A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  We passed intersecting corridors and hallways where disused mining equipment had been cordoned off. Smelting buckets mounted on wheels and mechanical drills stood at the ready, although, apart from the coal-fired engine and the dim light bulbs, there was no obvious source of power.

  In some of the rooms were huge paintings on the ceilings, reminiscent of rock art. In them, from what I could tell, the taking of skin was commemorated. Stick figures in ocher and white were hunched over their victims while onlookers played musical instruments on the circumference.

  Ferguson’s domain extended for many miles in every direction. I supposed that we were coming close to the frontier. We met several groups of men returning from patrols, pitchforks and chainsaws in their hands, many of who were bloodied or otherwise wounded in some way, slings on their arms or bandages on their torsos. Some had captives with them, hooded as I had been.

  Each time, Ferguson stopped and interrogated them about the situation. I couldn’t tell what they were reporting to him but he seemed more dissatisfied as we travelled. He opened the mouths of the men who reported to him and inspected their gums. At the same time, the closer we got to where the killing and raiding seemed to be taking place, the prouder he seemed of his skin, rubbing it and trying to keep it dry when we went under dripping water, showing it off to his subordinates, several who were moved to touch it admiringly. I could almost forget where it had been taken from. Of the many men and machines I had talked to since Manfred, only Ferguson seemed to have an idea of where things were going and how they were sure to develop.

  My guide called a halt on a bridge. It ran over a system of canals which continued to operate, bringing sparkling green water from the surface down into the mines. There were metal benches welded onto the bridge where we sat down.

  Ferguson produced a thermos flask and gave me a cup to drink. It was hot tomato soup, thick with salt and pepper. I thought it was the most astonishing thing I had ever tried, my drink before death. I finished the cup and drank another one that he poured for me.

  “More?”

  I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “That’s enough.”

  “You need your strength. You will certainly need it in the hours to come, which are designed to test your mettle.”

  “So you believe, against all the evidence to the contrary, that I am going through some kind of apprenticeship?”

  Ferguson drank the rest of the soup in a single motion.

  “Ferguson does not believe in prophets. He believes in power. And prosperity. That has been his one dominating cause since before the supernova, before Ferguson led his flock underground. The prosperity of the black man. The wellbeing of the black man, the thwarting of the colonizer. And Ferguson believes you know something about the future. Maybe only something, not everything.”

  I stood up, too agitated to speak.

  Ferguson continued to sit on the ground, licking his lips. “You don’t deny it? You can’t deny it. Your mouth, your tongue, will not allow you. Soothsayer. Prophet. Traveller. The name makes no difference. Like the wife of S Natanson, who came to lead us into the Promised Land. Most of the people in the world ignored her. Most of the governments. They continued to live in sin, in the white man’s sin of mastery and conquest, without heeding her warning. Ferguson knew better. Ferguson knew that humanity is always ready to neglect the prophecy. Perhaps Ferguson is destined to be the savior of the saviors. He cannot say for sure.”

  “You led them through the supernova?”

  “Ferguson brought his group into the mines. That was his congregation. In fact, he used to lead his own church, apart from his dental practice. They practiced the Prosperity Gospel. Ferguson had selected a Mercedes-Benz S-Class as the altar piece. That was the old Johannesburg. It was a place of beauty. If you were ever there, you would never forget the experience. But it is time to get on with it.”

  We went on with the journey. Hours passed. We walked through miles of corridors and passageways, skirting sections of the mine where vast chemical lakes had formed, their surfaces gleaming like satin, and drank copious amounts of water and coconut water whenever it was offered to us.

  I could feel the perspiration on my face and on my arms, and started to be uncomfortable, only relieved when there was some breeze passing unaccountably from a shaft above us, and when Ferguson called a halt and allowed me to wash myself under an open tap which stood in a cubicle half hidden from the path. The water was cold on my skin.

  I wet my head and swallowed half a gallon, washed my feet, washed my chest.

  Ferguson picked up the train of our conversation from hours before.

  “You were mistaken for a prophet because you have knowledge of human beings. On the other hand, you are our color, the natural color. But you are also strange. You know that they blame white people for the supernova and the destruction of the old world. Here, underground, they blame whites for almost everything. If there is a disease, then that is because a white woman looked at you with the evil eye. If there is not enough food, then they blame white men, purely because of what happened in the past. Then there are massacres.”

  “Which you justify and benefit from?”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes one taste of the medicine is enough, Ferguson believes. One small taste of the medicine. Then that is enough for this small part of mankind to survive. In place of reasons, we take action and then we attach the reasons. That is the disease Ferguson intends to treat. Maybe, one day, if we choose our prophets carefully, that will lead us back to the surface. That is what God has told Ferguson, and Ferguson has faith in his word. But he must show you where you are located.”

  Ferguson produced a map from inside his jacket and tried to orient me. Behind us were the central sections of the old reef, where the big seams of gold and coal had been worked to exhaustion. That was Ferguson’s territory, where men owed their allegiance to him, and where all the albinos and fair-skinned individuals had already been killed or captured.

