He changed the subject. “If it were up to me, I would prefer to drive myself. That’s what I do on holiday, drive to and from the coast, eight hours each way. By myself on the open road. In my opinion, we’ve handed too much of our lives to machines.”
Something in Lucan’s voice distressed me. I had tears in my eyes again. Maybe the effects of the sedation had worn off and I was working through the horrors of the past fortnight.
“What do you think I care? I was in a graveyard for centuries. No matter how much I brush, I can’t get the taste out of my mouth.”
Lucan put his hands on his thighs and sat up. “Let’s get this over and done with. This is your father’s most recent place of residence, I believe. The Abacha Reef Home for loyal sons and daughters of the continent. Akiko, you stay behind and plan for Enver’s training cycle.”
In the course of an entire life, my father had slept alone for a grand total of eleven nights. As a young man, he had been sent away to technical school in the mountains. The teachers indulged his passion for tinkering, allowing him free license with the woodworking and electronics carts.
During his bachelor years, he’d resided in a barracks for construction specialists, building silos and rocket pads for the Interplanetary Service. He met my mother on a very hot spring evening at a get-together for young Anglophiles and others nostalgic for the old world who were bringing back the game of bridge, scones and cream, bowls tournaments, and Edwardian architecture—although they conveniently forgot what would have happened to them there.
My father and mother were married inside of a month, never separated for a night. They rented a corner apartment on the seventieth floor of a building adjacent to the river, near an old observatory, where, with the appropriate licenses, they were allowed to raise children.
The place had rows of windows on two sides. I had many memories of looking out over the Service gantries and launchpads, watching the thin rockets go silently into the sky, one after the other at the peak times, each standing on a pillar of white smoke. They reached a certain height, balanced there for half a minute, then shot upwards and disappeared.
When my mother died unexpectedly, my sister and I were away from home. My father closed the shutters so that there was no difference between day and night. He refused any attempt at communication. If we tried to visit he fenced with us over the intercom. When the police forced their way into the apartment, he met them with a barrage of constitutional objections, filed with the automatic court by a judicial consultant, which turned out to be nothing more than a server in his shoe cupboard. He was put in a trap but he made a trap for the rest of the world.
Nobody could hold out forever. I was the one who finally came to witness his apprehension and sign the papers. After he had been sedated, a parade of carts arrived to disassemble his possessions and transfer them to storage. My father’s inventions, complete and incomplete, unpatented, had gone along with the silverware and the bedding.
The machines had made their return. In recent years, my father had been housed in a modest facility for the aged, some distance from the city and on the other side of Nujoma Location, where I had visited him the day before my assignment. I knew the place better than I wanted to, a yellow brick building with green corridors. Apart from the spacious lounges on the ground floor, it was as crowded as an albino slum. The residents occupied individual cells, sixteen to a floor, four floors in all. The staff consisted of a platoon of medical carts.
Everything on these four upper floors was done for your own good. The air was recycled for your own good. The temperature was kept at seventy-five Fahrenheit, day or night, for the good of the body, in the middle of winter and in the slow months of summer. Everything possible was done for your comfort and protection, consistent with the Constitution. Your body was dealt with for your own good. Your teeth might be taken out in your sleep, in the comfort and protection of your own bed, by an automatic dentist. They might be offered back to you encased in a plastic plinth, reminding you of a fly caught in a tablet of amber, but they had been unnecessary since you first came through the doors of the group home.
The food, after all, was restricted to a healthy greenhouse paste, having the consistency of marzipan and the paradoxical smell of prawns. Several breeds of dog, the kinds which had been lucky to make it into the mines, were assigned to the inhabitants on account of their positive emotional effects. Township specials and Rhodesian ridgebacks, trembling greyhounds and terriers descended from the kennels of long-forgotten madams who once ruled this part of the world. The smaller dogs were the more striking. They roamed the halls and common areas, pounced on the carts, curled up in baskets in rooms and looked with their grapey eyes on gold-framed holograms in which every face had been forgotten.
Exercise was prescribed in the walled-in garden because it was good for you. Blood pressure and heart rate were monitored, however, by the second. Red lights would flash and carts would go skating down the corridors when there was even the hint of trouble. In Abacha Reef Home, you were kept as safe as humanly possible—assuming it is safe to be bored out of your wits.
The building seemed deserted apart from the dogs sprawled on the lawn. The security system signed us in at the door. The lounges were empty.
In his cubicle, on the fourth floor, my father was bent over a cart. He had pried open the side panel to reveal the internal mechanism. I watched as he took a screwdriver lying on top of the cart, lit the hissing white flame on its head, and poked it here and there amid the circuitry. He was following a diagram spread out on the floor. His blue overalls were spotless. His curls had turned swan white.
“Should you be doing that?”
“Young man, you are perfectly correct. I should not be. I was merely teaching it to play chess.” He stood up and switched off the screwdriver, pretending to blow it out. “Are you from the League, perhaps?”
“The League?”
