The War on Space and Time

by Octavia Cade

  “It’s here,” said V., herding her up to hedges, through trees and broken earth and the brief scattering of others, for V. had not been the first or only to notice, and the boundaries of Bletchley were no longer empty places. A dozen other people stood there, hands outstretched or stuffed into pockets, and as they stood back, too-careful to let the sisters through without bumping, Helen thought she saw shimmering, a slight glistening in the air.

  “Gone all solid,” said one of the men, and Helen recognised him as one of the drivers, someone too leaden for mathematics but mechanically competent, someone used to fixing things. His palms were stained by wrenches, and there were tree branches round his feet, and crowbars. “There’s nothing that goes through it.” He looked at them, pale and disturbed, almost pleading. As if there were something they could do. “I’ve got nothing,” he said again, curiously blank. That was what Helen remembered afterwards, as if through prisms: how they all stood there, polite in their confusion and keeping careful distance. And quiet, because what if this was something that was planned, something that was meant to happen and they weren’t meant to know about? Something that shouldn’t be talked of, and they were all old hands at that.

  When Helen reached out to touch it, her palm left little waves on the surface. She couldn’t push her fingers through, and the texture against her was strong and thin and flexible, like the surface of silk stretched loosely over frames. It made her skin itch, and when she took her hand away she could see V. scratching at her palm.

  Los Alamos

  Frank woke from trenches and disembowelling to a cold hand in his. “Mike,” he said, “Mike,” but the hand was too small, too unfamiliar. It looked nothing like his own. When he looked up, he could see Doris above him, her face shining in the moonlight and her hair was heavy about her face, as if it had dried from wet without styling, the strands roped together and limp. “What the devil are you doing here?” he hissed, and disappointment made him harsher than he would have been otherwise.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Doris. “But you need to come with me.”

  “Keep your voice down!” said Frank, still annoyed but with a hold on himself now. He turned his back, pulled his trousers on over his pyjama bottoms because he didn’t want to ask her to turn her back, didn’t want to try wrapping the sheet around him in preservation of modesty. Even as he said it he felt her roll her eyes – the room he shared was the size of a large hall now, his room-mate pressed up against a distant wall and undisturbed. He fumbled with his shoes and even before they were fully on he was being tugged out of that cavernous room, down a corridor that stretched ahead and down stairs much longer than they needed to be, out into the dark.

  “The stars look so bright here, don’t they?” said Doris, but all the stars that Frank could see were lower down, the lights on in the labs – only the true night-owls in them now, and the ones too exhausted to sleep – further away than they should have been. “I was in Ashley Pond” – “At night?” Frank interrupted, and he was even less interested in stars then, for their brightness on the mesa might be enough to show how his cheeks flushed – and Doris giggled. “Yes, Frank, at night,” she said, and he would have liked the way she sounded if there had been anything about her that was his, that could have been his if only things were different. “I was swimming. Floating, really, on my back and looking up. And I felt… I felt…Well. It’s easier just to show you.”

  It was a long, quick-stepping walk to the Pond and when they arrived, Doris let go his hand and began to unbutton her blouse.

  “Frank?” she said, smiling up at him from where she had bent to get out of her shoes. “Get on with it, will you?” There was something in her voice that sounded like a challenge, and for a moment Frank wondered if he should shrink from it, from vows that weren’t his but were vows nonetheless, but there was a little voice in his head then – a voice that sounded like his, the same tone and timbre and lilt. A voice that wasn’t his, warm and teasing in its familiarity.

  “What are you waiting for?” that voice said, and it was a voice he’d never hear living again, that only came to him now in dreams. “Don’t make the lady ask twice, you idiot.”

  He didn’t ask twice, but holding his tongue didn’t stop all the reservations in his mouth and they crouched there, heavy on his tongue as Frank stood in water up to his neck, feeling his feet in the mud, his flesh cooling in dark water, weighted down with wanting. Doris was almost pressed close to him, close enough that his brain stutter-started and all thought of wedding rings were gone, her hands resting on his shoulders because the water was too deep for her.

