When Akiko offered to ask Lucan to give me the chance to visit my father again, I turned her down. Although I was no more removed from my previous life than a ten-minute ride, I felt as if I had been separated from it by centuries and that it would be too painful to return without some resolution of the charges over my head.
Up top, the season was changing. Thunderstorms alternated with cascades of hail, the stones hard enough to dent the roofs of automatic trucks. It got colder down below. I spent my free time catching up on old holograms and romantic biopics, the logs crackling in the background. I watched many hours of television from the old world, not sure whether I was doing it for the sake of personal development or because I wanted the shade of Shanumi Six to look kindly upon me.
One day, Akiko Thirteen came to find me at my desk. She first took a look at my results and nodded, then switched the consultant off unceremoniously, giving me her cup of green tea to hold.
“Come and listen.”
“What is it?”
“The DC is here.”
The main hall was already deserted. We went through the adjoining rooms, past empty tables bearing typewriters and sheaves of carbon paper, and along the corridors which led to the auditorium. There was a banner up at the front of the hall, candles set in a lead menorah, and various flags and trophies displayed in glass cabinets. The seats were taken so we sat in the aisle. There was no idle chatter, only the spectacle of a hundred agents studying their notebooks or filling in their document sheets. The consultants stood against the wall in the manner of off-duty machines, stripes of light passing from chassis to chassis. Their cone-shaped heads leant on the brass shoulders of the neighbor.
The door behind the stage opened, allowing a woman with silver-white hair to enter. She relied on a cane and a white robe over her shoulders. Over it ran a chain bearing a tiny gold statue of the Buddha. She stood in front of us for a minute, out of breath, and laid out a series of notecards on the lectern. Then she looked around, as if counting the people in the audience. Her eyes were as silver as her hair.
The DC talked breathlessly but without hesitation. “Under ordinary circumstances we work. But these are not ordinary circumstances. They are extraordinary ones, which demand that we work together with the utmost intensity. Our intelligence holdings have been compromised, as you know, almost across the board. Many of our residents have been abandoned in the field and, to our distress, might never return to us. If ever there was a time for the hidden enemy to come close, this would be it.”
Above us the solar plant began to sigh. Once a day the panels reversed their polarity and orientation. I saw the DC’s hands were blue where they supported her weight. and I wondered why, unlike my father, she didn’t have a cart to assist her. She went on with her talk, her eyes glowing unexpectedly.
“No matter how bleak, however, reasons for optimism exist. We continue to observe our activities in the recent past, as well as the near future. Barring a reversal in the cloud of possibilities, the consultants see the Agency continuing to operate to the horizon of our observations, although naturally we cannot be so sure about the future where Section is concerned because it is in the nature of Section to conceal itself. We believe that the line of Directors in Century remains unbroken from S Natanson to a point many thousands of years from now when the restricted centuries commence. I have authorized a dozen missions to launch in the next fortnight, which should contribute to a consolidation of our power and a rebuke to those who have brought suffering and death into our ranks. Controlling the leakage of information is always the key to success in counterintelligence. And so, the only individuals who can really defeat us are the people in this room. Be on the lookout for any sign of loose lips. Finally, remember that, if we can see them, our adversaries may be looking right back at us.”
When the meeting broke up, Akiko Thirteen led me back to the main hall where the typewriters were silent.
“Shall we go upstairs, Agent Eleven?”
“What do you mean, upstairs?”
“To the surface. How long since you’ve been out?”
“Are we really allowed to go?”
“At the moment I cannot stand to be inside.”
Going through the checkpoints in reverse took a quarter of an hour. The ceilings were low and the lights were harsh.
It wasn’t until we went past the labyrinth of stairs and hallways, through the tropical interior of the plant, and were in the open, that I realized how much I had missed sunshine and fresh air. The funfair was nearby, colored light bulbs glowing quietly. The cars of the roller-coasters and the adjoining merry-go-round, loaded with sculpted horses, sat in the lovely yellow daylight. I wondered what their wooden ears managed to hear.
Without discussing it, we went in the direction of the funfair, walking through lanes set in the forest of electric panels until we came to double lines of barbed wire. There were robots working on the tracks behind the wire.
The building housing the artificial beach had opened its sliding doors, revealing the thousands of yards of perfect white sand, deserted at this time of day, and the wonder of a foam-flecked indoor ocean.
I closed my eyes, felt a wind on my face, and thought what it was like to be on holiday: to be on the sand with my father and sister at Tofo Beach, standing among the coconut palms, where the crabs commanded the rock pools in the daytime and burnt on the coal grills in the warm evening. I remembered the heat of the sand on my feet.
“Good to be outside?”
“I can’t tell you how much.” I closed my eyes again. “Akiko, I am living in a story where I am doomed to be buried, only to be dug up and reburied.”
“It’s not something the foreign service trains you for. Shall we go over?”
The park was almost ready to open. It was attended by a mixture of robots and human staff, each with a beehive hairdo and platform shoes, waiting to help us and attend to our every desire to spend money.
