Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  “There’s a McDonald’s at the corner,” the young man said. He looked to be around thirty. “Can I invite you for a cup of bad coffee?”

  The restaurant was crammed full, and all they could do was lean up against a counter. The man in the gray-and-white coat was called Gary McGray and came from Scotland, near Aberdeen. He made his living by traveling the world in search of antique keyboard instruments—preferably harpsichords—buying them, restoring them, and then selling them to museums, collectors, and musicians. It was the kind of job you had to put your heart and soul into, and it didn’t bring in much of an income, but his biggest problem was forgeries. If someone persuaded him to part with a lot of money for an instrument that turned out to be a copy, it drove Gary to the edge of financial ruin, since he had to sell it for less money than he had paid in the first place.

  They spent the rest of the day leaning up against the counter, hardly noticing the hours pass. When Charlotte went back home to her parents that evening, she announced, “I’m in love!”

  It always worked this way: whenever a new director took over the agency, the first thing he would do was summon all the divisional directors to give their reports. Which was logical enough. Logical, too, that these meetings couldn’t be planned down to the minute—if the new director had questions, then he would take his time hearing the answers. Which is why William Hughes Adamson found himself waiting in the secretary’s office for over an hour, with his thick leather briefcase on his lap containing his computer and a stack of documents, and nothing to do but stare at the wall. It may all have been very logical, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. And he didn’t.

  Finally, the intercom on the desk buzzed. “Yes, Mrs. Jacobs,” said the secretary, then she released the button and gave him a thin smile. “She’s ready for you now, Mr. Adamson.”

  He cast another glance at the clock. One hour and eleven minutes late.

  The director’s office at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research wing, was impressively big and just as impressively furnished. Adamson knew it well. The office had a great view over Arlington, for those who liked that sort of thing, as well as of the huge brown condo opposite. Someone was standing out on a balcony over there right now, watering plants; the other hundred or so balconies were all empty.

  Roberta Jacobs, the first female director of DARPA, looked just as young face-to-face as she did in the photos that accompanied the news of her appointment. All the same, he was still surprised to meet her: she was so young, and such a looker. She really looked good. Adamson would even have said sexy. She wore her mahogany-brown hair in a pageboy cut that made her look even younger than her years, and her bangs swung as she shook his hand. She gestured toward a chair, next to which was a coffee cup and a video hookup for his computer. Her most impressive feature was her lively, searching, light blue eyes, which followed his every move keenly as he plugged in the video cable.

  He could have given the presentation in his sleep. The only extra work had been picking out which diagrams, photos, and film clips to use. He gave a very brief overview of the basics of the Future Combat System; he could assume she knew most of it. He showed some classified clips of refinements on the BigDog robot, a four-legged machine that could move like a dog over terrain, and then turned to the Autonomous Combat Robot projects. He gave her an update on the Urban Ops Hopper, a jumping jack of a robot that could clear obstacles greater than its own height. The machine was designed to be able to deliver cargo to specified locations in urban combat zones so that they could, for instance, resupply units with ammunition. Here, he had a neat little film clip to show—a robot jumping comically up and down on one leg in a hangar while men in white coats pelted it with cardboard boxes, lumps of wood, stones, sandbags, and other missiles to try to make it lose its balance. All in vain.

  “Looks good,” the director said. “So what’s the problem?”

  Adamson stopped the film. “The positioning system. The computers can compensate for jumps and landing, but they don’t yet have the capacity to steer it to a predetermined destination in any even remotely complex environment.”

  He reported progress on the EATR, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. This was a machine designed to be able to turn any kind of biomass into fuel—to eat, as the name suggested—so that in principle it could operate indefinitely in the field. He reported his division’s work on insect-sized reconnaissance drones. He reported on the concept of chemical robots, still very much at the theoretical stage right now.

  “That sounds interesting,” Roberta Jacobs said. “What’s that exactly?”