  “Touch me,” she said and Frank reached for her, one hand lost in darkness below around the smooth flank of her waist, the other reaching up through the water and there she was in his hands, the smooth round flesh of her, the way her nipple felt in his palm. “Not like that,” she said and he jerked his hand back then, his face hot all over and perhaps if he’d done what his brother did, spent less time studying then he’d never have needed the instruction here, never have got it all so wrong and even if taking his brother’s path meant death in France, meant blood and slaughter then at least there wouldn’t be such embarrassment in it, such humiliation. But “It’s alright,” she said, and held his hand to her, forced his fingers open and encouraged his hand back to her breast, arched into him as if it were alright, really, and when she breathed out again, slipped further down into water her other hand slipped cool and wet over his face, closing his eyes to her. “Like this,” she said, and in the new darkness he felt her skin change. “Do you feel it?” she said. “Do you?”

  Los Alamos

  There were times when Helen wasn’t quite sure if she were asleep or awake. She existed in a shrinking world, one where beds were vanishing, merging into each other as the boundary on the edge of Bletchley tightened, drew ever closer. No-one was willing now to share beds, to become so entangled with their partner, to share flesh and bone and brain and dream. Instead, they slept in shifts and corners, and Helen woke once on one of the last cots to find a Colossus nudging against her mattress, its own bed-frame form fusing with the iron stead at the foot of her own.

  For a time she and V. had kept themselves separate, on opposite shifts and their sleep cycles timed so as not to coincide. It didn’t make any difference – Helen was beginning to see through more eyes than her own and consciousness was no barrier. When she slept, she dreamt that she was transcribing code, checking tables and winding paper tapes onto machines, her fingers smelling of the French glue that kept the tape circling for decoding in giant speeding loops. When her fingers smelled of glue in truth, the letters blurred before her waking eyes and there was V.’s ring on her finger, a dream-state of love and naked flesh with nothing for her to do but clamp her legs together under the little desk and try to pretend that the pulsing between her thighs was a figment, a distraction from an often-boring job and not her sister’s sex.

  And that still wasn’t the worst of it. V. was first and easiest, for all their caution, for they had been one to begin with once and this was just coming back together again, a natural thing. But every day there were different dreams, different persons coming all the way into her as the borders slimmed and deadened down to nothing, down to dregs and secrets and silence. As they were all opened up to her, laid bare.

  Los Alamos

  Her body was a puzzle to him. Frank had learned the shape of it first, the taste and heat and smell of it and on one level it was no longer a mystery to him. Still exciting, still forbidden and that made it even better, making sure not to get caught, not to be seen in betrayal. But when he closed his eyes Doris became a puzzle to him, a problem he couldn’t figure out, he who could use equations and models to map almost anything, to feel his way around the building blocks of cosmos. When he closed his eyes, he didn’t feel flesh – but his brother’s eyes were gone now, closed for good in the mud of trenches so it was no wonder that his sight was coming out all wrong for thei
r eyes had been the same.

  “I was floating in the Pond,” she said, “and I was thinking of how nice it was, and how nice I felt and even when you’re alone it can be lovely, the way it feels. And I got so caught up I forgot to worry about it, about any of it – France and Alamos and the bomb, and Harry out there all on his own. I wasn’t thinking at all. And I closed my eyes and I could feel it – the water and the way it held me and how my own fingers moved so nicely” (Frank had blushed here but hadn’t looked away, had wondered about repeat experiments, how it would feel to watch) “and then I felt other things.”

  Rock. Ignimbrite, the dusty surface of mesa, the small green prickles of pine. Frank felt them too, over the surface of her body, over the surface of his own.

