by Unknown
‘It’s a chicken switch, programmed with your right thumbprint. It flips open like a lighter. If you press the button then one of our people will be with you within four minutes.’
‘Why should I swallow this hogwash? And why me?’
‘The New World Order is Old Hat. War is making a major comeback – not that it had ever gone anywhere – and scientists like you win wars for generals like me. Because quantum cognition, if spliced with Artifical Intelligence and satellite technology in the way that you have proposed in your last five papers, would render existing nuclear technology as lethal as a shower of tennis balls.’
‘And how do these phantom headhunters know about my research at Light Box?’
‘The same way we all do. Old-fashioned industrial espionage.’
‘Nobody’s going to kidnap me. Look at me. I’m middle-aged. Only Einstein, Dirac and Feynman made major contributions in their forties.’
The Texan stubbed out his cigarette, and tipped the pot pourri back into the bowl. ‘A lot of people kiss your ass, Doctor, and if I thought it would do any good I’d kiss your ass too. But listen really good. I can’t make heads or tails of your matrix mechanics, your quantum chromodynamics, and your nothing turning into something by energy borrowed from nowhere. But I do know that no more than ten people alive can make Quancog a reality. We have six of them, now, in Saragosa, in west Texas. I’m offering you a job. Come this fall, we were going to relocate Light Box’s Quancog project there wholesale, and offer you a package of incentives the usual way. But your resignation letter has forced our hand.’
‘Why should I work for you? Your president’s a shallow crook.’
‘Doesn’t take an egg-head to see that. But of all the shallow crooks with fingers on buttons today, who would you rather own Quancog?’
‘Quancog as a military application? Nobody should own it.’
‘Come to Texas, Dr Muntervary. Of all the agencies who want you, only ours will respect your conscience, and the rights of your boy Liam and John Cullin. You see me as your enemy, Doctor. I can live with that. In my world enemies and friends are defined by context. Understand that I’m on your side before it’s too late.’
I looked out at Mercury.
‘I always liked that one,’ said the Texan, following my gaze. ‘Lived by his wits.’
The pub sign of The Green Man squeaked as it swung. Maisie was leaning on the stone wall, looking out to sea through her telescope. Brendan was around the other side, pottering about in the vegetable patch. Maisie’s last grey hairs had turned white.
‘Afternoon, Maisie.’
She swung the telescope at me, and her mouth opened. ‘As I live and breathe! Mo Muntervary come back to haunt us! I saw a funny hat get off the St Fachtna,’ she lowered the eyepiece, ‘but I thought it was a birdwatcher come for the Thewicker’s Geese. Whatever happened to your eye?’
‘It got hit by a rogue electron in a lab experiment.’
‘Even when you were knee-high you were always bumping into things. Brendan! Come and see who it isn’t! Now Mo, why weren’t you back for the summer fayre?’
Brendan limped over. ‘Mo! You’ve brought some grand weather back with you this time! John was in sinking the Guinness last night, but he nary breathed a word of your homecoming. Holy Dooley, that’s a black-eye and a half ! Put a steak on it!’
‘I didn’t want a fuss. But aren’t the roses a picture! And how do you get honeysuckle to run riot at the end of October?’
‘Dung!’ answered Maisie. ‘Good and fresh from Bertie Crow’s cows, and the bees. Keep a hive, Mo, when you settle down. Care for the bees and the bees care for you. You should have seen the runner beans this year! Beauties, they were, eh Brendan?’
‘Aye, they turned out well enough, Maisie.’ He inspected the bowl of his dogwood pipe, the same one he’d smoked for half a century. ‘You see your ma in Skibbereen, Mo?’
‘I did.’
‘And how was she?’
‘Comfortable, but less lucid. At least she can’t do herself an injury where she is.’
‘That’s true enough.’ Maisie let a respectful silence go by. ‘You’ve lost too much weight, Mo. I thought you live on fondues and Toblerone chocolate in Switzerland.’
‘I’ve been on a trip, Maisie. That’s why I’m on the lean side.’
‘Lecture circuit, no doubt?’ Brendan’s eyes gleamed with pride.
‘You might call it that.’
‘If your da could see you today!’
Maisie was better at spotting half-answers. ‘Well, don’t stand over the garden wall. Come in and tell us about the wide world.’
