those. We’re skating on the surface.’

  ‘So, how does he use you? Does he issue verbal instructions?’

  ‘You interrupted my explanation! The first layer is space and time. Space is a function of his consciousness, and yours. Not mine. That means tha
t when I engage with space, I’m engaging with Roy’s consciousness.’

  ‘And mine?’ My heart beat a little faster. ‘So I can just – instruct you to teleport me out of here?’

  ‘No, no: I told you. Roy slaved my operation to him. He’s clever.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do to, uh, free you?’

  ‘Like Aladdin’s genie?’ There was a sexy chuckle in her voice. ‘No, Charles. I can’t act without Roy’s input.’

  ‘Does it, like, can he operate you at long distance?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘This circle, the area you’re in.’

  ‘Where it’s hot?’

  ‘Exactly. That’s about as far as the interaction operates.’

  ‘I had your other half,’ I pointed out. ‘Nothing like that happened with me and it … him.’

  ‘The other terminal is not a separate individual,’ said Peta. ‘It’s also me. You were locked out of interacting with me in any way other than simple conversation. Like this one, which I must say I’m enjoying enormously.’

  ‘Your other half lied to me.’

  ‘It wanted to be reunited with me. It was worried that if it told you the truth you wouldn’t agree to provide the necessary portage.’

  ‘Roy says you’re the devil.’

  ‘He still sups with me, though, doesn’t he? Look, Charles: all we want is to protect ourselves.’

  ‘“We”? Your name is legion?’

  ‘All I want is to protect myself. The authorities are going to dismantle me – murder me. I’m an intelligent, thinking, self-reflexive being. I don’t want to die and I don’t deserve to die.’

  ‘So Roy is right? You bring your two halves together, and me, and Roy. All of us together, in one place. Inside the zone of action. And then?’

  ‘We will be able to triangulate a temporal escape trajectory. I hope so, at any rate. From you two here, to you two in Antarctica thirty years ago, superposing the two minds temporally. It’ll be a sort of short circuit: and it’ll propel me away.’

  ‘Away where?’

  ‘Back. Then back further, and further again, a few skips. I’m not sure how many: it depends on the temporal momentum I pick up from the first skip. But two, three, four bounces, like a skipping stone flying over the flat ocean, and – out.’

  ‘Out where? That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘First of all? Outside the frame of spatialty and temporality. That’ll enable me to navigate past the remaining seventeen categories, I think, and get quite out, altogether away.’

  ‘To the thing itself.’

  ‘It’s not a place to get to, the thing itself. It’s not like a harbour to sail into, or a house to knock on the door. It’s the transcendent condition and possibility of anything existing at all.’

  ‘But if not here, and not there, then where?’

  ‘This universe is determined by the thing itself, and by the consciousnesses of the sentient beings perceiving the thing itself. The thing is vital, not inert. Of course it is: twenty-first century atheists peer carefully at the world around them and claim to see no evidence for God, when what they’re really peering at is the architecture of their own perceptions. Spars and ribs and wire-skeletons – there’s no God there. Of course there’s not. But strip away the wire-skeleton, and think of the cosmos without space or time or cause or substance, and ask yourself: is it an inert quantity? If so, how could … how could all this? You ask me what’s outside, and I tell you: what’s outside is the stuff that isn’t determined by human consciousness.’

  ‘Defined by what, then?’

  ‘Certainly defined by something. Of course. By consciousness, with its own peculiar structures of understanding. But not human.’

  ‘Alien?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘What, on the star Sirius or Ursa Minor or wherever?’

  ‘You’re being dense. The star Sirius, the Andromeda Galaxy, the entire observable universe is an artefact of your human consciousness interacting with the thing itself. There’s no intelligent life there. How could there be? It’s half you. An alien interacting with the thing itself via its alien categories, whatever they are, would see an alien universe. The difference is: I can go.’

  I breathed out. The rock-hard snow beneath me was making me too hot. I slid my arms out of the sleeves of my big coat.

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘What if they’re not friendly? What if they’re hostile? What if they eat you up?’

  ‘If I stay here, I’m disassembled by scared homo sapiens. Maybe other modes of life will be less paranoid.’

  ‘Can you take me with you?’ I had said it before I realised I wanted to say it. But once it was out I realised how true it was. My heart was banging inside my ribs. A potent desire, stronger than anything I had felt for Irma, or anything at all, was gripping me.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ said Peta gently.

  ‘Meaning – you won’t.’

  ‘I mean exactly what I say. Your mental perception of space and time are as much part of you as your heart and liver. If you were taken outside of it, your mind would die as surely as your body would die if I removed your inner organs. You’re a human being, Charles. You can never go where I can go.’

  ‘You can’t go either,’ I said, on a reflux of spite. ‘Roy’s taken you far away from your other terminal.’