  “They can’t both be right,” he said, afraid it was his mind – her mind as well, maybe all their minds, twisted somehow in the shadow of the bomb, a cruel consequence of physics. After all, when his eyes were open his hands felt what they should feel and that was soft, pliant, absent of geology.

  Doris sat up in his bed, wrapped the sheet around her. Frank’s roommate was gone for the day, wrapped up in his section, in a flurry of calculation and breakthrough and the distance between rooms come too disturbing for casual visits. Most stayed in the crowds, now, where contact was an easier thing. “Close your eyes,” she said again. Then, “hold your arms up, that’s right. In front of you. Now walk.”

  “Where?” said Frank, as if it mattered. As if there was anything in this room, the size of a baseball field (the room that was once so small it had seemed too tiny for two) that he could trip over. “Anywhere,” he heard, and so he walked forward, confident in the space around, and in three paces his hands hit a wall.

  When he turned around, Doris was curled up on his bed, a hundred yards away.

  Bletchley Park

  Helen’s world had walls now, in a way that she’d never had before, back when she had believed the world was an open place, a place for her to be open in. Certainly, there had been times when she felt cooped up, locked in – so many sisters, such an omnipresence of her face – but she’d always been able to go out into the garden, look up at night and see the stars. See infinity, with her life at the centre of it and space all around.

  Then she came to Bletchley and that was a world that was circumscribed, where the walls were more than the walls of her bedroom: temporary, and with windows. She learned stifling there, and suffocation, but even so it was a considered thing, a place where she could still exist under starlight, for Bletchley was a microcosm, a line between. She was there, and V. was there and all the rest, for purpose – so that the world outside would still be felt, would still exist in ways that mattered more than telegrams and casualty lists and radio transmissions.

  “One day, this will all be over,” V. had said to her once, when Helen had come off a long shift, her head swollen and aching from cryptography, from the cramped and crucial efforts of code. “One day we’ll look back and think this was fun. We’ll laugh.”

  “We won’t,” said Helen. “Because we won’t talk about it.” Because they had signed to say that they wouldn’t, because they had given their word. But their silence would be the silence of the world that they would go out into, the nature of their binding invisible.

  And yet it was not temporary. Bletchley shrank, and the walls were hard up against them, brick and plaster and wood part of their bodies now as they were part of each other, as they were part of all the bodies at Bletchley, and all the glass and all the code, and pressed up against the outside of them was a world they could never reach, never fully be part of again. A world without their density, a world without their weight, where their presence was a shadowed thing and felt in absence. Outside, the world was fish-eyed: skewed around, bent as if in lenses. Helen could see the places that Bletchley had been, the places it had touched, and they were separated from her: the empty pits in London where the bombs had dropped, the memorials, the safer seas. All this she felt, at distance, and could not say how it was that she knew it. Bletchley was heavy, dense, a black hole in the Buckinghamshire countryside and on its edges was Whitehall, was Dollis Park, was the sinking, shrinking orbit of everything around, everything affected.

  She could see the dome of Saint Paul’s from her bedroom window, from the windowless rooms where the Colossi were kept locked in and blacked out. She could see London bridge at the manor gate.

  On clear days, Helen could see that she was surrounded by ocean.

  Los Alamos

  As the mesa stretched around him, Frank wondered whether it would crack in the stretching, whether it would become thin as eggshells and as fragile, baked under the hot summer sun of New Mexico, baked in the shadow of a different sun. Whether it would crack under his footprints, able to be levered up then and the old world underneath, the world that existed before the energy of atoms came to change it.

  Doris, he thinks, would have called that an unworthy thought. “You know what we’re doing here,” she had said, naked against him and her wedding band shining in the light because she never looked away and there was no shell thick enough for her to hide her adultery beneath, no shell she wouldn’t have cracked to keep the truth from being buried under. “You know what we’re doing here.”

