A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  My life, I thought, had been a dream intent on bringing me to this point.

  “We wish you good fortune, Agent Eleven, on your mission. And Godspeed on your way.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for your valuable assistance.”

  Above us the roof was melting, caving inwards. A tide of flame swept through the chamber, burning the oxygen out of the air. The remaining machines had given up the fight and were allowing themselves to fall to the floor. They seemed to be watching me as I hesitated.

  Sections of girders and massive hunks of iron plummeted from above, falling under artificial gravity. In ninety seconds the surface of the station would disintegrate and the vacuum would come rushing in.

  I prepared to hold my breath. I must have lost consciousness because when I opened my eyes again I was on the floor of a vast hall, rolled into a ball. I was listening to somebody screaming with all their might. I passed out again.

  The sensations dear to my heart: the scent of cinnamon and hospital custard. The tang of safe tobacco. I was home in a cocoon, the blanket close around my shoulders. I considered a trip to the Mozambique islands, finding a current in the warm water to take me far into the distance. I would take my father and sister along.

  I smiled and turned to the side when I realized that my hands were tied to the bed. I sat up, trying to pull them through the knots which got tighter, the cord cutting into my wrist. When I gave up and relaxed my arms, it also relaxed. After a minute, it returned to its original length.

  I took stock of my surroundings, telling myself not to panic, although I was already hot from fear. I was in a narrow hospital room. It was empty apart from the bed and the monitor, a door with a panel of frosted glass set into the top. My head was fully bandaged.

  On the far side of the room was an unbarred window. I was on the fiftieth or sixtieth floor, looking onto Lagos Memorial Plaza. Mile-high office buildings alternated with row houses and automatic brothels, the pattern of development in the center of Johannesburg after the hard years in the mines. Advertising balloons moved between the buildings to announce men’s colognes and high-heeled shoes, skin-darkening creams, platinum jewelry, and valet robots in seersucker suits. I thought I could make out, in the distance, the solar rays on the great monument to the Day of the Dead. And yet there was something unfamiliar to me in the panorama.

  The hospital bed observed my activity: “Now that the risk of necrosis has passed, it was decided to allow you to wake up.” It must have seen something underneath the bandages. “Try not to scratch anywhere. I will prescribe something for the discomfort, emotional as well as physical.”

  “I’m chained here.”

  The bed was even-tempered. “Enver Eleven, you are detained under the provisions of the Fourteenth Statute concerning treason. Do not be unduly distressed. Your constitutional rights will be respected to the degree that is humanly possible.”

  Saying this, the bed released a blue-green gas into my face which lowered me rapidly back into sleep. When I woke again I knew that I had been sedated. I couldn’t stop laughing from the giddiness. I woke and slept, woke and slept, adrift on an ocean of wild joy and silent suspicion. Once a day the medical cart entered to change my bandages and paint my face with new skin. It gave me the feeling of being rubbed with electricity.

  I was fed with tubes and cleaned with tubes. Blood was taken, more tiny glass ampoules which were then filed on a rack in the refrigerator.

  I watched the tubes accumulate from the bed, trying to ignore the tingling in my cheeks and the fear that I had been replaced body and soul. The heavy sedation did its work, lifting my spirits—although I knew my state of mind was artificial and that a charge of treason stood over my head.

  The sounds of trucks and airplanes drew my attention to the outside world: infinite Johannesburg. I remembered its glitter through the haze of the sedative gas. Its automated merchant banks and holographic channels starring digital actors and albinos. Its crowds into which, already a spy as a child, I had loved to disappear as if into a gleaming black flood that would bear me away with it. Its prophets of truest optimism and pessimism. Its fortune-tellers in white robes who gleaned the future in a drained cup of hibiscus tea, seeing no sign of a cloud on the horizon. Dressed from head to toe in hair, its Yoruba preachers on the other hand who prophesied a second supernova.

  I could tell them they would get what they wanted in the end: a sky full of fatal stars.

  My condition deteriorated each time the bed sprayed gas into my face. I was alternately sure that I had fallen into the hands of the main enemy and that the Agency had put me on trial. I found myself trying to carry out a conversation with the cart, summoning it to ask trivial questions while my mind wandered through the centuries. I reached to my face when the bandages came off and found tears I didn’t remember shedding. I cried and laughed, argued, and cried again. In short, I was losing my mind.

  When a man came into the room, I hardly believed in his existence.

  “Do you even know what day of the week it is, Agent Eleven?»

  I thought for a minute, sitting up in a corner of the bed, and feeling as if he were shining torchlight into my face. I wasn’t used to the fierceness of the human gaze. The bed and the medical cart were much more neutral; they expected less in the way of response.

  “It must have been three months since Marrakesh.” I was not familiar with the sound of my own voice either. “Three months at least, I’d say.”

  “You’ve been here a fortnight. One Friday to the next. Today is Friday again.”

  I said, “That’s impossible.»

  The man came to the side of the bed. He had a face like an axe. He was joined by a young woman.

  “Lucan Thirteen. This is Deputy Inspector Akiko Thirteen. I have asked her to join us for the sake of legal validity. We work for Internal Section.”