  Adamson cleared his throat. She had crossed her arms under her bosom, which he found distracting, and fixed him with an attentive gaze. She wore a dark blue suit that could have clashed horribly with her hair but suited her. She looks good, he thought again. Could be a successful hotel manager or something along those lines. Instead of which she’s in command of the most secret weapons-research program of the most powerful nation on earth. The idea took some getting used to.

  “We call them ChemBots,” Adamson explained. “The idea is to develop a completely new kind of machine—soft, flexible units capable of squeezing through openings narrower than themselves. Then they should be able to reassume their earlier shape, with all systems functioning, and carry out their instructions.” He pulled up some diagrams that showed the scope of the program. “The idea is to build a bridge between robotics and materials chemistry,” he explained. “At the moment our research is focused on transitions between gel and solid states, on material deformation and flux processes in general, or with specific reference to magnetic or electrical stimuli. We’re looking at geometric transitions, reversible chemical or colloidal bonds, and bond-breaking—”

  “I’d like to see an up-to-date budget plan and a breakdown of results so far,” she interrupted him.

  “It’ll be on your desk tomorrow morning,” Adamson declared. All he needed to do was pull up the data and print it out, but the way he had phrased it sounded more impressive. It was one of the first tricks he had learned after arriving here fresh out of MIT.

  “Good. Thank you for what you’ve shown me today,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long.”

  “No problem,” Adamson replied, switching off his computer. As he unplugged the video cable, he added, “While I’m here, I’d like to recommend someone. Kind of. This isn’t exactly a Human Resources matter. It’s about a fellow student from my time at MIT. Hiroshi Kato.”

  Her bright blue eyes grew suddenly cold. “They warned me you would get around to this. They even say it’s an obsession of yours. Kind of.”

  Adamson wound the cable back into his laptop bag, untroubled. “I know they warned you. Did you know Dr. Blackwell?” Simon Blackwell had been the director before last, in office when Adamson first started at DARPA.

  She tilted her head, but said nothing.

  “We didn’t see eye to eye,” Adamson confessed. He had been too outspoken, and Blackwell had seen him as a threat. “And Dr. Blackwell knew how to bear a grudge.” Which was probably one of the reasons he had died of a heart attack at the age of just sixty, right here in this office.

  Roberta Jacobs leaned forward, placed her folded hands on the desk in front of her, and said, “You have five minutes.”

  “Okay.” Adamson took the documents out of his case, chose a sheet of paper, and handed it to her. “That’s him. Hiroshi Kato. He must be—what?—around twenty-seven years old by now. Japanese mother, American father; he has Japanese citizenship. He studied with me at MIT, a couple of years behind me, and published a number of very interesting articles while he was there. Not quite five years ago, he simply dropped out from one day to the next and vanished without a trace. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  Jacobs looked at the sheet with its photograph from the MIT yearbook. “Go on.”

  Adamson sat down. “Mrs. Jacobs,”
he said, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know how to judge people for their potential. When it comes to robotics, Hiroshi Kato is a genius. He is also, unfortunately, very much his own man. He takes it to extremes. When I approached him and tried to bring him onboard with the Robot 21 strategy paper—I’m sure you know it…”

  “Adamson’s Laws of Robotics.” The director nodded.

  He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Well, that’s something of an exaggeration. I have no idea how it came to have that name.”

  He knew perfectly well, of course. He had worked hard to make sure it happened that way. It was a textbook case of successful self-promotion.

  “Coming back to Kato,” he went on, “nothing worked. I even…” And here he hesitated. “Right after Kato turned me down quite brusquely, I was appointed as academic referee for a project he proposed. At the time I thought it tactically useful to recommend that it be refused. Not that there was anything academically wrong with it, but because I had hoped to be able to cut a deal with him, so to speak. I wanted to shake him out of his maverick mode. Do you follow me? Granted, it was morally somewhat dubious, but I thought that the end justified the means. Unfortunately, he vanished almost the same day. And I don’t like the thought that he may have been working for a foreign power ever since.”

