(Or a maiming knife.)
With regret: he’s not inclined to concur with his learned colleague about my vagina, although no doubt there is a sexual component to the structure, because sex, especially untapped libido, is a powerful drive and no one with this level of skill, be it instinctive or acquired, would neglect such a resource.
The village barber shaves himself, by the way. Anything else is impossible. We know that he shaves all the men in the village who do not shave themselves. Therefore if he does not shave himself, he must logically shave himself, which is a paradox. We are given no direct information about whether, as well as shaving all the men who do not shave themselves, he also shaves anyone else. Taking the premise of the puzzle as accurate, the full truth must be that he shaves all the men in the village who do not shave themselves and one – the barber himself – who does.
So then:
On the peak of the same mountain there is another village, and the barber there shaves all the men in the village who do not shave themselves – and only them. Does he shave himself, or not?
Don’t let the question slip away. Don’t dismiss it. Questions that trouble the mind are the only ones worth considering. Think about it.
Did I or did I not say that I had prepared for this?
I think I did.
ghost books
THERE. THERE AT the end, at last: a brief flavour of the actual woman.
Bloody hell.
Mielikki Neith slumps back on to her bed, and never mind that slumping wakes the crushed capillary memory of Lönnrot’s Cuban heels. Touching Hunter’s mind with her own is like laying fingers on the flank of a python on a branch, familiar vitality in an alien life. It is exhausting, as if this recorded consciousness is deeper and more real than her own. In training, Neith experienced the minds of murderers and suicides, surgeons and thieves. None of them possessed this measure of density. Astronauts, perhaps, come close. She remembers it as one of the great treats of the graduation year: sitting with her friends at a long table in the Hoxton academy, jointly recalling the same borrowed identities, the exotic competence of ESA spacewalkers. She remembers remembering a welding operation, broken rigging white hot against a field of stars, her feet hanging over an infinite abyss. Except that she didn’t see it as an abyss until she was back in her own head. To the principal, it was the distance she had flown.
Neith has in general very little time for identity tourism, and regards the occasional attempts to make a commercial venture of experiencing the high points of another person’s life with distaste. It pleases her that, so far, they have all failed. There is something alarming to her in the idea of a world in which people derive life satisfaction from vicarious experience, although she recognises the solidity of the argument against her: it requires the resources of a high technological economy and the whole history of science to put astronauts in space, and therefore anyone on earth may rightly lay claim to participation in the result. Astronauts are persons who contain multitudes.
Which brings her back to Hunter, whose mind conceals not one untruthful life, but three. Three mirages laid on top of one another so that the dismissal of the first becomes the gateway of the second, and so on and on, deeper and down. This recording is a sinking sand of the mind. She could have dreamed all the way through these last days, taken on the whole sequence in a single deep sleep. She is, superstitiously, pleased that she did not. A nervous part of her wonders where she might have woken up – or, more alarmingly, whom she might have been when she did.
It is a breathtaking defence. The architect of this barrier did not attempt to harden the mind against inquiry, did not build some brittle wall to keep the Witness out, but accepted the stricture of intrusion and created a defence in depth – not a shield, but a drowning. It is not accidental, not some caprice of bad drug reactions or paradoxical psychology. It was done, either to the woman or by her, with this end in view: that when – not if, when – the Witness touched her mind, Diana Hunter would confound it.
‘Who was the madwoman who beat the Witness?’
– It is a null question. Witness enforcement and interview has never been effectively countered.
‘But who was she?’
– A junior executive in a subcontracting firm. Her cognition was anomalous. It emerged that she inhabited a fantasy world which was almost entirely consonant with the real one, but variant in crucial respects. Understand, this was not a question of faith or personal perspective, but of unmediated experience. A small alteration in the oneiric psychoscape would have caused her difference to become extremely dysfunctional. Significant intervention was necessary to correct the defects in the deep neural structure.
‘Copy the file to me, please, in case it’s relevant.’
– Done.
Is that it? Did someone examine this woman’s madness and reverse-engineer it? Who knows so much about the System’s interrogative branch and its working? Was this done to Hunter or by her? If the former, where? No doubt there are neuroscience departments in twenty countries with the theoretical background, but the practical knowledge is another thing again. How many failures would be required to learn the trick? And what would happen to them?
And why? Confound the Witness, yes, very well – but to what end? To prove a point? Was this nothing more than a test piece for an army of impenetrable, implacable enemies to follow? Or was this the army, one old woman with a bad attitude, her entire masterplan just to die?
If so, it is a very unsettling existential challenge. If the interrogation killed her because she would not reveal her mind, and it cannot be proven that what was in that mind was genuinely of importance to the security of the nation, then what does that mean? The System trades in certainty and by that token in the guarantee of fairness and security. If the certainty is gone, the other two are suspect. Does the legitimacy of the System withstand it? Or does the action of maintaining that it can, hollow it out?
But then, if that intent can be demonstrated, then what was in Hunter’s head was indeed a threat to the System and the machine was right. In that case it is not the legitimacy but the efficacy of the Witness that is in doubt.