  “You’re Agency? Officially Agency?”

  “Effectively so. A sealed organization within the organization, principle of tradecraft.” Lucan gave me a prime number which I knew from training, proof of his good standing in the halls of the Agency, and took out a small mirror in which I could examine my reflection. Despite the gesture of respect, he seemed angry with me, and looked tired enough to fall over. “As for the impossible, we deal with the impossible each and every day. We have been called in to deal with a situation in which a senior agent has been lost in the field.”

  The hold of the sedation gas made it difficult to express anger but I still had logic at my disposal. “Just to remind you that you lost two agents. You left me out there in the cold. I was burnt to the bone. Now you have me in custody on a treason charge, as my bed informs me. I must say that something is askew.”

  Lucan went on with his prepared statement. “As a matter of protocol, Agent Eleven, I would like to prepare the room for legal validity. At this time, for fear of mental degradation, I am not planning to use any form of neural coercion to ensure your compliance.”

  “Go ahead. I am looking forward to having my story on record. Somebody is going to pay.”

  I tried to make myself comfortable despite the restraints on my arms. It was starting to rain outside. The day was overcast, banks of cloud pressing in for miles. Lucan brought in two chairs from the corridor and placed them at the foot of the bed. He smiled, for the first time, although it was intended for the deputy inspector.

  The young woman, Akiko, produced a short tripod from her briefcase. She turned a dial on the tripod, activating its large red eye which scrutinized the room. I knew something was wrong as soon as she began to speak. There was a vibration in her voice which didn’t make sense, made my whiskers tremble.

  And yet she was perfectly professional, not even unfriendly. “I’ll let this run through. I am aware that field agents like yourself have little patience for such niceties. But, as we say, the Constitution protects every legal person on the continent,
rich or poor, man and machine alike. Albino and black man.”

  “Albino and black man.”

  Were the ritual words even true? Did we mean them? They were second nature when you repeated them to a tripod at every significant juncture of your life, as I had done when entering the Agency and again when, to my surprise, I successfully completed the psychological battery.

  For the first time, I questioned whether an albino, hated and feared on account of her pelt and lidless eyes, could expect equal justice. We simply used their names to prove the worth of our Constitution. I couldn’t say why Lucan and Akiko’s arrival had brought such ugly thoughts into my mind. Maybe it was simply that I had been around albinos and drunk beer with them like ordinary human beings.

  At the end of its cycle, the tripod flashed and went silent, ready to listen. My guests sat down. Akiko looked up and down from her screen while Lucan began.

  “Inform us, from your perspective, about the events in Marrakesh and thereafter.”

  “At what level of detail? Do you want the facts? Do you want my suspicions on record?”

  Lucan put his hands on the railing of the bed. His eyes were flat and blue, splinters of a broken bottle. “Everything. We have suffered the most serious reversal in the Agency’s recorded history, past and future. Our time capsules were nullified by Dr. Muller, who you were supposed to have under observation. We lost Shanumi Six, one of the foremost agents of her time or any time. We thought we lost you until someone close to the restricted centuries sent you home. So, anything and everything you remember.”

  Lucan allowed me to go straight through, from Morocco to the end of time. He and Akiko Thirteen were polite, listened without comment to what I said about Manfred, and the drones on Jupiter Station, what I recalled about the warehouses, the vans of soldiers, the boys in white caps carrying flasks of tea along the road, the rolls of carpet stacked in the back of the shops, and the jeweler at his desk who kept an eye on my comings and goings. I explained about the hotel boy who had helped me get ahold of a spade, the narrow road which led to the Protestant graveyard, the cat which had been trying to find a way down when I lost consciousness. I tried to conjure the broken landscape under bombardment, the team of archeologists who’d pulled me out of the ground. I didn’t hold back anything.

  Despite my intuitions, I didn’t try to be a case officer because I was too powerless in that situation. I thought it was my strange destiny to go from one century to the next and tell stories.

  When I was finished, Lucan Thirteen stood at the window, reviewing the material as lightning crackled and smoked on the horizon. He consulted with Akiko in the doorway. I could hear that they were arguing, although I couldn’t tell about what. Then Lucan came back in and finalized the recording on the tripod. He didn’t offer to show me the results.

  Nevertheless, I was relieved to have told my story. I had done my duty to Shanumi Six and to Manfred. I had told their stories as best as I was able.

  Lucan put his hand on my shoulder. “I can tell you, informally, that you are unlikely to face a counterintelligence investigation. According to the consultants, who have reviewed your tripodal testimony, you believe that you are telling the truth. Of course, you could be programmed to believe that. Plus, there are grave questions to be considered: Why did the beacon break down? How did the events on the recording and the actual mission come to differ? Why did it happen at almost the same time as the intrusion into the library of the past and the future? The consultants will not be satisfied until they have obtained answers.”

  “And until then?”

  “Until then, how shall we put it, you are a member of our penal battalion, if you remember your twentieth-century history.”

  I knew my history: the penal battalions had been placed in the front lines of the Red Army. If they retreated an inch they were cut down with machine guns by their own side.