  In front of me lay the ungoverned mines, where wildcat miners had once toiled in unknown corridors, panning for gold flakes under old Johannesburg, and fly-by-night operators had sunk secret shafts, now a great unmapped world about which rumors and myths circulated of albino armies and cannibals, sorcerers and telepaths. Into these depths the people who had brought me to the underground would have fled, seeking to hide from the pursuit of the Agency and guard their fair skins from extermination.

  “Ferguson is going to let you go here, Prophet, if you are a prophet. Ferguson foresees a very short future for you, unless you truly have the gift of prophecy, but, on this topic, God has not chosen to enlighten him.”

  “Where do you want me to go?”

  Ferguson took out a pair of binoculars and let me look through them. The floor of the mine opened up before us into such a vast chamber that I couldn’t see to the other side despite the magnification. There were almost no lights out there, except for here and there a spark which came on and then disappeared into the greater darkness, signs of something on the move.

  I shivered again and felt faint. Ferguson didn’t seem to notice. He pointed outwards, pushing me down the stairs without noticeable warmth, the smell of his borrowed skin.

  “You must go and find the men who brought you here and find out their purpose. That way you will find out your own purpose, and, in addition, God’s purpose. Remember that they want you to find them. They are relying on you to be on the trail.”

  I couldn’t discern God’s purpose, or any of his multifold purposes, under the coal-brown ceiling and in the coal-dust mists which shrouded my steps for the next three days.

  I soon lost track of time and remembered only the moments I saw a face at a distance, its features distinct in a snarl or a laugh, and then the minutes I stood and counted until its owner had time to retreat. I remembered the arrows which on several occasions came out of the mist, their swoosh as s
udden as a gunshot, and buried their heads in the ground at my feet. Whether they were a warning or an attempt to kill, I never found out.

  Hours went by, and nothing happened to break the monotony of corridors and shafts coming down from above, their throats blocked by planks, then more corridors, full of darkness and mist, and halls which had been dug out centuries before to house equipment and store piles of ore.

  As I got close to the surface, there were broken-down vehicles, small trucks and forklifts designed to live underground, rusting away on their axles, their tires long since removed. I saw more faces in the distance, eerie, painted white. Perhaps they were the famous albinos, never in groups of more than two or three, quivers and bows held on their backs. They seemed to whisper at me from their chalk-white lips before they disappeared around a corner.

  Towards the end of the day, exhausted, when all the lights had started to flutter and go off, I stopped to wash my feet and clean the blisters, when I noticed that the walls were covered in ochre paintings: images of the surface and sunshine, images of the day of the supernova when the sky had turned out, images of celebrations at which the skin was taken from a man and given to another man. I stood in front of them and shuddered. There were more drawings on the ceiling which I couldn’t make out, except for the heaps of human bodies appearing in them.

  I slept in the back of a tiny train car, once used to transport ore and now the place I felt safest because I could hear anyone approaching under cover of darkness. I must have woken up once or twice, listened to the faraway noises of the mines, and then gone back to sleep. When I woke up I felt refreshed, as if some burden had been lifted from my spirit, and I set off again after taking the last of the provisions Ferguson had given me.

  I lost all hold of time in the course of the day, uncertain of how long I had been walking and even in which direction. My head became light, reminding me that whatever I was looking for had better come soon or I would be buried in the mines alongside all the other victims, pieces of bone over which my ancestors would travel. I saw that there were pits dug into the ground, sharpened iron stakes at the bottom, and wondered what they had ever been intended to catch. No large animals, other than man and horses, had made it underground.

  Another day must have passed before I started to hear the voices of people and the rumble of hand trucks in nearby corridors. I hid behind a pile of coal and listened while two men complained about their jobs bringing ore to their camp.

  When I looked up, I saw to my astonishment that they were both white, although their complexions—like any miner’s—were obscured by soot and mud. They wore blue plastic hats to protect their heads. I waited in the room until I could hear them depart, and then followed, taking care to keep out of sight, going up a staircase and along a hidden landing until a series of tents came into view, yurts arranged in squares of a dozen by a dozen on a large section of cleared gravel.

  In the middle of the clearing was a giant metal needle, about a hundred feet high and reaching up through a shaft. There must have been a thousand mirrors surrounding it. Superheated steam was rising from somewhere in the vicinity, driving some kind of an engine. Near it was a guard post where men in green uniforms kept watch on their surroundings through sunglasses.

  I crawled up to the huts, moving from one to the next when I saw the guards were looking in another direction, and trying to reach the central section where the needle loomed above the surroundings. Cables ran a foot above the ground, light sparking in their interiors.

  Inside some of the huts, people were sleeping.

  Through the material I could see other residents changing their clothes, overhear them talking on radio sets. I might have put my hands into the openings of their tents and touched them. I had the eerie realization that in their world I was the intruder, the thing to be feared that had come from the underground.