It feeds the present political discussion, of course. If Hunter had been live-monitored, she could not have evolved the strategy in her mind without being caught doing it. Indeed, the decision to do it would have been enough to bring her to the attention of the Witness, and she would now be alive. But at the same time, Hunter was not a recidivist or a violent sociopath. Why should she be pre-emptively monitored in her own head?
Was this a suicide of principle?
And if it turns out that it was, how bad is that?
It does occur to her that she could conceal or falsify her result. Mielikki Neith is not a machine. She is honest, not unimaginative. She could make the entire discussion go away. Hunter would be proven right, but only she and Neith would ever know, and Neith could claim fatigue and trauma and have the memory removed. She could sacrifice her integrity for the System and never know it. It might be a rational exchange.
She is no more capable of doing such a thing than she is of flying.
She gets up and changes her clothes, then sits in silence waiting for the constables. In this interim, she does not actively think. Rather, she sits and listens to the sound of the city and the real world around her, letting the body anchor the mind by allowing herself to be washed away. Unlike any human partner she can imagine, even as the minutes tick away and ten become fifteen become thirty, the Witness does not feel the need to intrude.
*
For her return to the Hunter house, the Witness supplies Neith with a brace of strapping young fellows whose very willingness makes her feel older than she is. Donovan, the taller one, takes his cues entirely from her – so much so that by the time they get out of their car she is beginning to find him eerily familiar. He is one of those people who automatically fall into the pattern of speech of anyone they are trying to impress, so that his natural ambit, generationa
lly removed from hers by a distance of ten years or more, gives way to the more formal structures she learned when she was at school. The short one, Baskin, is a workhorse in mind and body. His aptitude scores are very high, hampered only by a lack of non-linear invention. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is a habit that can be learned; no doubt some tertiary selectional weighting factored into his being picked for this duty the hope that a few hours with Neith on a difficult case might affect his thinking.
The house is a black slab set against the box windows of the estates a quarter mile beyond. With no owner and no heir, and the whole place a crime scene, of course the lights are off. The street is deserted, the small hours before the dawn too cold and drab for even spooning teens. And too late for dog-walking, alas, so there will be no chance meeting today.
‘Perimeter on,’ Neith says into her terminal.
– Active observation is engaged, the Witness assures her. If Lönnrot is still here, there will be no repeat of last time – neither the beating nor the absence of proper images for tracking.
‘Did you get what I asked for?’ Neith asks the constables.
Baskin reaches into the back of the car and pulls out a pair of tripod aerials and a long roll of cable. Neith nods, then opens the first tripod and plugs it in, then walks towards the house with the other. At Baskin’s look, she shrugs. ‘Signal booster,’ she says. ‘Take the Witness with us.’ As if that was obvious, though it hadn’t occurred to her either until the machine suggested it.
She minds her step going up to the door. Is it superstitious that she doesn’t want to step in her own dried blood? Or a sense of self, however attenuated?
Donovan brings the key and lets them in.
*
The hallway is the same, of course. She hadn’t expected Lönnrot to wreak some great havoc on the books and pictures. She follows her own path, touching and remembering. Her recollection is good.
‘Check the shelves,’ she tells Donovan. ‘I want her books. Not the ones she read, the ones she wrote. Take the jackets off, don’t trust what’s on the cover.’ The Witness will look over his shoulder, identify known works. Leaving only the ghost books, if there are any.
Donovan salutes, taps his terminal to confirm that the booster is working.
– I can see you, the Witness replies on the general channel. Neith tuts and shakes her head: that should be a given.
‘Carry on.’
She turns and gestures to Baskin, then takes the stairs up. In a house as old as this one, the bedrooms are always upstairs, the private spaces. Downstairs is for everyone, but upstairs is where the secrets are. Traditionally, anyway, though it isn’t always so.
Baskin touches her arm. ‘Best if I go first,’ he suggests. Well, why not, if he wants to?
They climb the stairs at her pace, and Neith moves from room to room – Baskin always politely but firmly going through doorways first to take incoming fire. Small guest room, lavatory, then Hunter’s bedroom; Neith recognises it immediately, not because she has seen it but because it is the right one, with the best view and a commanding sense of being the head of the house. If the kitchen is the heart of any home, this is where identity is vested, this large, high-ceilinged space with elegant proportions. But no clues. Clothes, yes. Art, certainly, traditional oils very deep and lustrous. Hunter’s self, full of culture and contemplation. But no papers, no mad scrawls on walls. No plot to destroy the world. A lone stuffed toy, chewed by some distant terrier, sitting on a shelf. A memory, but not one Neith can easily trace or interpret.
She steps back out on to the landing, peers out of the window at the end at the wall of the next house. Unenlightening.
Baskin leads the way to the second floor. Children’s library – more fodder for Donovan – and another bathroom, and finally another guest room.
Neith hears Baskin make a sound of satisfaction, and steps quickly in behind him. The Witness would have warned her if there was a threat, so this means … what?
The room is pleasant, a little chintzy. It would have been a servant’s, perhaps, back in the time this place was built. It has been decorated in a period style, floral and fractionally too sweet. There’s a bowl of potpourri on the marble mantle, a pungent smell of anise.
the two glasses at my feet hurled their contents into the air
For a moment, the memory is almost fully realised rather than recollected: she can smell Addis Ababa, feel the heat and the sofa under her hands.