  It took another hour to obtain judicial authorization to release me from the bed. In the same minute, the bracelet on my wrist parted. I tested my arm, unable to believe that I could move it. I stood up and almost fell over. My legs buckled under me. Stars floated in front of my eyes. Akiko helped me back onto the bed. I didn’t want her to touch me and yet I wanted her to touch me.

  I asked, “Did I do anything to deserve this?”

  Lucan ran his hand along my neck, up to my head, as if he were taking a firm hold of me. “Muller used a particular eight-hundred-digit prime number to enter our system at a high level. The factors of that number would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to calculate. It was known only to the members of the Morocco group. Therefore, you or Shanumi Six. Take your pick. And be thankful I haven’t given permission for the consultants to use neural compulsion. Yet.”

  “But if you’d used it already, I wouldn’t necessarily know.”

  “That is also correct.”

  It seemed like another kind of dream to be walking on a street, free of the hospital. The buildings extended to the horizon. Automatic trucks and trolleys rolled past, almost without a sound, while holograms on the station plaza published visions of space stations and supermodels, Antarctic holidays, hair extensions, kora concerts.

  I couldn’t move an inch without a machine befriending me by name, congratulating me on my return, asking after my health, and offering me vouchers and discounts on colonial furniture, exciting opportunities, adventures in the new settlements for loyal sons of the continent, and other glimpses of happiness. They didn’t accost Lucan.

  “They don’t notice you,” I said to him.

  “Internal Section has police privileges. We have freedom from commerce. Strictly no solicitation.”

  On the road I could feel life around me, living faces which were going to work and coming home, people of my own century who were on their way to meet friends and robots, making plans and breaking them on their gold-paneled telephones.

  Around me, not so far from Rosebank, were the individuals I cared about, my sister’s children and my friends from before the Agency. In theory, I could have contacted them, talked about weather or soccer, listened to their voices, seen their familiar expressions in the air. They didn’t know that I had been gone, had laid in a grave until the verge of the restricted era, and had been burnt nearly to the bone. In practice, though, I was in the custody of Internal Section and they controlled my rights of connection.

  “Anything you need?”

  Lucan pointed at a shopping arcade. Hundreds of shops, outlined with lights and inhabited by holograms, went from ground level up into the sky. You could see assistants moving inside them. One of the sales machines, unoccupied for the moment, was staring out in our direction. Its boredom and longing were disconcertingly human. I thought about asking to buy a cup of espresso, pitch-black as a supermodel. Then I shook my head.

  “You’re taking me to another prison?»

  Lucan put his hand on my elbow. “Until this matter is resolved, you can’t speak to anyone, apart from atomic family, and obviously even that under supervision. But I’d like you to see your home and family.”

  I travelled light. It was a side effect of the profession. Besides, I didn’t want to take Lucan to my dreary room in the basement, between a robot-operated launderette and a dim sum cafeteria. I was sure they had already been through my possessions. Every particle, every message and transaction originating from my name, would have been scanned into the archive.

  “Are you offering to let me see my father?”

  “He’s your last remaining relative, isn’t he? Didn’t you lose your sister last year?”

  Lucan summoned an automatic limousine, long, black, and gleaming like the ZiLs you might have seen at the Kremlin. In the back it had two rows of facing leather benches.

  I sat down behind the tinted windows. Lucan sat opposite me and placed his hands on the roof, just for a moment, as if to test its strength. I saw he had on a
wedding ring. Akiko was in the very back, hunched over her screen, the top of her head visible above the seat. I couldn’t tell who these people were, but I knew they wanted something from me and that what they wanted was impermissible.

  The car nosed into the road and sped into the left lane when there was an opening. The skyscrapers gave way to Chinatown, red lanterns outside the restaurants, the fireworks bazaar, and fish markets with their growth tanks open on the street, their unmistakeable smell of catfish and wet paper.

  Then Little Lagos, witchcraft salons and wig factories, followed by train stations and warehouses, machine works, schoolyards, and apartment blocks. Recycling plants, connected by webs of super-cooled wire, set one next to the other.

  Beyond were the camps for refugees from the drowned continents, laundry hung on the cement walls. They were supposed to be superstitious about robots, despite the best efforts of the government. They spoke in a language of their own, which they believed was unintelligible to machinery and machine translation. They gambled, fought, made useless political protests on the broadcast channels. Brought up their pale children to be pickpockets and hologram actors.

  Twenty miles out, the first stretch of countryside became visible: farmland subtended by irrigation pipes, solar collectors dreaming in the sunshine, and dams filled to the brim with sparkling green water. Starlings and sandpipers, regiments of sacred ibis patrolling the embankment, stabbing the ground here and there. Unattended tractors moved on the land. Not a person to be seen. I remembered it was late spring. Other people, in other lives, on other timelines, were preparing for the holidays, packing for their beach houses.

  Lucan darkened the windows. “We have special requirements, Agent Eleven. These limousines provide a higher level of safety. Underneath it all I am the same as you, a humble case officer.”

  “I don’t know what it means to say we are the same.”