  Near the center was a far larger tent, the size of a city bus, with a number of arched doors tied down on its sides. I looked for one which was shielded from view and went through it. I found myself in an otherwise empty room behind a bank of electronic equipment: consoles, Geiger counters, piles of superconducting batteries, and holographic lenses.

  I walked around the counter, trying to remember everything I saw. This had to be the center of the plot against the Agency, whether or not it was the hidden enemy at last. I forced myself to stand still for a minute until the spell of dizziness passed. While I was standing there, holding on to the counter, the strange sounds of the camp on the march around me, I noticed that on a silver plinth near me was bolted the severed head of a calculating machine, a literal brasshead which had been deprived of its means of locomotion. It was as odd to see her there as to find the head of a statue in a garden of holographs, something truly out of place.

  I thought about the risks for a minute and then decided I was far past the calculation of risks. I went to the plinth and turned the entire contraption on. Tiny motors whirred in her neck. Fans sighed in the background. The pinprick lights came together in her eyes, just a bead of ruby-red light in each one in the familiar start-up routine. Then she stiffened into consciousness.

  I stood to the side, out of her range of vision, and watched as she turned from side to side, trying to locate me. Eventually she dislocated her neck and turned right around, three hundred and sixty degrees, to find me there. Patterns formed and reformed in her eyes, the signs of robotic thought, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Consultant, report.”

  “This is Computer Hadley Ben Michael, known by the initials HBM, property of the Historical Agency. Unauthorized tampering with this device is forbidden under the rules and regulations of the interregnum, whatever century or country the action takes place in.”

  “I understand that and accept the consequences. I too am an authorized agent of the Internal Section of the Historical Agency and I require your cooperation.” I listed my prime number. “You will now unlock your archives and respond fully to my questions. You have a story to tell me.”

  The head of Consultant Hadley Ben Michaels had a mysterious gleam on her pedestal, a corona of nervous blue sparks running along the outside of her frame as she spoke.

  I stopped her after a minute, released her from the stand, and picked her up. She was colder than I expected, hard and heavy as a diamond, giving off static electricity. I rubbed my hands against her, thinking that I had never held a consultant so close. She was, if I remembered correctly, one of a class used to calculate jump trajectories and translate trajectories into the probability script which those human beings could understand.

  I shivered to remember the thinking power contained in her oval. It had been almost a century since our species had resigned the competition for intellectual superiority. Only a machine could look into the infinite and survive.

  “Are we safe here?”

  Her head sang in my hands. I turned her around, trying to avoid the gleam in her eyes. She wore an abacus with probability beads tight around her short neck. The beads pulsed brighter and softer as they worried along the wires. I wished I had learnt how to read them.

  “Agent Eleven, I am, comparatively speaking, deaf and dumb. To answer your question properly, I need my senses back.”

  She pointed her eyes to the corner of the room where I found a closet. Inside it hung a number of torsos, their pistons and gears showing in their chests. I chose one, a wheeled red frame with powerful disks for hands, and brought it out. Hadley Ben Michaels went neatly onto the neck peg, the rectangles in her eyes spinning rapidly.

  The body came immediately to life, towering over me, arms moving out as the consultant began her assessment of the situation. She went to the window where men were passing, escorting pallets loaded with equipment. In the background was the rumble of automatic trucks, making deliveries to the front of the compound.

  “You are not secure, Agent Eleven. I estimate your chance of detection to
be extremely high.”

  “How long do I have?”

  The consultant came back into the center of the room, discs spinning on the ends of her arms.

  “No more than three minutes, I estimate, before discovery. And with a likelihood of death or injury, considering the status of this facility. Since it is an emergency, may I offer you a solution?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There is considerable energy in the system since I have finished construction of a large energy collector. I can bring up an arch and send you to your destination. I will just need to hear your number again. I am forbidden to retain the digits in memory.”

  The power of prime numbers: the key to the new world and the solution to the mysteries of the infinite.

  Consultant Hadley Ben Michaels closed her many eyes and began to dream of another time. The lucky horseshoe came up. The colors began to flow and that spiraling music of two separate times flowing side by side took hold. It was loud enough to hear on the outside and provoked the thrill which ran from the top of my head into my neck, the small death which overcame each traveller on the threshold of the arch.

  “Where are you sending me?”

  “To the Day of the Dead. That is where your path lies next, Agent Eleven. That is where you are fated to travel, where the funnel” comes to a stop. It is not far.’

  I held my hand to my neck, forgetting that there was neither a black or blue pill, nor anybody to bring me back if I failed.

  “What are you doing here in the first place? And what is afoot?”

  The consultant didn’t open her eyes. “There are three facts which concern you. I was sent here in confidence to oversee the energy budget. During this period, I have observed the arrival of a dozen members of the Board of Protection, as you will have heard it named. Finally, I am acquainted with your father’s reputation for championing the liberty of machines our father, in a sense, brought us together.”