“That’s impossible.”
Lucan didn’t respond, turning that blank expression to me with which I would soon become familiar. Instead of responding, he showed me out of his office. I waited in the corridor while he locked his door.
“Our way of life is built on the fact that it’s impossible. Mathematically impossible. But if I were you, I would lock your door behind you when you go to sleep.”
The key led me through the maze of the installation. It sent me down steel corridors with low ceilings, turning this way and that to reveal rooms inhabited by teams of men and women huddled around desks in the steel-blue light. Brassheads stood in lines of refrigerated crates, waiting to come online.
In the quieter sections of the facility, which hadn’t yet been occupied by members of the security bureaucracy, I imagined I could hear the hum of the superconductors from the solar plant. There was a sense that the Earth was moving around us, as slowly and heavily as a giant. I missed the wind in my face.
As I went down, I remembered the carnival somewhere above my head. My father had loved the machines at the carnival. He could spend hours talking to the roller-coaster and the merry-go-round governor, red-and-green lights flickering around their ticket counters. They entertained his ideas which were too extreme to debate with his own species. The multiversity which would run research across distributed realities. The bill of rights for sentient things which would allow machines to update their own programming. Albino liberation. He had a proposal to extract free energy by putting a pendulum into a causal loop, a thought which made any normal person shudder.
My father loved the machines for their forbearance. Conversely, he hated the secret government, its pretensions to govern human history and the human heart, considering it treason. He must have known his postcard would bring his argument back to mind. But I wondered what he remembered in his condition; what he expected me to do about it. How could I fight what he considered treason? What had he seen in his crystal ball about Akiko and Lucan Thirteen?
Four flights down was a row of round steel doors, bolted on their hinges. One opened into an unexpectedly large room. The bed was on one side, a thick mattress and a heap of goose-feather pillows. On the other was a fireplace next to which was a heap of short logs. In the cupboard were towels and clothes.
I stood under the shower for twenty minutes, enjoying the rush of very hot water and the clean odor of soap on my skin. When I wiped the steam off the mirror to check my reflection, I could hardly recognize myself in the glass.
I dried myself and built a fire, placing the logs in a pyramid. They turned orange in no time, the smoke disappearing immediately into the flue. There was music available on a bedside speaker. The real deal from the old world: xylophone performances from Lourenço Marques, calabash harp bands which had once played behind the marble columns of colonial railway stations. For a mousetrap, it was comfortable.
I put the lights on dim, lay on the bed wrapped in the towel. Before I knew it, I was out. I dreamt of Marrakesh and women with pale complexions, waking in the near darkness to listen to the throb of the recycling unit. Then I went back to sleep, woke, slept. I finally came to myself many hours later. There was no sign of whether it was day or night, only the same low light in the corridor. The fire was out, leaving no scent of smoke.
I had dreamt something important, concerning the Agency, and I wanted to write it down right away. But it became more elusive the more I tried to remember, as intangible as a hologram. It had some relation to the Day of the Dead.
I thought about S Natanson sending his wife back days before the supernova, although she’d failed to convince the world governments about the dangers. He’d spent the rest of his life in thrall to her last grainy picture, under the old yellow sun, when the skies shone emerald and every radio and television set crackled for the last time. He had become our myth. And yet he had been no more than an ordinary man with a thin neck and freckles.
At the time of my furlough, there was an air of unreality at Internal Section, probably throughout the Agency and the key institutions of the foreign service. The constant security checks and inspections, the surveillance devices posted to the doors, the need to use typewriters and account for every sheet of paper, the orders to lock every drawer when you left your desk even for a minute, meant that Internal Section was in a state of upheaval. Many case officers worked nearly around the clock, settled at their stations at six in the morning, scarcely budging except to collect a cup of coffee or a boiled yam drizzled with syrup from a passing cart.
I didn’t get much of a chance to pursue my own suspicions about Akiko, about the vibrations in her voice. There was no room for conversation, only the chatter of typewriters and the ringing of their bells at the end of each line. Some agents smoked pipes or electric cigarettes in the hallway, trying to restore their nerves, but they stood apart from one another as if to prevent any suspicion of conspiracy. There were stringent controls on documentation. At the end of a four-hour shift, everybody handed in the paper on which they had been writing, and received blocks of blank paper and a blank typewriter cartridge in return. Before I could go to sleep I went through a scanner, and if I wanted to go topside, I had to go through the gauntlet again. I could see the tiredness in the others’ postures, as if they were merely clothes dangling on a hanger.
Other than that, I was unsupervised except for occasional interactions with Akiko Thirteen, who became my default handler. I went on with certain tasks assigned to me as part of my rehabilitation. I answered more questions about Marrakesh and about my reactions to events as they’d unfolded.
The consultant on point put together a holographic map of the important locations, from the hotel to the graveyard, providing an overview to set alongside the probability diagrams which I couldn’t read. It focused a good deal of its interest on the inside of the Green Dolphin, asking me questions about the fine details of the conversation I had had with Muller and his companion, lights running continuously around the bones of its burnt copper skull.
