‘So no idea, is what you’re saying. Cross-reference: Diana Hunter.’
– No connection found with: Diana Hunter.
‘Cross-reference with: Fire Judges. Skip the historical stuff.’
– No connections. Fire can in some cases be a synonym for an emergency or a closing down, hence ‘fire sale’. It is often linked with purification and destruction, but also, as in the case of the phoenix, with rebirth. The Fire Judges might therefore be the arbiters of a new beginning, or a crisis.
‘Or they could be going cheap until Saturday.’
– That is an interpretation, the Witness agrees, and the lack of inflection makes it sound ironically bland.
‘Is there a band? A musical group? Check venues close to the Thames.’
– I have. There is not.
She’s never comfortable with that ‘I’ – not because she thinks it augurs some sort of awakening, but because she knows it does not. The Chinese room is empty. There is no god in the machine, just a very sophisticated card index. It should not pretend to experience.
A while later, she realises she has stopped asking questions and that she is falling asleep. The copper inside wants to push on, but the rest of her is comfortable, and tired. The machine was right: concussion is exhausting. She rests her head in the deep comfort of the pillow, enjoying the slight coarseness of the weave, the smell of disinfectant on the floor.
*
‘Call Tubman.’
– Rest is still recommended.
‘I will get up and I will do aerobic exercise.’
– That is not recommended.
‘Call Tubman.’
– Calling.
She snorts, and waits for Tubman to pick up the call. It takes longer than with most people, partly because Tubman tends to leave his terminal off when he’s working, and partly because, as a man who welds and solders, he distrusts haste.
‘’Ullo?’
‘Tubman? I need your brain. Is that okay?’
She could have asked the Witness, and it would have moved Tubman’s meetings for her. Like her own, Tubman’s working days belong to the System, and even if they didn’t normally, this case has a very high priority score. Tubman wouldn’t mind if she just loaded a pre-empt into the calendar and took as much of his time as she wanted – but that is exactly why she feels she has to ask.
‘Always got time to play Watson for my favourite copper,’ he says. ‘You know that.’
‘You’re not busy?’
Tubman blows an actual raspberry. ‘For God’s sake, Mielikki,’ he says, ‘don’t be daft. Glad to help. But,’ he adds, as she prepares another round of apology, ‘don’t waste any more breath being charming about it. I hate charm.’ And so she has to promise to come directly, which is what they both knew would happen. A moment later, her terminal opens a sidebar and she can watch his schedule emptying for the rest of the morning. Each cancellation makes a noise like a very polite burp. In place of the various colour codes – delivery, maintenance, weekly management session, even his much-needed eleven o’clock break – the Witness loads a silver bar tagged with her own name. Tubman glances off to one side, no doubt seeing the same thing, and winces.
‘I’ll bring coffee,’ she says, and sees him struggle for a moment to find a polite way of begging her not to make it herself. ‘From the place on the corner,’ she adds.
‘Bless you,’ Tubman agrees.
Her head pounds, and she allows herself a moment’s unvoiced complaint. Ow, ow, ow.
– You will tire quickly, the machine says. From the point of view of personal health, it would be better to wait another day before leaving the hospital.
‘The case is important.’
The Witness doesn’t answer, but a little while later, the nurse informs her that a car is waiting.
*
‘Fuck me,’ Tubman says genially when she arrives. ‘I’d heard, but they didn’t do it justice.’
He pushes her a chair almost without looking. It rolls on casters across the floor of his workspace and stops next to her. She could sink straight into it, but instead she makes a point of walking it back and handing him his coffee, then brushing it off before lowering herself on to the black plastic seat.