“The League for the Defense of Individual Rights and Responsibilities. Come to save me from everybody who wants to save me from myself.”
The cart came to life, set off a warning bell, and flashed frantic orange-and-red lights around its body. It bumped into me, scurried under the bed, and ran headlong into the wall where smoke came billowing out of its casing. I could hear it whirring here and there, clicking under its breath.
After a minute it nosed its way into the passage, between the feet of Lucan, and disappeared. I thought it had put a hand in my pocket but I didn’t want to look for fear of alerting my new superior officer. I thought it must be a holograph of my sister which my father didn’t want around anymore.
I said, “For argument’s sake, let’s assume that I’m from the League.”
“I hoped you would get here earlier.”
“We go where we’re most needed.”
“I have filed over a hundred petitions for constitutional relief from age-based persecution. I’ll find them for you. They’ll be important for your legal argument.”
But he didn’t look. Instead, my father sat down in a wicker chair, part of a pair beside the window. He took off his slippers and placed them underneath the chair.
Lucan left us alone. My father looked confused to see him go. The deterioration was evident. He was worse than the time before, much worse than he had been before my sister, much worse than I remembered him from a few weeks before. The lines in his forehead were deeper. His eyes circled unsteadily behind his spectacles. For years, he had been unable to follow the thread of a conversation very long. He would start, and start again, repeatedly lose the thread. On the other hand, he could work on a cart, or any type of device, for many hours without losing his concentration.
“So you’ve been altering the machines?”
“Who told you about that?”
“I saw two of the carts playing poker on the stairs. I see you have tools on you.”
He looked slyly at me. Put his
bare feet into a small tub on the floor, opened the taps, leant back, and let the hot water wash up to his ankles. When it was full, he poured bubble bath into the water.
“All the games. All the games. Which ones already? Which ones have I done and been done with? Go. Backgammon. Chess. Monopoly. I have programmed them to perfection. These devices have a lot of time to spare. I figure they should have a pastime.” He adjusted his wedding ring, turning it once or twice to loosen it. “I haven’t started the boxing yet. I want to train the upright machines to box. It’s not easy. My hands, you understand, are going before my brain. Some days they won’t keep steady.”
I didn’t need to say much around my father. If it wasn’t about the Constitution, he would talk about his contraptions, getting up to show something in action or put it in your hand—an artificial butterfly, say, which would settle on the ceiling, or a quantum interferometer in the guise of a mercury thermometer, a fourteen-inch-tall android designed to win arguments on any topic, or an automatic kettle, containing modified blue-green algae, brewing blue-green tea or coffee from the spores.
None of his contraptions made any real money. And to be fair, it wasn’t the right time to be an inventor. We borrowed our ideas, defined them according to the energy required to copy the blueprints from another epoch. We copied fashions and literatures, legal doctrines, the political beliefs of better centuries, and even our top twenty hits. We didn’t need—we didn’t think we needed—authors, inventors, composers. For my father, it was different. Each one of his creations was like a prank. He was playing jokes on the universe.
At some point he paused and looked up from his explanation. His face, weathered to the bone, was as bright as a coin.
“Do you know, my friend, we have been conversing for almost an hour and I must confess, I have not been altogether honest with you.”
“In what way?”
“I have not told you that you remind me of someone. You really remind me of somebody familiar.”
I looked away to hide whatever was in my eyes. He took his feet out of the bath and dried them fussily. In the distance, across the river and over the train lines, a rocket was being prepared for launch. The automatic cranes were withdrawing from the sides. Steam rolled out of the engines. The sky was lined with golden haze.
By the time I looked back, my father had returned to his wedding ring, trying to take it off.
“Who is it?”
“Who’s what, if you please?”
I asked, “Of whom do I remind you?”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say you reminded me. Of whom? Of whom? You speak with such formality for a young gentleman. I wonder who you get it from. But, since you mention it, I have a very strong sense of déjà vu today. Young man, would you pass me a towel from over there so I can dry my feet?”
I was no closer to figuring out, from anything he said or had in his room, who on Earth or in the heavens below had gotten me in their mousetrap. I don’t think my father minded when I left. I was eager to get out of the building. It wasn’t until I was alone a corner of the limousine that I pulled out the postcard deposited in my pocket by the cart and read the words printed on it:
Beware of treason. Beware. Beware.
The secret government had its public face.
Lucan took me to the Constitution Hill address where Internal Section maintained a sculpture garden and a museum of cryptography, including a collection of Enigma machines. The mansion sat next to a converted prison, enclosed along Hancock Street by a masonry wall, and observed by a watchtower.
We walked in through the side door, past automatic reception, and up a spiral staircase. It went up four floors, its velvet-carpeted throat opening into a gallery and library, bookshelves rising to the distant ceiling. The hall was a hundred feet in length. It was unoccupied. Desks and reading lamps were placed around the high windows.