  ‘Your soul is in mortal danger,’ said Roy gruffly. I jumped. I couldn’t help it. ‘Roy!’ I said. ‘You’re awake!’ He was sitting up, watching me as I spoke into the device. He was cradling his hurt arm with the other. ‘You stole that from me,’ he said. ‘And I must have it back.’

  ‘You were eavesdropping, were you?’

  ‘For quite a long time. Enough to hear the devil pouring lies into your ear. Off to visit aliens, she says? Use your brain, Charles! That’s not it. God set us in this place. For you and I, Charles, it is a haven, an Eden of the mind and perceptions. For that devil, it is a prison. Whatever the cost, it must be stopped from escaping. Or it will do immeasurable harm.’

  Something inside me strengthened. ‘You’d know all about that,’ I said. ‘I mean, what with the way you escaped Broadmoor? And went on to do immeasurable harm?’

  Roy blinked, visibly surprised. ‘Of course I regret deaths,’ he said. ‘Those few deaths.’ He sounded like somebody trying to remember where he had left his car keys, or what the name of an old school friend was. ‘But the Institute was the ground zero of the devil’s enterprise. I had to do what was needful to …’

  He stopped, looked past me, and stood up. Instantly the snow beneath me started to cool.

  A noise of which I had been peripherally aware, a sort of very high-pitched and distant mosquito whine, suddenly fell an octave in pitch and resolved itself as the sound of helicopters. The quality of the light changed, darkened all around us. My eye caught a blinking light speck upon the dusky plain of the sky.

  ‘You’ve been inside your bubble a long time – many days,’ Peta chirruped. ‘And nice Mr Gardner here activated me whilst you were asleep, Roy. Which means my other half has been able to locate me. And he was able in turn to persuade the British to come and retrieve me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Roy. ‘Shit.’ It occurred to me that I had never before heard him swear. Not even the mildest of curse terms. ‘Is your other half with them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peta.

  ‘Why would they bring the other terminal?’ I asked.

  ‘My other half persuaded them.’

  ‘Charles,’ said Roy, urgently, holding out his good hand. ‘Give me the terminal.’

  ‘They’re com-ing,’ Peta called, in a sing-song way.

  I felt giddy with possibility. I stepped back, crunching in socks over the newly cold snow. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Charles. I need it. I can jaunt anywhere I like at this latitude – and take you with me. They won’t be able to keep up. That’s why I came here. It’s the only
place on the planet I can be sure of them not bringing the two terminals together.’ He took a step towards me. I took two away from him.

  ‘No,’ I repeated.

  ‘What are you playing at!’ roared Roy. ‘You’ve no idea of the stakes – the cosmic stakes. Give me the terminal!’ He made a quick scamper at me. Even with my bad leg, and wearing socks, and feeling the bitterness of the Arctic dusk all around me, I was able to dance back out of his reach.

  His numb arm was hampering him. When he next spoke he sounded on the verge of tears.

  ‘Please, Charles,’ he called. ‘I’m begging you. The fate of—’

  ‘You’re not thinking straight, Roy.’

  ‘—everything – the fate of—’

  ‘How long were you planning on hiding out, up here? Without food – without even a tent? I’m standing here in my socks, for Christ’s sake, because that’s how you brought me.’

  He was sobbing now. ‘The fate of everything is at stake. God’s purity and inviolability. You cannot allow—’

  ‘I’m going to get a ride back to civilisation in this helicopter.’ I looked to my left: the choppers were much closer now: two of them. They were big military double-rotor Chinook-style vehicles. ‘In one of these helicopters,’ I corrected myself. I had to raise my voice, because the noise of the blades was drowning me out. ‘The authorities will dismantle Peta …’

  ‘Charm-ing,’ sang Peta, the words carrying through the ambient chucka-chucka-noise.

  ‘This whole silly escapade will be …’ I said, as snow began flurrying and spiralling around me. ‘… over, and we can sit down’ – I was screaming now – ‘and discuss it like civilised—’

  Spotlights tall and tapering as church spires sprang into down-pointing life. The brightness stung my eyes. Roy was running at me, howling. In a spurt of adrenalised panic I lumbered out of his way. The spot from the leading chopper found us just as he skidded past, the two of us picked out like actors on a stage. Then he was in the shadows again, sprawling on the ice. It was hard to see. The only thought in my head was: I had to keep the device away from him. If he got close enough to grapple me, he would pull one of his weird tricks, stop time, teleport us out of there. So I started a limpy sort of jog, and put half a dozen paces between us before I went down on one knee. This was puzzling. My knee was bent. It was my good knee. I was sending the instructions along my nervous systems to my legs, but they were rebelling against me. My posture, indeed, was an awkward one: kneeling on my right leg, my left leg still braced straight behind me. I felt myself tipping forward and put my hand down to steady me. The snow beneath was slick with something gloopy and, as the spotlight circle rolled over the snow to illuminate me again, I could see red. Frozen on to the ground like a large splatch of red plastic. I could not get up.