Tubman is a technician, and not especially qualified on paper to explain the inner workings of the interrogation suite, but he has a gift for clarity that Neith has found helpful more than once before, most notably in a case where a man was so traumatised by events that the record taken from his mind was compromised. He is what used to be called an oily rag, and is known these days as a high viz in reference to the reflective clothing worn by workmen: a man who climbs in and out of muddy holes to fix things his supervisors imagine are beyond his proper understanding, but which, on a given level, he knows far more intimately and usefully than they do. Tubman doesn’t actually spend much time in ducts, but he does occasionally get down on his knees and rummage under vastly expensive consoles for loose wires, replace circuits chewed by mice, and critique improper neurosurgical interventions with the long experience of a man who will have to fix this mess. At the far end of things, his proper job is dealing with the knackered outputs of complex machinery behaving badly. In a quiet tradition of digital autodidacty, he has no high qualifications of his own, but contributes to the final examination questions of qualifying technicians and medical staff.
‘Go on, then,’ Tubman says. ‘What did you bring me?’
‘Narrative blockade.’
Tubman winces. ‘That doesn’t end well.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, it makes everything take longer. Uncomfortable for the subject. But it doesn’t change anything; the machine gets it done just the same. You go all the way to the end and you find the thread of real life again, just waiting to be picked up. It’s an hour’s delay and it’s effortful for the patient. Tidy-up can be a bit higgledy-piggledy after that, neurally speaking, or so I hear. Not really supposed to be my field, that bit. Sloshy grey stuff. I do the silicon.’
She waves this away. ‘What about non-volitional playback of an implanted memory?’
‘What?’
‘I was unconscious. I got a whole wallop while I was out.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, you get that with larger files. Nothing to worry about. The egg hatches a bit previous sometimes, is all.’
Neith considers this image, and firmly rejects it.
Tubman shrugs. ‘Don’t fret – I doubt it’ll happen again. Send me the record if you like, I’ll have a look. It’s a pressure valve sort of situation usually. Not actual pressure, but – these things are supposed to unspool, right? And they fade away if you don’t think about them, like any other memory, so there’s a sort of urgency in you as well as in them. Which – well, you, particularly, I suppose, this might happen to.’
‘Why me, particularly?’
‘You’re all about the urgency, aren’t you?’
Neith glowers at him for a moment, but Tubman is immune.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘If you had to offer an opinion, who’s the best we have?’
‘I like Vaksberg in midfield. He makes opportunities.’
‘Tub.’
‘Mielikki.’
‘Tub.’
‘Mielikki?’
‘Who do I talk to about narrative blockades and potential consequences? Who’s the top?’
Tubman shrugs. ‘Muckymucks and professors. Verlan was good; he’s in a home. Pakhet’s at the university and she’s crusty and irritating. You want someone who’ll come off the fence …’ He sighs, conceding a point to himself. ‘There is a perfumed gentleman named Smith – smooth as a shaved ferret. Word on the circuit is that he’s tomorrow’s man.’
– Smith, her terminal informs her, first name: Oliver. Director of Tidal Flow at the Turnpike Trust. She doesn’t query the terms. Smith can explain them to her in his own words. ‘You’ve met him?’
‘I’ve been in the presence, but we have not conversed as me
n. Mr Smith doesn’t do the unwashed and horny-handed sons of toil. He’s elevated.’
‘But he’s good.’
Tubman acknowledges that in so far as such muckymucks go, if you’ve got to have one you might as well have this one.
‘Thank you,’ Neith says.
‘No problem. Now go off and detect, darling. Some of us have real work to do.’
*
Neith requests a meeting with Oliver Smith. The Witness arranges one for the following day, though evidently Smith’s schedule is not to be shunted and shifted with the same freedom as Tub’s, even for a high-status internal inquiry. Neith sends a formal note of thanks to the perfumed gentleman in advance, then returns to her home to rest. The Witness is quite right: she is exhausted. Her head feels as if it weighs three times as much as it should. She drinks water, a lot of it, and takes her medicine, then sleeps.