No. London. Now.
She looks again, and sees what attracted Baskin’s attention: a single wooden chair, modern and sheer, is positioned to look out of the window. It is not from this house. It belongs nowhere in Hunter’s way of doing things, this stark functional decision. The bed has been pushed to one side, the space adapted to a new purpose.
She sits down in the chair and looks out. London stretches away in lines and spirals, ghost-white street lights reflecting on low cloud. In the breaks between, the endless black of everything that is not the world. The glass frames her out of these extremes: a hollow-eyed bone face and clothes like mourning.
It would tell her who sat here, but she already knows.
‘Mielikki? Hello?’
Neith opens her eyes again, briefly disorientated. She’s at Hunter’s house, but this is her bedroom. She remembers closing her eyes in Lönnrot’s chair. Did she fall asleep on the spot? No. No, of course. She worked through, searched the room and found nothing, just more of Hunter’s clothes in the cupboards. After that, she joined Donovan looking at books until gone ten in the morning. Vaguely, she recalls the brown fog around the edges of her vision, and telling Baskin to get her a car. She must have been half-asleep climbing her own stairs. She’s still dressed.
‘Hello?’
The voice is confusing. It is coming from several places at once. Her terminal. Her workstation. Her front door. Her entry box.
‘Mielikki, it’s Pippa. Pippa Keene. I came by to say hello. Are you all right?’
Pippa Keene from the Witness Welfare Directorate. She is standing outside, and she has cued open all her devices at once. The Inspector scowls, but without real anger. It is typical of Keene, that small margin of overstep, and even appropriate. The other woman is charged with being sure that no one goes mad on the job. She has keys to everything.
‘Yes,’ Neith says. ‘I was asleep. Hang on.’ The business of getting up feels paradoxically both rushed and slow.
‘Hello, Pippa.’
Keene embraces her with a very proper reserve, then steps back. ‘Are you really all right?’
‘Yes. I really am.’
And yes, she realises: she is.
Keene grins. She is tall and lean and has a long face. The Inspector thinks of her as strapping: energetic in that deep-rooted Home Counties way that is both reassuring and annoying.
Neith rolls her eyes and tells Keene she can’t come in, at which Keene, of course, does. The whole moment is typical of her: first to get Neith to say that she is all right, and know it for the truth, and then to assert the soft prerogative of entry that her role gives her anyway, but so smoothly as to feel like a friend and not a colleague. WWO Keene is as good at her job as DI Neith is at hers. But she is also – as a person – perplexingly opaque. The Inspector – as an officer of the Witness – dislikes opacity.
Living in an environment of almost total surveillance, Keene nonetheless contrives to be opaque. It is as if she has withdrawn her human self entirely inside her own head, so that all of her that leaks into the external world is uniformly bland. Neith has seen her blandly concerned, blandly assertive, blandly compassionate. She has even seen her blandly flirtatious, butterfly fingers catching as if casually on desired skin, eliciting a startled breath of response. She imagines Keene to be blandly memorable in bed, although a part of her wonders whether perhaps she might be so perfectly bland as to be forgotten immediately after closing the door on her way out.
Only once has she observed Keene doing anything that
seemed to be genuine, in the sense of proceeding from some interior self, briefly revealed. It was at a Witness winter party full of families, rambling and ramshackle and immensely enjoyable as it spread itself across a Beatles-inspired showpiece entertainment suite in Park Lane. A little boy in a blue cape and cowl was standing despondent and alone by one wall, caught halfway between the children’s den where movies were showing, and the clusters of adults lounging on orange plastic furniture and white Egg chairs. As she watched, the first twitch of despair curled the boy’s mouth, preparatory to a flood of tears.
Neith was querying the System for a strategy of intervention when she saw Keene catch herself in passing, shrimp on a stick in one hand and bourbon in the other, and go down on to one knee. In a single motion so fluid as to appear implausible, she set down her canapé and her drink, and palmed a deck of cards from a glass table in those long-fingered hands. Coming around to face the child, she made the cards fall like water from one hand to the next, and then crooked them so that they fountained upwards again as if she had simply reversed the flow of time. Neith waited for Keene to invite the boy to pick a card, and then realised that she would not. This was not a performance that required anything at all from its intended audience. It was not interactive. It was a gift.
The boy had known this immediately, she saw, and approved of it. There was a contract between them, instant and complicit, and in not asking for cooperation at all, Keene had secured it absolutely.
Keene made a snake on the ground which flipped one way, then the other, then swept her arm over the cards so that they riffled up into a fan. She twitched, and they seemed to disappear altogether, until she produced them once again in their little cardboard box and handed them over. The boy accepted the gift, and Keene in return gleaned from him a confession of something – a desire, a question, a long-held nightmare – and resolved it on the instant. The boy, smiling now, ran away to join the others without thanks, and Keene for one moment seemed to be perfectly content. Her expression did not change when she and Neith made eye contact a moment later, and yet somehow Neith felt her disappear again, and knew not to mention the cards or the boy when they met a few moments later by the buffet table.