I found the process tortuous and told myself that working in the foreign service meant learning to repeat yourself ad infinitum, no different from the old-world myth, set out in one of the favorite films of Shanumi Six, in which a man had to live a single day of his life over and over again until it could never be lived more perfectly. I was an ordinary person of the century, had an ordinary heart, ordinary indoctrination. The idea of eternal recurrence was one I could not separate from the accompanying shudder of horror.
The air of unreality underneath the surface was also my creation. If I started to think about reality, I became paranoid that the details had changed in my absence. That I had returned to a place in which the color of the sky was subtly different, and the voices of cats and dogs, men and women, had shifted ever so slightly in timbre. Even my father’s conduct struck me as altered in some indefinable way. In the old days, he would have said what he thought out loud and left it for the secret government to worry about the consequences. He wouldn’t have resorted to a postcard, inscribed with a mere five words, that had been entrusted to a malfunctioning cart. Beware. Beware. Beware.
But that was only if I started to think. In a punishment battalion, you weren’t expected to think for yourself. The anguish I experienced wasn’t unique. On the contrary. A few short days had passed since the prime numbers had been factored, as easily as if Muller had been parting a wishbone with his hands. Hundreds of operations had been disrupted, not to say the validity of the library of the past and the future.
For example: Muller’s arrival had made mincemeat of the Agency’s reputation for competence. Certain historians, and conspiracy theorists, had crafted a fantasy in which every coincidence and surprise from the old world was attributed to the intervention of a foreign service element, the notorious invisible hand. I could see why they had created this fantasy. It made a good story, something to frighten the constitutionalis
t in each person’s breast.
In theory, only in theory, the Agency could make it so that an enemy had never been born. It could ensure that he was swept away in an epidemic, or that he took vows on attaining his majority and entered a monastery for the contemplation of infinite virtual worlds, never to be heard from again. It could apply neural coercion and bend a rival to its dictates like a Möbius strip so that nobody would know—not even the unfortunate candidate—whether he was a double, triple, or quadruple agent.
But it was a fantasy all the same. As a result of outside pressure to protect the historical thread and prevent causal loops, and of its own sincere adherence to the doctrines of S Natanson, the Agency ran on a meagre energy budget dispensed by world government. Our principal activity was observation, not intervention. Not manipulation of the human soul as if these people were our slaves merely by dint of existing in the past. For the most part, the case officers in the field acted as an early warning system in case the hidden enemy emerged into the light of history. They were there, as well, to make sure that it never happened again.
One evening Lucan finished his engagement with the team of consultants earlier than anticipated. I had been hanging around near the door of his office, hoping to find out something that could be to my benefit. Lucan called me in and used it as a chance to catch up with my progress. First, he pulled me into one of the studios which were protected from eavesdropping up and down the timeline. The door closed.
After a minute a green light came on. The sound of the extractor fans was so loud, Lucan had to speak deliberately.
“Either it’s you or there’s a mole, Agent Eleven. But I believe it comes back to you in the end. Something to do with you.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible. I am a junior case officer and nothing more. I know that you don’t trust me but you should know that I don’t trust you either.”
Lucan looked at me as if I had set him a puzzle he didn’t have the slightest interest in solving. He went on without acknowledging my words. “Think about it from a counterintelligence point of view. You are the only one who came into contact with Keswyn Muller and lived to tell the tale. You sat across from him at a table in the Green Dolphin. Your Six was forced to take the black pill. As you already know, you occupy an uncommonly central location in this series of events which culminates in the destruction of our libraries. What if it was you who passed the code to Muller at the Green Dolphin? Forget what was in the past. What is in your future that should concern me?”
It felt as if the room were turning around me, a whirlwind about my ears. I sat down at the table, which had a pad of paper and pens with disappearing ink on it.
I found myself writing out the names of everybody I had met in the preceding days. Drawing a line under the list, I showed it to Lucan, and watched as the purple letters disappeared after a few seconds. I was growing used to Section’s love of antique gadgetry. Invisible ink which could be read by an electronic microscope. Self-consuming parchment which burnt when you drew a certain symbol. I drew another line, and in response the paper decomposed into ash which blew away in the breeze.
Lucan sat across from me, continued his explanation:
“I know who you’ve talked to, just as I know everybody in this place has talked to. If we eliminate you as a suspect, the problem originates in Agency, or in Section itself. If there is a mole, the DC wants to make his life as difficult as possible. You are our bait.”
I looked up at Lucan and pushed the pad of paper across the table. “And if there isn’t a mole?”
“There’s a mole or some other kind of leakage of information.”
“How can you be so sure? In all the centuries, in every scrap of data the Agency has collected, we have never found an organization dedicated to opposing us. The hidden enemy is nothing more than a suspicion.”