Inside her, quite unbidden, Diana Hunter’s interrogation continues to unfold itself: a strange seed in a clay pot.
wooden egg lying
ON THE PLAIN of Erebus in the kingdom of Hades, close by the black and waterless river Styx, I dreamed a witch’s dreams and found a hidden gnosis: the knowledge and conversation of a demon. It rose up out of the tunnels beneath the earth and spoke in my soul like the night-time anticipation of death. It had the head of a man and the chest of a peacock, and its face was shrouded in shadows – shadows here, where there is no sun, in this place that is named ‘darkness’. I realised I was not afraid, because I knew its secret name. Magic is the invocation of names, just as miracles are acts of faith and technology is the application of mind to stone. The names of human persons are sacks to bind up the fragments of our selves, but the names of the jennaye are instructions to the world, and the jennaye must heed them as the water must heed the moon.
‘The soul of Adeodatus is cut into five parts,’ the demon said, ‘and not God nor all His Angels can retrieve it, for it is kept in the realm that is apart from Him and cast upon the waters of the ocean of Apeiron where He may not go. There can be no proper transmigration, not even into the body of the least animal. The dirt cannot be put aside, for the soul is sundered and incomplete. Each piece must float upon the ocean and find what sanctuary it may in whatever nook of matter until it is regained and made one.’
Adeodatus, my son. Demons, too, may know the power of names, and here was one to conjure me by. Dreaming, I gave myself to the solution of puzzles, and thereby held back tears.
Five is a sacred number to the followers of Pythagoras. Two is woman and three is man, thus five is marriage. The number four, defining a triangle-based pyramid which is the simplest of three-dimensional shapes, is their way of denoting space, but add to four a single unit – the One that is the beginning of everything – and you get five. Space and divinity: five is their great mystery, because it denotes hieros gamos, the combination of godhead and matter, whose product is mortality and the flow of time. Five is also the number of secret places of the Pentemychos, in which it is well known, in this syncretic empire of Rome in Africa, that Jupiter Ahura Mazda concealed the seeds of a new creation, in case Angra Mainyu should destroy what is. There are five books in the Torah, five fingers on the Hand of Miriam; there are five elements and five Wounds of Christ from which flow the five rivers in the kingdom of Hades, and five bad angels that watch over them until at last they run into the lower ocean and rise again to the beginning. The Goddess slew five demons and wove their skins to make a cloak that turned all blades. Five becoming one: rivers becoming seas, time becoming God. What lies beneath the lower ocean? Perhaps the upper. Perhaps the world wraps around the world like the serpent Ouroboros.
If you believe in that sort of thing, which I try not to. It’s not good for an alchemist to believe in things. You perform what works and speak the words, and leave the pretension of knowledge to priests. They’re at home with things like the notion of a quinsected soul.
I heard my own voice, though I had not opened my mouth, demanding how my son’s wounding might be healed.
‘It cannot,’ the demon said. ‘It is impossible, and yet it has passed, and so cannot be undone.’
I spoke the name that was carved deep within it, and the stones of Erebus rose up and hurled themselves against the narrow knees and webbed feet, and beneath the blue-feathered breast the scrimshawed bones were shattered so that it screamed and spat. My voice spoke again from outside myself, and reminded the demon that Erebus will not abide falsehood.
A shadow fell across us and the demon flinched, as if it would roll itself up and disappear. I looked, and I saw a huge shape blot out the darkness, sculling like a monstrous fish in an ocean far above my head.
Remember the name: Erebus.
And then, in Carthage, a man with broad shoulders who smelled of rust and sweat put a sack over my head and said: ‘Upsy-daisy, my girl, let’s not have a tanty,’ and I awoke, forgetting, and howled for what was lost.
I think my abductor took my tears for fear, and was ashamed.
Well, I am not afraid. When this sack comes off my head, I am giving someone the bollocking of his young Roman life. I am no winsome trollop to be carried off amidst giggles and insincere protestations – not that any woman should smile upon such poppycock! I am forty-two years of age – and a bloody damned scholar, besides.
Oh, no doubt: back in my student days, I should likely have found this great fun. Bloody damned Aurelius Augustine would have been game for it too, in his lecherous heyday. Had he thought of it, I’d have been slung over his shoulder and off to some suitably appointed den for a pastoral ravishing, rich olive oil and rough red wine for all, and much of it ending up in places no good Levantine olive would recognise. In fact, come to that, I’m fairly sure he did think of it – if it was Augustine, and not one of those predecessors whose existence he so greatly resented.