The place had the appropriate Kente uniforms and crossbones decorations. Buildings boasted cowhide roofs, stretched on pins, and cowhide shields instead of doors. At the open-air counters, you could be served coconut water by robotic hands, or sugared termites on a stick, or yams in many different preparations, their shaved orange bodies lying ready in pails of water. You could walk underneath the scaffolding of the various rides, past the water slides and the illuminated fountains, and enjoy the fact that there were no other guests in earshot. Behind the rollercoaster tracks was an amphitheater where we sat on the steps and watched the blue-and-yellow lights running along the sides of the tracks. We stood in front and waited for the door to open. When it did, we took a seat in the first car.
After another minute, the doors along the loading berth closed, to the accompaniment of a horn. The cars, empty apart from one or two other riders, clattered up the first slope. We buckled in. Our car almost came to a halt again at the very top, and then gradually but with growing momentum accelerated down and around the bend and into the first loop.
I said, “I don’t know how you manage to work underground every day. To choose to go underground every morning. To me it’s like allowing yourself to be buried.”
“This is new. Before Muller, we rented a floor not far from Constitution Hill. I had a view of the Carlton Centre. Speaking as a counterintelligence officer, we were out in the open. In retrospect, it was sinful. We were asking for problems. We became arrogant.”
“So this has changed your life as well?”
“We used to be a backwater in the Agency, a place for unpopular people who cared about codes and observational parameters. Now we have the power of life and death, the power to choose who lives, dies, who has the right to knowledge. Who has the right to know what is going to happen to them. What do you think?”
I wasn’t sure what Akiko wanted me to say. Or why, for that matter, she was relaying this information to me. Still, I liked list
ening to the sound of her voice as long as it lasted.
I said, “Difficult to answer in the abstract.”
“When it comes to deciding about the lives of our colleagues, do I have the right? Do you have the right?”
I wondered about Akiko as the rollercoaster gathered momentum for the upward slope. She was as calm as ever, a still point in a turning world, her hair turned around its chopstick. She was very close to me and said nothing. Yet I had the sense that something was happening between us. That she had intended something to happen and to reveal something. It wasn’t desire. I wasn’t necessarily attracted to her, although her complexion was as dark as ebony. I didn’t want to hold her in my arms. And yet the awareness had stolen over me in the same way as a feeling of love, like a secret unveiling itself. I had been on the same rollercoaster as a child, and I had the sensation of something repeating itself across the decades.
When the car got to the top of the second larger hill, I turned to her and put my hand on her shoulder.
“So you are trying to tell me something, Akiko?”
“You are going to have to make those choices yourself, Enver. What will you choose to do? As I said, you are going to meet a resident who is a friend of mine, someone we keep permanently on station as a representative of Section.”
“Does he like the work? I can’t imagine being on foreign assignment twenty-four hours a day. You never get to relax and be yourself.”
As I said the words out loud, I realized how nonsensical they were. In any case, Akiko ignored them. The car began to move again, slowly at first.
“In sensitive regions, it may be worth the energy cost to have someone present over the longer duration, someone with demonstrated expertise and sensitivity. The residency program has been expanding for that reason. The DC authorizes on a case-by-case basis. Thanks to your friend Muller, we have residents scattered through the centuries. They think they’re going to live and come back home.”
“But they’re going to die out there instead?”
“In some cases, we know when, and in what manner, but there is a question of what we should tell them.”
“And what do you think?”
Akiko paused while the rollercoaster ran amok. We went into the loop at a hundred miles per hour, came to a stop at the top, and hung upside down on the seatbelts. The three-decker coal trains on the nearby track stretched to the horizon, thousands of rusted carriages in slow motion. I thought I was going to fall into the landscape. Akiko didn’t seem in the slightest bit nervous.
She went on as if we were sitting across from each other in a seminar room. “I think every person has a right to understand their own destiny. The doctrine of S Natanson is why I signed with Agency. It starts from the premise that every life has dignity in its own epoch, that it can’t be tampered with at the whim of the future government.”
The car we were in began to move again and I clung to my seat, knowing that what was coming would be bad. “If you want to tell me your principles, Akiko, why the theater? Why are you tormenting me on this ride?”
“Because you are going to be in Brazil, as you know, once your Portuguese has reached a certain level. In Rio, you’ll have to work with the resident, João Twenty. We know from our paper records that he will be murdered the day you are scheduled to exit.”
I looked at Akiko, trying to read her expression as a professional duty, and failed. I steadied myself on the handlebar as the car bucked and swayed with us inside it. “And you think if I know that, I can try to prevent it?”
“I am not asking for you to violate any operational understandings,” she said, suddenly breathless from the ride. “I am asking that you don’t do anything to complete the causation. That is João’s only hope for escape. And in any case, why should we be responsible for killing our own? That is what I’m truly afraid of, that an action of our own will lead to his death. Maybe you are the murderer and you don’t know it yet. Maybe you are.”
