‘Yes.’ A grin spread across her face. ‘I’d hoped you would see it. Nobody else ever has, just the local implications. The small theories, minor proofs.’
‘But this . . . this is big.’ I tried to grasp the meaning. ‘This is about paradox!’
‘Yes. I’ve done a lot of work on it. It would take quite a while to explain. But it all rests on this. Which I wanted to show you. And leads here.’ She tapped her heart again, and the four equations scrawled across her T-shirt. She was wearing the answer. The answer to the most complicated question ever asked.
‘And you did all this . . . All this! By yourself?’ I didn’t understand it properly, but I understood enough to know that it was a work of genius. Something I might better comprehend given time, but could never have dragged out of the universe’s protesting grasp to put on a page. ‘By eighteen?’
‘Yes.’ She looked down, but I could tell that a smile was teasing the corners of her mouth. The first I’d seen.
‘Wow!’ Then I told her what I’d been wanting my father to say ever since the day he left us. ‘Eva, this is incredible. I can hardly believe anyone could crack it.’ A deep breath. ‘Any father would be proud of you.’
She looked up, smiling properly now. ‘I have good genes.’
CHAPTER 15
According to Eva’s calculations, a direct meeting with Demus would likely destroy both of them, along with several city blocks. Since her analysis had allowed her to make a staged contact with me where neither of us died, it seemed that her equations had passed at least one experimental hurdle. Now that she knew Demus existed, she promised to run the numbers and devise a strategy that would allow them to meet.
In the meantime she wanted me to leave for London.
‘I thought fathers were supposed to do the ordering around,’ I grumbled.
‘If you’re nearby when I start approaching Demus for the first time, it’s just going to be that much harder.’ She was wheeling me along the street where we first met, or in her terms where we were going to meet.
‘I can hang back, give you guys some space. I’m sixteen, not an idiot.’
‘Well, you might say something insensitive, it’s true, but I’m more concerned about you unbalancing an already highly unstable equilibrium and getting us all killed. Two-body problems are so much easier to solve than three-body ones.’
I allowed myself to be silenced by this piece of mathematical wisdom. While I wasn’t looking forward to being jolted around for an hour on the train, I did quite want to go home. Hypothetical daughters and new theories aside, leukaemia felt like the most pressing and most real of my problems, and when any animal is sick or injured the most basic instinct is to return to its den.
‘How will you even find Demus?’ The station was in sight now, and it seemed as though time were running out for all those unasked questions.
‘I’ve built a little device,’ Eva said. ‘A paradox detector, if you like. Not very accurate but it should lead me to him after a bit of wandering about.’
Eva took the Lewis Carroll book from me and pressed something smaller into my hands: a photograph of her sitting on a wall somewhere sunny. ‘In case you forget what I look like.’ She sounded embarrassed.
We left the wheelchair in the parking lot and I hobbled on to the London-bound platform with Eva hovering around me as if I might fall at any moment and need catching.
‘You need to check into an A&E as soon as you get to King’s Cross. Have them look the wound over.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
She shook her head at my tone and that made me laugh, which made my stitches hurt, which made me resolve to do exactly what she’d just told me to.
I got onto the train unaided and turned in the doorway.
‘Stay safe.’ We both said it together, then grinned, then looked away awkwardly.
‘Demus knows where to find me,’ I said. ‘I’ll catch up with you guys when you have a plan.’
On the train journey to London I found myself exhausted, maybe from blood loss, and dozed on and off the whole way. I would have guessed that any one of the day’s revelations was sufficient to make sleep an impossibility, but somehow all of them together seemed to cancel out, as if they were all battling for my headspace, and I nodded off while they were fighting among themselves. I did wake up somewhere around Letchworth, though, and for long enough to marvel at the simple fact – well, simplish fact – that I had a daughter. True, among the infinite timelines of the future I had an infinity of children, but we humans care about what is, about what’s in front of us. Untouchable realities are too academic. If a man is starving to death on our street we empty the larder to feed him. Move him to a country a thousand miles away and our compassion shrinks a hundredfold. Move a child to another universe and we cease to care.