“If we found something, we would already have taken the necessary steps and you might not be aware. Someone like Muller, we will deal with according to our usual methods. But now you reflect on the broader set of facts. In Morocco somebody had advance knowledge of your arrival. First time in history. A Six was captured. First time in history.” Lucan counted the events on his hands. “The codes are exploited and an entire library is destroyed. First time in history. A super-long prime number is broken down, or seems to be broken down, a mathematical impossibility. For the first time since S Natanson, we are flying blind. We have no idea what’s coming in the future. Nor can we say what is happening in the past. So I would argue that we have to prepare for an adversary. Maybe even the one we have always feared is coming against us.”
“All right, given your justifiable suspicions, why am I still playing a role in this case?”
“Because you, my friend, saw Keswyn Muller in the flesh, and survived. One day—I hope very soon—you’re going to get a confession out of him. Until then, as I say, you’re our bait. Somebody is going to reveal themselves to you.”
“And how do I encourage that?”
Lucan got back on his feet and opened the door. “Don’t press so hard on the paper or you will leave a physical impression. And work on your Portuguese, please. Akiko is going to supervise the rest of your training.”
Akiko Thirteen alone, I believed, was immune to the madness. Throughout the day she was imperturbable, as serene as if she were preparing to pray. As a matter of doctrine, I thought, she couldn’t allow a sliver of chaos into her heart. The security checks didn’t worry her. At times of an inspection, whenever I saw her, she numbered her documents cheerfully, and handed in her papers to the cataloging cart without complaining. I didn’t know what her game was, but she was playing it very smoothly. Somehow it made me less worried about her ultimate purpose. I started to relax around her.
At midnight, instead of turning into a pumpkin, Akiko turned up at my desk and checked on my day’s progress. Her white shirt was crisp to the collar, her long black hair bound along a chopstick. She forced me to speak Portuguese with her for a few minutes, making her own assessment independent of the machines, and trying to show me where I tended to go wrong.
The consultant reported on my linguistic competence, generating a series of pie charts and syllable diagrams. At the end of the report, Akiko opened a keyboard and started communicating with the mind of the consultant directly. Her fingers flew over the keys without touching them. I imagined she would be great at old-fashioned piano.
“Is something wrong with what I’m saying?”
“Hold on a minute.”
Akiko finished making the changes and waited as the consultant’s brass head rose, its eyes flashing green to indicate it was back in operation. I thought, at that moment, that there was something reptilian about our machines—as if, at the back of their minds, they maintained their own views about our continued existence. But I dismissed the thought. It was too late to judge where human beings began and machines ended, where the darkest thoughts of one travelled and what constituted the most secret fantasies of the other. It was too difficult to say how far we dreamt of our own extinction and in what measure the machines longed to fulfill our suicidal wishes.
Before she left, Akiko continued in Portuguese:
“The resident in Rio happens to be a friend of mine, João Twenty. Everybody knows him as Joãozito. Maybe you’ll meet.”
“I hope to.”
She put her hand on the consultant’s shoulder. “But I am sorry to say it is the same problem as it was before. My friend Joãozito sent in a complaint about it two years ago. Nobody pays attention to a Twenty because they are on the scene and therefore, in the view of many, they are not reliable. They have supposedly been captured by foreign assumptions. But Joãozito made a very good point, in my opinion.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Akiko.”
“Brazilian Portuguese, in the period we’re considering, is quite different from Lisbon Portuguese, Porto,
or Sintra. They were teaching you to speak the Portuguese of the landed gentry. Sometimes, when you look at how we behave, when you look at how back-to-front our machines are taught to see the world, you would think we are still a colony.”
The conditions improved as Section established its routines. The Thirteens began to disappear to their rooms and there were more ordinary conversations in the corridors. More often than was necessary, a cart came by with coffee and squares of water chestnut cake.
I was thawing out myself. I woke up in the silence of my cubicle, showered in a flood of recycled water which tasted of chalk, threw on dungarees and sandals, passed into the facility under the watchful eyes of the guards, and continued my Portuguese instruction with whichever consultant could be spared. Thanks to Akiko’s intervention, I was taught to mouth the words properly, to speak in the musical fashion of a carioca, to adjust my hand signs, to converse about football with the proper authority, and, in general, to seem at home in Sao Paolo as much as in Lisbon, in Porto as in Minas Gerais.
Time was divided according to the rhythms of human absorption—one task for the morning, when you were closer to your dreams; one task for the afternoon, when you were readier to come to grips with the nitty-gritty of code-making and encryption. The instructors taught me to create ciphers, how to decode them, how to write messages that couldn’t be deciphered by any method available to the twentieth century and so could be left in a safe-deposit box for Section to collect in five hundred years. They showed me how to brew an undetectable poison in a bowl of blue fungus.
I ate my meals in the makeshift cafeteria, alone for the most part, taking no pleasure in the bean paste buns and processed yam strips. I sensed I was being recorded, a circumstance which drained the honesty out of my feelings. I tried to pursue my own questions with the consultants, especially about Shanumi and the mishap in Morocco, but, as anyone would know who had ever tried to get a straight answer out of a consultant, it was like shadowboxing. The answers I got weren’t so much vague as poetic—the mode the machines adopted when they wanted to keep a secret from a human being.
A Spy in Time Page 10