“You trained with her for three months? You didn’t fall in love with her. I find it difficult to understand.”
When Manfred talked, he cupped a hand over his mouth, picking meditatively at his mustache. It made me think he was deciding how much it was advisable to reveal.
“What’s difficult about it? One case officer learning the tricks of a trade from another, as you would say.”
“No, it’s interesting. It’s interesting to me. In our context, very few deaths mean there are very few births on the other end. An education is a different process. No enemies and friends. No teachers and pupils in a neurochemical tank. No affairs of the passions.”
I cautioned myself, not for the first time, that a good case officer let the other person pour out the contents of his heart. So I waited for Manfred.
Eventually, he continued. “We do not live one on top of the other anymore. On the contrary. No cities. No companies. No parliaments. We are strung out across the solar system. The Earth is no longer the focus of our activity as a species. Nor do we focus on one another as you did. For somebody to have a moon to himself is not unheard of—if that is his heart’s desire.»
I said, “It sounds like a lonely existence.”
“Well, that is all I know. I can’t say if it is lonely or not. To be honest, despite this line of work, there is nothing less interesting than the human mind in all its glory.”
It was as close to an explanation that Manfred gave as to why we would never be friendly with each other. I had arrived in a century without the burden of friendship, and there were advantages. It meant there were no consultants to placate. No charts in probability script to decipher. No enemies and no allies. Only the silence to welcome me when I woke up and the even sunshine spreading throughout the facility from no discernible source.
In the meantime, I set about recovering my strength. I swam in the Olympic-sized pool in a deserted gymnasium, one lap after another to the point of exhaustion. Chlorine and the taste of chalk in the recycled air. From the full-length mirrors on the gym walls, my reflection gazed reassuringly into my eyes. I was skin and bones, but I wasn’t a skeleton.
I was delighted to be alive again. At the same time, I yearned to be out on the surface and see the sky, whatever it contained. I sat in the steam room for hours, pouring water on the charcoal brazier, until my skin stung with the heat. The reek of the graveyard which had lodged in me vanished, although it came back sooner or later.
On the launchpad, noticing my anxiety and, I assume, wanting to distract me, Manfred returned to the technical aspects of our journey.
“We need a significant chunk of hydrogen gas to allow you to return.”
“How big are we talking?”
“Jupiter will not be quite the same. Time displacement, as you know, is the most expensive activity in the history of economic investment. It has almost denuded the solar system.”
The rockets underneath us began to whine. We kept a moment of silence and then strapped in. I looked at myself in the mirror Manfred provided and repeated the words of the Founder under my breath, old-fashioned precautions.
I examined the inside of the shuttle. Benches were arranged along its length. Gauges and terminals were built into the bulkhead, although there was no cockpit. No overhead lights, only a red pulse running in a spiral from the floor to the ceiling. It wasn’t the technology of the Interplanetary Service.
“Who are you, Manfred?”
“You know my name and class. I see no need to complicate your life and my life further by going into explanations.”
“Who are you really, though? I’m not asking for prohibited knowledge. But I would like to have an idea about the meaning of all this. Are you even human?”
My companion didn’t reply. He looked impatient, as I might have been had the roles been reversed. The windows of the shuttle went dark as steam rolled up the fuselage. We were off the ground without knowing it, steadying to an angle in midair.
In the darkened cabin, I thought that Manfred’s eyes were glowing. I considered the possibility that my revival had been staged and that I was in the hands of the main enemy. That they’d pretended to come out of the far future, pretended to be in the employment of the Agency. That I couldn’t trust my eyes. That Manfred, whoever he was, had tricked me into revealing my secrets.
By the time the windows were clear, we were ten miles up. I could see the swirls of cloud forming in the atmosphere. The mountains and the ocean were as peaceful up here as they had been a hundred thousand years ago: the stone crown of the continent encircled by mysterious green water. There was no sign of the bombardment under way. The poles were still covered with spidery fingers of ice, a marble shimmering in the middle of the cosmos that we had come across by accident. I could trust in the majesty of the scene, which could not have been staged—even if, by design, I could not understand the man who sat across from me on the top floor of the rocket.
My paranoia settled as I recalled the spirit of the doctrines which guided Manfred as much as myself. It was easy to forget how close we as a species had come to extinction. On the day of the supernova, despite the warning delivered by the wife of S Natanson, a small fraction of the population had made it to the safety of the mines. Decades later, a fraction of a fraction had returned to the surface. It had been the Agency’s task to ensure that the catastrophe never recurred. Never again.
Yet the Earth was empty again. Manfred unbuckled and stood up straight. He stretched his arms and legs, bent down to let me out.
“We are nothing but your descendants, Eleven, acting in accordance with the doctrines of S Natanson to preserve the thread of civilization. To prevent the abomination of a multiverse taking hold.”
I got up as well. Outside, the maintenance robots were clambering along the girders of the ship, green-and-red lights blinking on their torsos.
“That’s your story?”