I got home late having spent most of the day in a crowded A&E department full of noisy drunks and noisy children in equal measure. The doctor spent two minutes inspecting the wound and ten more scolding me for the idiocy I’d displayed in opting to discharge myself in Cambridge.
I managed to get past Mother without admitting to either my sword wound or my new diagnosis.
‘You look terrible,’ she’d exclaimed as I leaned into the living room on my way to bed.
‘The student life,’ I said. ‘Wall-to-wall parties at this time of year. It’ll all be over by next week. I just need sleep now.’
‘Take some vitamins, get an early night and have a lie in.’ She sounded concerned. There would be hell to pay when she found out I had to go back on chemo, but right now it felt like a fair price. Oddly, I felt as if I’d somehow let her down, that I’d failed at getting better and that it was my fault. I nodded and retreated to the stairs. Let her have another night not knowing.
The sleep that had come easily on the train eluded me for most of the night, despite the fact that I still felt achingly tired. My wound stung and itched. The glorious structures that Eva’s equations had hinted at drifted behind my eyes, illuminating a restless mind. And every so often a darkness would loom, swallowing new ideas and pains alike with the cold certainty that my returning cancer would take me down on this second try. In one of these darknesses I remembered the girl I’d met during my first round of chemo. The chatterbox who didn’t fall silent until the day she died. The girl I had searched for in the hospital and sat with on her last day. Her name was Eva. I think I must have named my daughter after her – to remember her struggle, and maybe to remind me to be kinder, better, less focused on my own worries.
I guess I slept, because I recall waking and those few glorious seconds where I remembered none of it, where I was just stretching beneath the covers in my own bedroom, safe and warm. Then like the jaws of a steel trap the whole thing closed around me once again and all I wanted was to leave the curtains drawn and sleep the day away.
In the end, it was fear of Simon’s disapproving phone call that got me out of bed and into clothes. There were very few things that would move Simon to use the phone, but not showing up for D&D was one of them. And when it came to awkward phone calls, well, let’s just say that Simon had a weapons-grade long silence.
I changed the dressing on my cut, replacing it with a bandage that a nurse at the A&E had given me amid the scold-storm. The cut seemed to be healing, but it still hurt like hell if I moved in a way that pulled on it. I got dressed slowly, as if I were sixty rather than sixteen. Some dark voice inside me suggested that I would never make sixty, so I may as well get in a little experience of being old now. I told that voice to shut up and that a universe of infinite possibility lay ahead of me. Some of the timelines running right from this moment held Nick Hayeses that lived to be a hundred. It comforted me a little, so long as I didn’t let myself think of the odds.
Getting to Simon’s posed a problem, since I didn’t feel up to cycling and then remembered that I’d left my bike outside Tony’s Cabs anyhow, and it was sure to have been stolen in the first hour of its abandonment. If I asked Mo
ther for a lift she would assume I was ill and would have me down the doctors, and if I told her it was because I lost my bike she would give me grief over that, too.
In the end I remembered the roll of ten-pound notes Demus had pressed on me. I called a taxi from the phone box down by the bus stop and travelled in style.
‘You’re late.’ Simon had the door open before I could finish the second of an intended three swift raps.
‘I came by cab and it takes longer than cycling.’ I followed him up the stairs, wondering how he knew to wait by the door. He must have been upstairs with the others, surely, and his room didn’t have a view of the front street . . .
Simon stomped to his chair and sat down heavily while I greeted the rest of them. ‘Hey, Mia. John.’ There was something about Sam’s face that made me want to punch it. Mostly it was how close his mouth got to Mia’s on a regular basis, so it wasn’t a very grown-up urge. But even so. ‘Sam . . .’
Sam beamed at me as if we were best buddies. ‘Nick! Take the weight off. You’re looking tired.’