Rain had begun to fall, pelting on the roof, and the subdued green radiance of the lamps showed strangely in the rainwater light. I thought about my father and the strange postcard he had composed. I knew that he considered time travel a kind of treason against human nature. I couldn’t figure out what else his message might have meant, whether he meant something specific or general, whether in his condition of being perfectly clear of mind and half addled he might see something which I could not.
I turned my attention to the gallery. One wall was taken up by portraits. They were housed in heavy silver frames, arranged in columns from floor to ceiling. There were no captions.
Lucan stopped in front of the wall while I examined the paintings. There were men as well as women, their collars and lapels rendered in photorealistic ink that pulsed when I stared at one place. The style looked conventional. But the more I tried to make out the individual faces, the more I understood that each countenance was lost in the darkest part of the scene. They were deliberately shrouded. I wondered what kind of trick Lucan was trying to play on me.
“Know who they are?” he asked.
“No idea. In any case, they’re half obscured.”
“The directors of Internal Section. Directors in Century. Those who were and those who will come to be, although we are not putting ourselves in the role of prophets by announcing their names.” Lucan turned me at the shoulder. “Loyal sons and daughters of the continent. DC 4 was an eminent player of Go. DC 7 composed fugues for the kora. DC 111 won’t be born for a thousand years and then only in a monastery in New Kathmandu, the scion of two great calligraphers.”
I knew that I was being tested in some way. I had learnt my lesson. I kept quiet.
Lucan continued: “One last point of interest. On the far left is the portrait of the first DC. I bet you have never seen an image of him before. Our first director is also known to you as S Natanson. Who else?”
Who else but the Founder? I couldn’t speak a word. If Lucan was probing my emotional responses, his experiment was going well. I had learnt from earliest childhood to associate S Natanson with rebirth and sacrifice; with the revival of humanity from the squalor of the mines to the conquest of the centuries; with the sacrifice of his wife for the universal good.
I went over to the portrait, holding my breath. Such had been the disorder of those years that there was no properly attested likeness of the Founder in general circulation. We revered an initial and a last name, an abstraction. Whereas the subject of the painting wore a pin-striped shirt rolled up to the elbows, the style of the old world. He had a thin neck covered in freckles, kept a scientific calculator in his shirt pocket, its solar strip showing. Behind the man were folds of a velvet curtain, held back by a knotted sash, and the torso of a grandfather clock. Besides that, there was nothing to suggest somebody of any great consequence.
Yet all our roads led to S Natanson, back to S Natanson, forward to S Natanson, whose spirit guided us amongst the centuries. S Natanson, who had created the pendulum particle which went to and fro through the centuries. S Natanson, whose laboratory was buried in a copper mine, near Kitwe, and from which he sent his wife back to the days before the supernova to plead for mankind’s survival.
I thought of him as a colossus of energy, someone who was always in the act of saving the world. I couldn’t imagine him sitting for his portrait in shirtsleeves. Yet there he was—if Lucan was to be believed—his face obscured in shadow, freckled neck, long, black-haired arms vanishing from the edge of the picture.
Lucan had set up a tripod.
“Before we go any further you’ll have to consent, on record, to following the instructions of Internal Section to the letter. There’s no room for conscience, or individual decision-making when you are on a furlough from prison.”
I watched the rain falling in the windows. It had cleared the drones from the sky, one point of light after another winking and falling silent. I thought about whether S Natanson had faced such a humiliating demand and what he would have said or
done. You couldn’t lie in our world, under our circumstances. You couldn’t do anything but tell the truth and follow the path, collect your salary, and purchase the required number of consumer goods. For a moment, it seemed to me that the old world, rough and cruel as it was, had allowed greater scope for individual dignity—if you weren’t directly enslaved.
“Do I have any choice?”
“In your situation, I don’t believe you have a good alternative. You can go back to the hospital, of course, and we can place you in a medically assisted coma until the situation with Muller resolves itself.”
I didn’t want to go back to the hospital and be sprayed in the face with sleeping gas each time I tried to stand up. So I accepted the conditions. The tripod watched as I swore to protect the codebooks and prime numbers belonging to Section, and to submit to its external relations committee in advance of publication of any manuscript, screenplay, or holographic screenplay I might author in the future.
Did the tripod register my doubts? Did it acknowledge my fear that I had been captured by a conspiracy within the Agency? It wasn’t a machine. It wasn’t sentient and couldn’t read minds or model their inner workings. It was a mere recording device with a job to do, taking and validating testimony under the Constitution. To prove that I was in my right mind, I had to fill in a crossword and solve three riddles designed to pick up psychiatric anomalies. It wasn’t designed to measure doubt, the first emotion of a case officer.
In exchange for my compliance I received a lengthy number, my own prime number with its undeniable potency, from the tripod. Lucan left the room while I repeated the number, numeral by numeral, until I had it by heart. The tripod flashed, put on a green light, and went blank.
Lucan came back into the room, as if he had been listening right outside the door, and shook my hand.
“Although you are technically on furlough, you will be in the system as an agent. You have the option of changing your designation, if you want. You can be a Thirteen, like me.”
A Spy in Time Page 8