I didn’t reply immediately. The car was flying along the track faster than I could think. I held my breath until it had started to slow again. On the one hand, I was relieved if everything I had sensed about Akiko—everything I had sensed was wrong—came down to a mere love story. No treason against the system, as my father had feared, but an affair of that ridiculous organ, the heart, which knew nothing about the passage of time. She was a spy who loved a spy, the saddest story that ever was. On the other hand, I was thinking about what Akiko was asking me to do. Energy conservation and minimal intervention were principles I believed in. I didn’t like the idea that I would be at the scene of a second crime.
Akiko interpreted my silence as disagreement. When the doors of the rollercoaster opened, she leant near to me for a moment, as if she were going to put her lips on my ear.
She said, “If it helps you to dismiss what I am saying, you should know that I am anything but impartial. I should confess that I was in love with João once.”
Thanks to Akiko’s confession, I felt guilty before the fact of another man’s murder, someone I had never even met, who went by the unlikely name of Joãozito. But I didn’t have much time to enjoy this guilt.
I was arrested at three o’clock in the morning. The door to my suite opened and someone placed a hood over my head. I was brought to my feet without any instruction being uttered. A security band was placed over my arms, tightened until it had my body in its hold. I had never been placed in custody in this fashion, but it wasn’t uncomfortable so long as I obeyed its instructions. If I wanted to go in the wrong direction, it pressed in, squeezing the breath out of me, until I changed direction. I wondered how far it would go if I disobeyed.
I was taken blind up the staircase, punch-drunk from sleep, and delivered to the office where the hood was removed from behind.
Lucan Thirteen was waiting for me. He was studying a map, his expression even more somber than usual. He didn’t make an effort to look up.
“Do you have some insight into your situation, Agent Eleven? You’re on furlough, on a charge of suspected treason for the dissemination of a prime, with enough mathematics against you to sustain an automatic conviction, and yet you are receiving prohibited information, making plans to subvert operational imperatives.”
I took a deep breath. The circle around my waist contracted. Lucan motioned me to the chair where I sat down. It was no more comfortable than standing. I could sense that there were guards behind me but I didn’t turn around.
“Akiko didn’t tell me much. She suggested Brazil, which I could have guessed from the fact that I’m learning that variety of Portuguese.” I found something in his face which told me not to skirt the truth. “Besides, you know exactly what she told me. You must have had it prerecorded. Then you must also know that she said nothing beyond the bounds of what is humane.”
“Correct.”
“I won’t say you encouraged it, but you knew about it and you allowed it to happen. You allowed Akiko to ruin her life.”
“Her rights and responsibilities under the Constitution will be protected under any process up to and including historical repudiation. We couldn’t charge her from a recording, as you should know. Prophecy does not count as evidence. But your suspicions are correct. It has happened exactly as the consultant predicted. The same one, by the way, which was teaching you Portuguese.”
I tried to think about the situation like a case officer rather than the culprit. I didn’t have time to feel resentment towards a machine. “You’ve let Akiko martyr herself in order to get an un-attributable message to me? Is that the idea?”
“I don’t have to repeat myself, Agent Eleven, on a day that you broke the rules. There are no martyrs under the Constitution.”
I cursed the Constitution under my breath, not to say the ways that it encouraged Lucan to twist and turn its very words. What was a Constitution but the dream of the tripods? Who did the Constitutio
n truly protect? What did it help to have rights and responsibilities when you could be disappeared more completely than by any secret police? This Constitution made it possible for human beings to do anything to other humans, preserving their good conscience. No one so immune to pity as a constitutionalist; no one so certain of his righteousness and so sure that a bright line divided law and what was unjust. I would rather live under a dictatorship, in the dark forest of the twentieth century, than under this Constitution which hardened our hearts.
But it would have been useless to bring up the Constitution with Lucan, or any of the Thirteens. They had business to get on with. Given the rising cost in terms of energy, they had to send me back to Brazil, June 1967—if they were going to send me at all—before the consequences of Akiko’s revelation played themselves out fully in the present.
I found out for sure when Lucan put a road atlas in the center of his desk and opened it to a bookmarked page. He smoothed out the creases.
I recognized the location at once. “Akiko was telling the truth.”
“It is Rio, yes. Our agent, as you know from Akiko, is already on the ground, in residence, as the bookkeeper for a Venezuelan company. He picked up Muller’s trail two weeks ago, ironically thanks to his expertise with tax records. Apart from him, as I weigh up the operational circumstances you are the only one who has face-to-face acquaintance with Muller.” Lucan paused. His eyes were almost completely closed, slashes in the helmet of his face. “Let me caution you. On this mission, for the first time, you will be acting on behalf of Section and in accordance with its rules.”
“Meaning that I can’t tell your resident his destiny. Meaning that I have to leave him to die.”
“Meaning that, if it comes to that, and only if it comes to that.”
A Spy in Time Page 11