‘I got cut with a sword.’ I lifted my shirt to show the dressing. It sounded way more sexy than my leukaemia came back.
‘Shit, man!’ He sounded genuinely concerned. All those acting classes had paid off.
All I got out of Simon was a frown. John and Mia both rose from their seats for a closer look.
‘How the hell did you do that?’ Mia asked.
‘It’s pretty hard to cut your side with a sword,’ John observed. ‘Even for you, Nick. Besides, you don’t have a sword. And if you do, can I borrow it?’
‘It was some other idiot. An accident. I kinda fell into him.’
‘You fainted again?’ Mia looked worried.
‘No.’ I waved the idea off as though it were silly, and tried to imagine how she would look when she found out the real bad news. Guilty is how she’d look. And I didn’t want that. Not at all. I scattered my dice across the table. All ones. I guess if the universe wanted to kill me, then pushing me to the extremes of every probability distribution was a good way to do it. I mean the universe didn’t desire to kill me, not in a sentient or malicious sense. I was like a clog in a pipe with the pressure building up behind me. Something had to give. Either I got blown away or the pipe cracked and everything burst out. ‘Let’s play, shall we?’
We settled to the game. Mia and I both failed saving throws, meaning that our characters remained bound in mutual chemically induced adoration, the love potion refusing to loosen its hold on us.
Our party of bold adventurers soldiered on into the labyrinthine workshops of the famed alchemist, Mercuron. Making progress required overcoming the natural hazards of experimental alchemy: explosions, toxic fumes, the wandering and dangerously mutated survivors of potion testing. In addition we had to defeat the guards and other defences set in place by the Guild of the Hidden Eye, Mercuron’s paymasters and owners in all but name.
Many of the encounters began with a fierce argument between our thief, Fineous, returning with news of what lay ahead, and our paladin, Sir Algernon, vehemently disagreeing with Fineous’s cunning plan for dealing with the problem. Meanwhile my magic-user and Mia’s cleric would canoodle at the back, the irony dripping off us like sweat, and John’s fighter would roll his eyes while dropping heavy hints that maybe she could save some of her energies for healing his wounds.
The next stage of the process was typically Fineous and Algernon’s argument growing loud enough to draw the attention of the opposition, rendering all planning moot as the enemy charged down the corridor towards us.
In Dungeons & Dragons, the alignment of your character plays an important role. Characters are temperamentally lawful, neutral or chaotic. They are also morally good, neutral or evil. It’s a very crude assignment when projected on real life. I tend to think, for example, that everyone I like is in many senses ‘good’, and that few people are so shallow that they can be well categorised by so simple a system. However, if you forced my hand I would have said . . . Simon is lawful neutral, Mia is chaotic neutral, and John is chaotic good. Simon’s own fascination with and respect for laws, be they technical, mathematical or legal, was the reason it took so long before Fineous came back to report with blood on his hands. His understanding of how lying worked was more theoretical than practical.
Sam, on the other hand, appeared to be lawful good through and through. Either that or just so dedicated to playing the saintly role of paladin that he was happy to see our mission crash and burn around us rather than bend the smallest rule or stray but a little from the path of righteousness.
We’d penetrated deep into the laboratory complex and left chaos in our wake. So many guards were searching the wreckage behind us that retreat had long since ceased to be an option. And we’d been waiting a worryingly long time for Simon’s thief to return from scouting ahead.
‘What’s awaiting us, Sir Fineous?’ Sir Algernon asked. He liked to call everyone ‘sir’, regardless of knighthoods earned or not.
‘Well, I snuck along, quieter than a mouse in socks,’ Fineous answered, ‘keeping to the shadows, and came to a small guard chamber by a large blast-door. And there were two guards in there, big men in chain-mail armour, with swords that burned with a kind of black fire—’
‘And your suggestion for dealing with the situation?’ Sir Algernon queried dubiously.