Brendan shooshed with his antique hands. ‘Maisie Mickledeen, give our god-daughter a chance to catch her breath before plying her with liquor. Mo here’ll no doubt be wanting to get straight up to Aodhagan. The wide world can wait a few hours.’
‘Come by then later, Mo, or whenever, so. Eamonn O’Driscoll’s boy is back with his accordion, and Father Wally’s organising a lock-in.’
Lock-ins at The Green Man. I was home. ‘Maisie, don’t lock-ins need the odd night when you actually close at the legal time? And a lock to lock?’
‘Desist your logification right now, Mo! You’re back on Clear now. It’s only sheep, fish and the weather here. Leave your relativity back in Baltimore, if you please. And if John brings his harp I’ll crack open my last bottle of Kilmagoon. Mind how you go.’
‘Mowleen Muntervary, you are an eight-year-old aberration who will be lashed by devils with nettles in hell until your bottom is covered with little lumps that you will scratch until they bleed! Do you want that to happen?’
My memory of Miss Thorpe veers towards an eyebrow mite through an electron microscope. Shiny, spikey, many-eyed. Why are primary schoolteachers either Brontëesque angels or Dickensian witches? Do they teach black and white so much that they become black or white?
‘I asked you a question, and I did not hear an answer! Is it your wish to be damned as a liar?’
‘No, Miss Thorpe.’
‘Then tell me how you got your grubby mitts on the algebra test answers!’
‘I did them myself !’
‘If there is one thing in this world that I loathe more than little boys who fib, it is little girls who fib! I shall be forced to write to your father, telling him that his daughter is a fork-tongued viper! You’re going to be shamed in your own village!’
A toothless threat. No Clear Islander took a non-Gaelic-speaking teacher seriously.
There was a trail of these exposé letters, all the way to Cork Girls’ Grammar School. When my da came back at the weekend he used to read them out to Ma in a funny English accent that crippled us with laughter. ‘It is inconceivable that your daughter scored a hundred per cent in this examination honestly. Cheating is a serious transgression . . .’
Da was a boatyard contractor who spent the week travelling between Cork and Baltimore, supervising work and dealing with buyers from as far as Dublin. He’d fallen in love with my mother, a Clear Island girl, and was married in St Ciaran’s church by a middle-aged priest called Father Wally.
These days the primary school kids are taught in English and Gaelic in Portacabins down in the harbour. The older ones go on the St Fachtna to a school in Schull that has its own planetarium. Miss Thorpe went to propagate her Manichean principles in poor multi-shafted African countries. Bertie Crow stores hay in the old school house now.
If you look in through the window, that’s what you see: hay.
I told the Texan I would reconsider my resignation over the weekend. I drove to the bank, and withdrew enough US dollars in cash for the manager to invite me into the back office for coffee while they checked me out. Driving back to the chalet, I caught myself glancing into the mirror every fifteen seconds. Paranoia must often begin as a nasty game. I phoned John to ask his advice. ‘A thorny one,’ said John. ‘But should you decide to,’ he switched to Gaelic, ‘take an unscheduled sabbatical, try to get back to
Clear for my birthday.’ John usually hid his advice in its wrapping. ‘And remember that I love you very much.’
I packed briefly, and left a note on the table asking Daniella to look after my books and plants. The hardware, like the chalet and the car, belonged to Light Box. I downloaded my hard disks onto the CDs I planned to take, erased everything else, and emptied zoos of my most virulent viruses on the disks I’d leave behind. My farewell present to Heinz.
How do you disappear? I’d made particles disappear, but I’d never disappeared myself. I would have to watch myself through my pursuers’ eyes, find blindspots, and move into those blindspots. I telephoned my usual travel agent, and asked for a flight to Petersburg in three days’ time, no matter the cost, to be paid by credit card. I e-mailed the only web site in Equatorial Guinea, telling them that Operation Cheese was Green. I went out for a stroll, and found a Belgian yoghurt lorry in which to chuck my cylindrical chicken switch.
Then I sat in my window seat and watched the waterfall, as the evening thickened.
When it was dark I began the long drive north on the Berlin autobahn.
I could see the beginning.