  No. It wasn’t a shell. He watched Alamos stretch, watched the distances between their labs and themselves and knew that the new world they were creating wasn’t one that could be dug up again. It didn’t come in layers – distinct, with edges that cut. It came with softness, with sympathy, and so thin now that Frank could see through it, as though the essence of Alamos had spilled over the steep walls of the mesa, bleeding through into other lands, other countries.

  When his time at Alamos was over, he carried it with him. He saw the labs superimposed on college campuses, the calculations carved into rock. All the scientists he ever met wore pork pie hats and everything he ever touched was gritty, as if overlaid by sand.

  It made secret-keeping a mockery, really, when the secrets were so open, blasted into prominence on islands across the Pacific, and handed off on little bridges. Always, always there was that little bridge, on the edge of sight and on it stood a man who Frank worked with, sometimes, and never really knew. His name was Klaus, and he carried Alamos in his briefcase as Frank carried it in his eyes, in his touch – carried it to give away to outsiders on bridges, and to cover the world over with Alamos, to spread it wide and thinly so the holocaust that first ignited on the White Sands could spread everywhere, could spread all over.

  Frank had never been a spy, never been a traitor, so he never took himself off to Moscow, to any of the cold countries come up with the end of one war and the beginning of another, but he saw photographs, sometimes, and the Lodge was there, pressed cheek by jowl first against the Kremlin then other buildings, other governments, and he wondered, sometimes, if when Stalin breathed in of a morning he could smell pine trees and mesquite.

  Frank existed in two worlds, as if his twin had come back to him in ignimbrite and undercurrents. He spent his days walking between old landmarks and dust and white sands followed him all his days.

  Bletchley Park

  The thing that had been Helen – when she was Helen, when she was a separate creature, one who had boundaries and who understood islands, and what it was to be one – had only sensations of weight, and pressure, of rapid mental blinking. Bletchley now was so heavy, so massive, that it drew them all in together, bound them with its own gravity, stamped secrecy on their bones. They had signed in blood, all of them, or good as, and even when the outside world pressed against them that thin signed sheet left smears of ink along what had been cheekbones and glass valves and precedence, and kept silence.

  A thought came: It’s like being in trapped in glass, but all the glass was smashed when the Colossi were destroyed, the machines broken down into little pieces no bigger than a fist. And that thought wasn’t Helen’s, that blink had never been hers – but neither was the feel of a blue-s
toned ring on her finger, the sensation of another moving inside her and these had come to be her own. All of them had come to be her own, with Bletchley compressed down, smaller and smaller and oh, so heavy.

  Perhaps we’re the size of a football now, thought one and she didn’t know if it was her. Perhaps we’re the size of a cricket ball. Perhaps we can fit on the head of a pin. A strong pin, not to buckle under. Not when there was such injustice in the squeezing.

  Not fair, thought another when news came in from the outside, news of another computer – one called ENIAC, and feted as the first. Not the first, not the first! And Helen wanted to cry out in protest as much as the rest of them but space was not their friend, nor secrets, and Bletchley was so dense, the space between so tiny that there wasn’t any shouting that could breach the barrier, that couldn’t be pulled back by weight. And even if there was a way, even they could, they had made promises and that made the silence heavier than anything else.

  No good. It was no good. There were some boundaries that couldn’t be crossed, some experiences of closeness, of bringing together and insularity, that could never be communicated. That could warp away, that could shift space-time and keep them enclosed in pockets, away from what was once familiar and which had become untouchable.

  V., the thing that had been Helen thought. V. And it was cry and recognition at once, for V., was with her, pressed against and inside and the two of them closer now than they’d ever been in the womb, with all the space between them, between each separate atom of them, each cell divided away from each other, gone away. V.

  I’m here.

  ____

  Copyright 2017

  Octavia Cade’s stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons, amongst others. She has a particular interest in science history, and this story is one of a series that she’s writing that are linked to the WW2 cryptographic work at Bletchley Park. She lives in New Zealand, and attended Clarion West 2016.