  Mrs. Jacobs studied the sheet, which summarized everything he had been able to find out about Hiroshi Kato. “What do you suggest?” she asked.

  “We should look for him. And see to it he works for the United States.” She regularly had lunch with the director of the CIA. It would only take a few words and a smile from her.

  Her face gave nothing away. “I’ll think about it,” she declared at last and stood up. A clear sign his five minutes was up.

  “Thank you,” said Bill Adamson. It was five minutes more than her predecessor had ever given him.

  Back in his office he took one more look at the Hiroshi Kato file. How many times had he read through it? Perhaps the ones who said he was obsessed were right. And what if they were? Every great man in history had his obsession. It was the only way to achieve anything. Without an obsession, all you had was an ordinary life.

  It was all here. Hiroshi’s project proposal. And the resubmission, asking for extra funds. When he read the specifications and Hiroshi’s arguments, it was as clear as day this was only one piece of a puzzle, and that he had not the first idea what the big picture might look like. But he needed to know. And he was willing to bet any sum that for Hiroshi, this project application had been merely the first step toward something big, something truly breathtaking. The question was, what? Bill Adamson wanted to know the answer more than anything in the world. And he would find out. One day he would see the big picture, whatever the cost.

  Gary was romantic, tender, a little mad. The first time he saw her naked, he wept with joy. He promised to cherish her as long as there was breath in his body, and when they had sex he was carried away like no man Charlotte had ever known before. They loved, they laughed, they couldn’t get enough of each other. In the blink of an eye, the whole world changed and her life began anew. It was as though everything that had happened up until now had only been in preparation for this moment.

  Charlotte’s talent was stronger than ever. Sometimes she felt even physical distance was no obstacle, that she could read things from afar. The history of the world was an open book to her. The two of them followed her gift, leaving Moscow for Warsaw, then on to Berlin, where they tracked down a harpsichord built by the legendary Pleyel company, a piece that had belonged to the great Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. Ever since she had fled Europe in 1940, it had been thought lost, and its rediscovery was a sensation that put Gary in the headlines.

  They went on to Aberdeen and finally to the little town of Belcairn to the north. Gary’s home here was a building in the oldest part of town, with a small apartment, a huge workshop, and a garden that had run wild. The rooms had low ceilings and tiny windows, and the whole house was crooked and ramshackle and hard to heat. Charlotte was enchanted. While Gary spent his days in the workshop, as he always had done, she took charge of the house. When she arrived, it was an unloved bachelor pad; she cleaned it from top to bottom, repainted, put up curtains, chose houseplants, bought new crockery and linen, and replaced all his metal shelving units with proper wardrobes and bookshelves. It became a real home. Once the long winter was over, she got to work on the garden.

  And every now and then, they would go hunting together. Gary ran a website about restoring historic keyboard instruments. The website brought him not only commissions but also leads as to where an unusual instrument might be hiding, anywhere in the world. When they set off to follow these leads, it wasn’t just a trip, it was an adventure, real detective work. They had to track down clues, ask questions, and listen patiently for the revealing detail—and, above all, play their cards close to their chest. As soon as people found out the old wreck that had been moldering in their attic for generations was a valuable antique musical instrument that might be worth real money once it had been restored, they started asking prohibitive prices.

  In a vineyard not far from Venice, they tracked down a genuine dulcitone. Gary would only have had to clean away the encrustations left by years in the pigeon loft, but the owner, a suspicious old farmer, didn’t want to part with it. A musical-instruments dealer in Geneva offered them a pianino that had supposedly been built in 1955 but which Charlotte soon discovered dated back to 1840—a bargain. In Rotterdam they found a genuine Alfred Arnold bandoneon.

  Gary was beside himself with excitement. “These things are incredibly rare,” he explained. “The company was confiscated from the family in 1948 and the original plans for the instruments were lost—even today, nobody has ever managed to build anything that makes the same fabulous sound.”