The track has wildflowers growing down the middle. ‘Aodhagan Croft’, says the sign, painted by Liam. Another sign swings underneath: ‘home-made ice cream’, painted by me. Planck dozes in the late sun. The windows in the house are open. The yellow sou’wester in the porch, the watering can, Planck’s lead and harness, the wellington boots, the rows of herb pots. John comes out of the house: he hasn’t heard me yet. I walk to the vegetable garden. Feynman sees me, and bleats through his beard. Schroedinger leaps onto the mailbox to get a better view. Planck thumps her tail a couple of times before getting up to bark. Lazy tyke.
My journey ends here. I am out of west to run to.
John turns. ‘Mo!’
‘Who else are you expecting, John Cullin?’
A latch clicks in the murk and I fold upright and where the hell am I? I slip and judder. What ceiling, what window? Huw’s? The poky hotel in Beijing? The Amex Hotel in Petersburg, is there a ferry to catch? Helsinki? The black book! Where’s the black book! Slowly now Mo, slowly . . . you’ve forgotten something, something secure. The rain drumming on the glass, fat fingertips of European rain. The smooth edges, unclutteredness, the windchime, you recognise that windchime, don’t you, Mo? The bruises down your side are still aching, but aching with healing. A man downstairs is singing Van Morrison’s ‘The way young lovers do’ in a way that only one man you know sings Van Morrison, and it definitely isn’t Van Morrison.
I felt happiness that I’d forgotten the feel of.
And there’s the black book on the dressing table, where you put it last night.
On John’s side of the bed was a John-shaped hollow. I rolled into it, the cosiest place on Earth. I twitched open the curtain with my toe. A sulky sky, not worth getting up for yet.
When did I become so jittery? That night I left for Berlin? Or is it just getting old, my organs getting fussier, until one of them says ‘I quit!’ I belly-flopped back into the shallows of sleep. A lonely horn sounded, from one of my ma’s gramophone records, a cargo ship out in the Celtic Sea, a memory junk across Kowloon harbour. We rounded the west cape of Sherkin Island, my black book and I, and after a trip of twelve thousand miles I could see the end. Would they be waiting here? They let me get this far. No, I got this far myself. The pillow of John, John the pillow, St John, hemp, smoke, mahogany sweat and deeper fruits deeper down, my heart jolting, hauling carriages, grasslands rising and falling, years and years of them, Custard from Copenhagen, inured to loneliness, gazing out of the window, I wonder what happened to him, I wonder what happened to all of them, this wondering is the nature of matter, each of us a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones, none of them real until observed whatever real means, and for something so solid matter contains terrible, terrible, terrible expanses of nothing, nothing, nothing . . .
Technology is repeatable miracles. Air travel, for instance. Thirty thousand feet below our hollow winged nail, it’s early morning in Russia. A track runs snowy hills and black lakes, drawn with a wonky ruler.
My fellow passengers are oblivious to the forces that infuse matter and carry thought. They don’t know how our Boeing 747’s velocity increases our mass and slows time, while our distance from the Earth’s gravitational centre has speeded up time, relative to those asleep in the farmhouses we are passing over. None has heard of quantum cognition.
I can’t sleep. My skin feels stretched and saggy. I bring my calculator onto airplanes to pass the time. It’s a chunky one that Alain borrowed from the Paris lab. It can do a quintillion decimal places. To pass the time I work out the odds of us three hundred and sixty passengers all being here. Long odds. It takes me all the way to Kyrgistan.
Anything to distract me from the near future.
A Chinese schoolgirl on her way back to Hong Kong is asleep next to me. She is around the age when lucky young women transform into beautiful swans. At her age Mo Muntervary transformed into a spotty gannet. Now I’m a wrinkled gannet. A dinosaur movie is on the screen, scaley violence in silence. My throat is dry with recycled air. I feel a headache coming on. Cryptish lighting, orthodontic decor. Where is the sun, which way is the world spinning? And what the hell have I got myself into?
The second time I awoke, footsteps vibrated the plank of sleep. I knew exactly where I was this time. How long? Two minutes or two hours? Real footsteps, running on gravel, measured and bold, with a right to be here. I lifted the curtain by an eighth of an inch, and I saw a young man jogging through a tunnel of drizzle straight to Aodhagan.