‘None,’ Fineous said. ‘We can all go forward and—’
‘I am pleased to see that my moral instruction has had an effect upon you, Sir Fineous. I expected you to insist on some unworthy and underhand strategy. I misjudged you, brother. Forgive me.’ Sir Algernon rubbed his chin. ‘Hmmm.’ He turned to John’s fighter. ‘A stern challenge awaits us, Sir Hacknslay.’
John shook his head. ‘My warrior’s barely standing. A goblin with a sharp stick could probably finish him off. Your paladin isn’t doing much better. And the cleric’s used all her healing . . .’
John was right. Our fighting force needed hospitalisation, not another battle. Sir Algernon’s insistence on the fair fight had brought us to the edge of ruin.
Sam thumped the table in defiance. ‘We must return to the fray once more. In the name of all that is good and honourable let us gird our loins and—’
‘I wasn’t finished,’ Fineous interrupted. ‘These two guards I told you about . . . they seemed to have had some kind of argument just before I arrived. One of them had stabbed the other in the back and then, overcome with remorse, poisoned himself. A tragedy.’
‘Nice one!’ Nicodemus the Mage swirled his robes. ‘Well done, Si . . . I mean Fineous!’
‘I knew it!’ Sam got to his feet. ‘All that dice rolling when Mia took you into the other room! I knew it! You murdered them!’
‘Hold your horses, Sherlock.’ John leaned back in his chair with an easy grin. ‘You can’t go accusing people without evidence. I find Fineous’s report . . . entirely plausible.’
Sam scowled, rapping the table in irritation. ‘He’s lying! Hasn’t your cleric got a detect lie spell, Mia?’
‘No,’ Mia lied.
‘Anyway,’ Simon continued. ‘I noticed that the blast-door was unlocked—’
‘Unlocked?’ Sam snorted. ‘You mean you picked the lock.’
‘Unlocked.’ Simon was getting good at this lying stuff. ‘So I crept in and found a laboratory with an alchemist at work. He had some assistants stirring cauldrons and some kind of mechanical soldiers by the far door. I really think this could be Mercuron. I think we’re this close to getting out of here at last.’ Thumb and forefinger demonstrated how close. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to tackle him myself, but I did find this on the floor close to where he was working. I think he may have dropped it.’ He held up an imaginary something.
‘Dropped? You stole it off him you . . . you . . . kleptomaniac!’
‘What is it?’ John asked.
Mia stepped in with the explanation. ‘It looks a bit like a flattened gravy boat that has been cut in half
and sealed closed. Fineous is holding the handle end. If it ever had a spout end then it is missing. The whole thing is made out of copper and has seen plenty of life. It’s tarnished and dented.’
‘Why would you even bring that back?’ John asked.
‘It fell out of a very hard-to-get-at pocket and was next to a pouch of gold,’ Simon said. ‘It has to be important.’
‘Gold?’ John sat up. ‘I grab Fineous by the ankles and shake him until the gold falls out of him.’
‘I draw my knife and dodge away!’ Simon pulled his character figure away from John’s warrior.
‘You hear a distant clang like the sound of a door being thrown open,’ Mia said. ‘And the tramp of very heavy feet.’
‘Shit, Mercuron’s noticed you robbed him!’ John shook his head. ‘He’s sent the mechanicals after us.’
‘Si, throw me the thing!’ I said.
‘Fineous tosses Nicodemus the thing,’ Simon said.
And while John and Simon rolled dice to determine the outcome of their chase, Mia drew me a picture of the thing. She came around the table and leaned over me to sketch it. Her proximity pricked against my cheek. The familiar scent of her made me want to reach out, take hold, press my face against her. Instead I kept rock still.
‘What is it?’ Sam asked, also leaning in and far less welcome.
‘Is it heavy? Does it rattle or slosh?’ I asked.
‘It’s heavier than you expect it to be, but doesn’t rattle or slosh,’ Mia said, standing back to admire her handiwork.
Simon and John paused their chase to look, both looking as confused as I felt.
‘Is that a lid?’ I pointed to something at the top.
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