“I have no reason to deceive you, Sleeping Beauty. I’m no restrictionist. I believe in a free exchange of ideas between time periods, to the extent that it’s possible. I brought you in.”
“I can’t have been the only one to get lost.”
“There, you are correct. The lucky ones managed to come in from the cold a long time ago. Some despaired, took the black pill.”
In the year of our Lord 10^5, it still took three days to get to Jupiter. The stately planet approached through the portholes as slowly as if we were on a ship.
Above and below us a dozen miniature rockets were firing as the shuttle changed direction. Through the porthole, we saw the sun—pale as a ghost in its corona. Galaxies surrounded us, tapestries of light in every direction. I quelled my fear of heights for the moment, although I occasionally wanted to cry.
It took until the third day for Manfred to put his sketch of the situation in front of me. It consisted of a series of figures on the top. Along the bottom, he had printed shapes and dotted lines: possibility and probability characters. I turned it around and couldn’t make sense of a single statement. My cheeks burnt.
“Your story strikes me as a riddle. That interests me so much that I have portrayed it there in the form of a possibility diagram. What did you know about Marrakesh?”
“Look, I wasn’t a specialist by any means. I wouldn’t dare to call myself a Moroccanologist. I read the case folder.”
Manfred went around closing the shutters so that we could sleep. The shuttle became an unexpectedly cozy chamber, soft green lights around the circumference. My companion rolled out the beds and put the sheets on them, running them up to the corner with a hand. He gave me the pillows from a closet behind the bulkhead and went on with his roundabout enquiry.
“Morocco was the first time you encountered the people who used to rule the Earth. When you could fall into the clutches of people who enslaved people like you and me. How did your Six prepare you?”
; “Shanumi watched Gone with the Wind, told me not to worry about people staring. She said that real actors, twentieth-century actors, were better than the greatest acting algorithms from our time, an argument that makes no sense. Also, she advised me to keep my natural skin. To stick to the itinerary in Marrakesh.”
I saw Manfred was becoming impatient. He sat on the side of the bed and brought up a hologram. It had been taken through a small window and looked onto the table where I had been sitting, a hundred thousand years ago, with two companions. Despite the grainy black-and-white image, I could make out that the woman was wearing earrings.
“Did she warn you, in any way, about Keswyn Muller?”
“Obviously Muller was under observation so there was some element of suspicion. But there was nothing to suggest that he could be a danger to us, let alone to the Agency. In the recordings he was standing harmlessly in a window. I knew he had been involved with antiquities. What are you trying to get at?”
Manfred ignored my question. “Lastly, Eleven, were you given any kind of instruction regarding Muller’s companion?”
“Not that I remember. No.”
“So who wanted you out of the way? This is a riddle I cannot solve. And, like you, I have never enjoyed the existence of a riddle.”
Manfred stood up, as if I had done something to anger him, and went over to the last open porthole on the other side of the bay. The one that looked in the direction of invisible Earth, back to the thousand-year dominion of the Agency, a thousand centuries in the past. The porthole that looked back to a past when there had been seven continents and seven thousand cultures. I expected Manfred to say something, to take it all in and put it in front of me, but instead he closed the final shutter.
I stretched out on the bed and thought about going to sleep.
I must have slept for twelve hours. When I woke up, Jupiter was the only thing I could see. It produced ribbons of brown-and-white gas along its breadth, and was surrounded by a bracelet of dim moons. It was immense. I couldn’t look away. The red eye, a whirlpool rotating beneath our position, examined the spacecraft without pity.
Manfred was studying data on his screen.
“You should put on a suit. You can find one in the topmost locker.”
I obeyed. I had never been in vacuum, but I had been trained to use any kind of protective gear. The basic design of a spacesuit hadn’t changed: atmospheric recycler and rebreather, microwave furnace, jets and tools, and the unearthly silver-white skin which space walkers have flaunted since the Apollo launches.
I adjusted the waist and pulled on the upper portion of the suit. It adapted to my form, the fabric sealing in front of my eyes. I checked the status of the various systems. They were in good order.
The station swam up. The central compartment was the size of an oil tanker, minute against the flaring red surface of the planet, blocks of machinery moving along the bulkhead. On the underside was the scoop. The funnel was a few hundred yards across. The metal was already glowing red in the cold above the planet.
Manfred showed me another schematic which I didn’t understand. He adjusted the collar of the spacesuit for me, tapped me on the side.
“The energy required for your return is enormous. We are pushing the entire manifold of space and time back to its next most probable state. The process is so demanding that it is destabilizing the chain of assets.”
“You said there was no technical problem.”
“No technical problem, but something may catch fire.”
Manfred put the helmet on my head. For a moment I was inside the atmosphere of the suit, the oxygen saccharine on my tongue, the electronic display painted before my eyes in bar graphs. I wished them away.
Manfred walked around me, snapping on the various hinges, and pressing on them to make sure. Lights came on inside as it assessed the situation. Temperature. Pressure. Orientation. Gravity and mock gravity.