Stone the crows. My son is a man. I felt proud and piqued. His duffle coat swung open. Dark jeans, boots, his father’s uncontrollable hair. Feynman stared from his paddock, munching, and Planck jumped up, wagging.
‘Mo!’ John shouted from down below. ‘It’s Liam!’
A door banged. Liam still closes doors like a baby elephant.
I put on John’s bat-cloak dressing gown. ‘I’m coming down! And John?’
‘What?’
‘Happy birthday, you scabby pirate!’
‘I’ve never had a better one!’
Huw opened the door and gave me a hug, munching a Chinese radish. ‘Mo! You got here! Sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport . . . If John had given me a little more warning, I’d have rescheduled my day.’
‘Hello, Huw. It was plain sailing until I got to your building. I thought the fourth floor meant the third floor. Or the third, the fourth. Anyway, your neighbour put me right.’
‘Hong Kong’s never quite sure of itself. British or American or Chinese numbering, even I still get muddled. Come in, put down your bag, have some tea and a bath.’
‘Huw. I don’t know how to thank you for this.’
‘Nonsense. Us Celts have got to stick together. You’re my first house-guest, we’ll have to make things up as we go along. Come and inspect your quarters. Not a patch on your chalet, I’m afraid—’
‘My ex-employer’s chalet—’
‘Your ex-employer’s chalet. Here you are! Chez Mo. Cramped and messy, but it’s yours, and unless the CIA has cockroaches on its payroll they’ll never find you.’
‘In my limited experience the CIA has a lot of cockroaches on its payroll.’
The room was no more cramped or messy than fifty labs I’d worked in. There was a sofabed ready for me to crash on, bless Huw, a desk, stacks of books that would bury me with one mild earth tremor, and a vase of flamingo orchids. ‘The lavatory’s through there, if you stand on it and twist your neck around you get a cracking view of Kowloon harbour.’
It was as humid as a launderette. Hives of life rumbled on the other sides of the floor, walls and ceiling. The tenement across the alley was so close that our window frames seemed to share the same glass. Trains grinded, little things scuttled, and somewhere a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up an
d hissing itself down.
The life of a conscience-led scientist. ‘It’s perfect, Huw. Can I use your computer?’
‘Your computer,’ insisted Huw.
The fire in the kitchen hearth wheezed and popped. Liam and I looked at one another, suddenly at a loss. The tiles chilled my toes. I’d polished this reunion for so long, but now I could only gawp. I remembered baby goblin Liam, I remembered the adolescent mutant he’d been last summer with bumfluff on his top lip, and I saw the raffish man he’d make in a decade or two. As well-summered as you can get in Dublin, his hair was gelled, he’d got an ear stud and his jaw was squatter.
‘Mam—’ his voice had become a bassoon.
‘Liam—’ I said at exactly the same time, my voice a flautist’s mistake.
‘Oh for the love of God you two,’ muttered John.
It was suddenly all right and Liam was hugging me first and hardest. I hugged back harder and until we both groaned, but that wasn’t why I wanted to cry. ‘You’re supposed to be at Uni, you malingerer. Who gave you permission to grow so much in my absence?’
‘Ma, who gave you permission to do a James Bond god-knows-where in my absence? And who did that to your eye?’
I looked at John around Liam’s shoulder. ‘You have a point. I’m sorry. A knight in shining armour did this to my eye. I forgave him. He’d knocked me out of the path of a taxi.’
‘“A point”, she calls it Da, you hear that?’
I karate-chopped his sides.
‘Don’t I get an apology too?’ whinged John.
‘Shut up, Cullin,’ I said, ‘you’re only the father and you don’t have any rights.’
‘I’ll just go and blunder off a cliff then and leave you two to it.’
‘Happy birthday! Da! Sorry I couldn’t get back last night. I stayed at Kevin’s in Baltimore.’
‘Blame your ma. She only phoned from London yesterday morning.’
‘I can’t do anything to her. She’s bearhugging me.’
‘You just have to wait until it passes.’
I let Liam go. ‘Off with your coat and sit by the fire. The fog’s made you clammy. And don’t tell me those ridiculous spaceman trainers keep your feet dry. Now tell me about university. Is Knyfer McMahon still Faculty Head? What are you doing for your first-year thesis?’