  Charlotte was astonished to learn how many different kinds of keyboard instrument there were in the world. Gary explained to her the difference between a spinet and clavicytherium, showed her how the reproducing piano played its melodies automatically, talked at length about the terpodion, and enthused about a gigantic instrument built in 1819 called the Apollonicon. She learned what a square piano and a claviharp and an Orphica were. She learned that the adiaphone and dulcitone produced their ethereal sounds by striking tuning forks rather than strings and therefore never went out of tune. She was amazed by the pyrophone, a kind of organ that ran on gas flame rather than on air. It tended to explode during concerts, and several organists had been injured during the nineteenth century.

  And so a year went by. Charlotte felt she was walking on air. Life was wonderful. Everything was so simple; the days were filled with plangent sounds from the workshop, which echoed through the house while she cooked and baked, cleaned and tidied. Sometimes she would cycle along the narrow country roads between the lush, green fields, her only regret that there was no farmhouse nearby that sold milk direct from the cow or some such simple treat. When Gary switched out the lights in the workshop in the evening, they ate, talked, and usually ended up making love. Life was wonderful and simple.

  It took some time for the problem to come to light. The harsh truth, however, was that even when he had been living on his own, Gary’s business model barely made enough money for one person to get by. Now there were two of them, but his work had not changed. Logically, then, the money he made simply was not enough. The only reason they had not noticed earlier was that the discovery of the Pleyel harpsichord in Berlin had swelled the bottom line for the year considerably. But that money was gone.

  Neither Charlotte nor Gary really knew how to handle money, let alone run a household. Charlotte had always been used to money being there when she needed it; when she went shopping, she had only ever asked herself what she wanted, not what she could afford. Certainly, she tried to keep track of prices, to keep within a weekly budget, to save where she could, but she didn’t get much beyond trying. Gary ha
rdly needed anything for himself and spent nothing on food and clothes but would pay whatever it took for tools and spare parts.

  “We mustn’t spend every penny we have,” he told Charlotte earnestly the evening they realized just how bad things were. “I always need some money in reserve to buy instruments; otherwise, I might just as well shut up shop.”

  Charlotte stared aghast at their bank statement and the notepad with their calculations. “And what if you tried to do more work on commission?”

  “I’ve tried that. It doesn’t bring in much money, because I have to pay a fee to the dealer who referred me. There aren’t many customers around here anyway. I’d have to live in the big city, and then it would cost too much to rent a decent-sized workshop.”

  There was only one answer: they would have to stop traveling together. When they both went, everything cost twice as much, but they didn’t necessarily bring in more income—it simply wasn’t worth the extra expense. With a heavy heart, they decided Gary would travel on his own from now on and only call Charlotte to join him if he found an outstanding instrument and had to be quite sure of its provenance.

  She was bored on her own. She didn’t know anyone here, and it wasn’t easy making friends with Lowland Scots. And anyway, was it quite fair, the way they lived? Gary carried on just as before, spending his days doing what he loved best, repairing antique musical instruments. The only difference for him was he had a woman now to keep house and warm his bed. What did she get out of the relationship? Nothing but work.

  While Gary was away in Istanbul tracking down a sixteenth-century spinet, Charlotte went to Aberdeen and bought stuff she didn’t need out of sheer frustration. She spent too much on costly hours on the telephone with Brenda as well, trying to work out where she had gone wrong. Then Gary called her to come to Istanbul on the cheapest flight she could find. The spinet really was from 1578. By the time it was being packed up for shipping, he had calculated the profit they were likely to make on it and said it would be no problem to spend another day in Istanbul. They visited the Hagia Sophia and Topkapi Palace and watched the sunset from a restaurant under the Galata Bridge. Charlotte shut her eyes and listened to the babble of languages all around. She began to riddle out some of the basic structures of Turkish. Her loneliness was forgotten. Life was wonderful again.