“Who are you really, Manfred?”
He put his hand on my back and steered me in the direction of the airlock.
“However much we reject restrictionism as an inhuman code, it suits us to limit the transfer of superfluous knowledge. Above all, mark my words, it rescues us from the burden of the infinite. The infinite is the only thing that a human being may not survive. That is what lies behind our hatred of the multiverse and repugnant causal loops.”
“I won’t ask anymore questions.”
“Good luck. Godspeed. In the best of times, in the worst of times, may the hour of your blessedness arrive.”
“And may it arrive for you also.”
He stepped back to let me enter the airlock. The alarm sounded. I went in and sealed the helmet. The identification markers came up. The bronze tint inside the visor faded, to be replaced by supernatural clarity. The gauges and indicators shrank, removed themselves to the side. The door closed behind me.
Manfred gestured through the porthole. He connected to the suit, his voice rasping on the line.
“You can think of me, Eleven, as the last of the case officers. A loyal son of the continent. I did my duty until the end. Remember me.”
“I will.”
“When the time is right, tell my story.”
Jupiter occupied the entire horizon. I thought I was dreaming to see its breadth below me: the slow spiral of brown-red gas and a thousand shards of lightning wherever you happened to look on the vaporous bulk of it. Everything on the surface was in slow motion—cloud or condensing rain. Silent majesty. I wanted to plummet into its great red whirlpool and vanish forever. At that moment I remembered, for some reason, that a seashell was the icon of the Interplanetary Service.
The thruster gave a final push, sending me turning head over heels until I collided with the airlock. I held on, desperately straining against my momentum which wanted to take me back out. The external door opened. I hauled myself in, and entered the station.
It was a brightly lit room in which I found myself, steel cupboards along the walls. The temperature was high. There was too much oxygen, as my instruments informed me. Rivers of sparks were flowing into the room, following the burnt underside of the roof, jumping here and there through the air. Somewhere in the depths of the station, heavy machinery was moving into position.
I kept my visor down, breathing inside the suit, sweating in torrents, and ran into the corridor. The temperature got hotter as I came nearer to the hub. The lights began to go out, faltering in the glow of the sparks. The map directed me to a room on the right, crammed to the top with cabling, and through a hall occupied by holographic statues of men and women, phosphorescent green and twenty feet tall.
The next room I went into was filled with drones. They were held in racks, insect eyes gleaming ever so slightly as I went by. Flame was working at them from above, causing their casings to melt. They didn’t seem to notice the situation. I cursed them. At the same time, I saw the fire reach down and catch hold of my suit. I watched without believing my eyes as the torso began to scorch. A haze of sparks rose around my head. No pain at first, but I knew that my skin was burning underneath the suit.
I stripped, beating down the fire as best I could. I kept the helmet on, trying to follow the map to the center. After a minute it brought me to a long hallway, very dark and very hot, sheets of purple flame forming above me. There was no sign of whether the other end was passable. The viperish crackle of the fire came from every direction.
I thought about going to sleep right there and then, removing the helmet, putting my head down on the grill, and letting the wound burn me into unconsciousness. Instead, I found myself running through the curtain of fire, burning my hands and shoulders. Someone nearby was screaming.
At the end of the corridor, a pair of doors opened at my approach. It let me into a vast chamber. Drones were crawling along the walls, trying to control the fire. Some sprayed foam, while others on the c
eiling were removing and extinguishing burning panels. One of them dropped in front of me. It had a long neck on top of its smoldering body and many eyes arranged around its head.
“You have been severely injured. Allow me to remove your helmet.”
I took off the helmet myself and dropped it on the floor, putting my hand on the drone to support myself. I couldn’t feel my arms. The ash was bitter inside my mouth.
The drone opened its side and produced a tray holding a capsule and injector.
“I would now like to administer a sedative and an antibiotic to the exposed area. If you would record your consent, we can proceed directly to treatment.”
I said, “If you delay me, nothing will be saved. Everything—everything—will be lost.”
The drone whirred and turned its head to the side, one eye after the other coming into focus. “In that case, will you kindly step this way?”
I couldn’t stand upright. “Help me get there.”
Another drone entered the room and stopped at my side. Between the two of them they managed to take me to the other side of the hall. The roof rose into a tower, thousands of feet tall, where I could see drones engulfed by the acrid purple fire. Many were starting to lose their footing in the heat. Several husks were already burning beneath them on the floor. Smoke was rising from underneath our feet.
On the side of the chamber was the arch. The aperture was shimmering, the famous horseshoe which had been our symbol across a thousand years. The drones brought me up the steps to the railing. I managed to stand on my own feet. Despite my burning skin, I felt that flicker of excitement every traveller lives for.
To my surprise, a number of drones had arranged themselves in a column in front of the arch. I walked through them, wondering what they were doing. They raised their heads at the same time, the same turquoise gleam running through their many eyes.
A Spy in Time Page 6