But now my son is dead and I am inclined to a less ebullient way of being in the world. A woman without her husband is a widow, a daughter without parents is an orphan, but there is no word for what I am because it should not be, or perhaps because it comes so often to so many that it is unworthy of mention. He was my son: I need no word to frame what I am now. It is with me always.
So I live my afterlife. I am serious; I read a great deal and I drink sparingly. I teach, I research and I consult. I am well paid by students who have fathomed the mystery that is Carthage, and come to understand that they will need an actual education as well as whatever else they find here. I conduct myself with a scholar’s dignity, and I shall experience a comfortable prime and a long and well-respected dotage. I am on the faculty now – and while we may yet occasionally find some small physical consolation among ourselves, we dons, we do it generally in a far more sedate mode. Candlelit dinner at which other guests somehow fail to arrive, casual proximity and perhaps a little wine to unclasp the toga: mutual complicit seduction, all elegantly and discreetly Roman. One hardly needs theatrics like this.
O ye gods and little fishes, I hope this isn’t one of my colleagues feeling his oats. If I’m to be wooed by a shrivelled goat of a man dressed as Dionysus while a string quartet of pretty young things from the slave market make bad music around their blindfolds, I shall probably stab him, and won’t that cause a stink. Yes, stab him, like the back-country urchin I was when I arrived here. I still carry my novacula. I use it for preparing herbs, but I haven’t forgotten how to be more assertive with it in time of need. A blade’s edge is a blade’s edge, and mine has a little cross-piece to keep my fingers from slipping, just in case.
Edge up; cut, don’t stab. Don’t forget you have two hands and two feet – the blade is a distraction as much as a final argument. In the first instance, threaten the face. In extremis: think of it as a cat’s claw, and use it to open the seams of a striking arm as your attacker tries to withdraw. If you get drawn in close, take it to the inner thigh and twist, but for preference: don’t, because the other fellow is likely heavier and stronger and hard men do so love to throw t
heir weight about.
All right, perhaps I am a little perturbed. I once was mistress to the hellraiser turned young contender of the Church of Rome who is now Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, with all the politics that attend such connexions. I left that behind years back, and I’m no good as a hostage anymore, not with Adeodatus burned to ash upon his bier. Fire dissolves chains, Augustine said. No flesh shared between us any longer, and nothing to tie him to his sins. Let them blow away into the past. So I did. I go by another name, and I have another life. If I am found and roped back in this morning, it is by some enormously ingenious and painstaking idiot, to be able to locate me and yet not recognise the futility of that achievement.
Unless, I suppose, Augustine’s heart is truer to his faith than his head. For three things endure, and these only: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of them is love. Chase after it, and the gifts of the Spirit, that you may know the truth. That’s the original Aramaic, rendered as best I can, and you wouldn’t on the face of it find a lot of room for confusion. But it applies to some other love, apparently, not this one. That love has to pass a higher standard than just existing and even than being reciprocated. Even than producing a child. All this time I misunderstood: I thought love was what granted sanction, and everything else came after, but it seems love has to undergo strenuous examination and be approved by the board. It has to be holy love, duly qualified and proper and pointed not at some hometown girl from Thagaste with oil on her skin and burning incense tied into her hair as she rides you, but at God, who evidently does not enjoy sex, else why impregnate a virgin through the intervention of an angel? Other gods, in the past, have taken a more direct approach – but not ours, it seems, not in Augustine’s mind, though I’ve read other gospels than the ones he favours, in which the Father and the Mother were far less ascetic about their conception. It just shows how you can be wrong about something you think you know beyond a doubt. Oh, well and well. He was fading from me long before that. Something in him yearned for dominion, and for authority not merely over bodies and prefectures, but over souls. A fatal flaw, perhaps, or contrarily, a fatal flaw in me that I do not understand it.