Wonderfuler and wonderfuler, she decided.
Strolling across a meadow of integers, she laughs at the sight of matrices flying in V-formation above, then picks irrational chrysanthemums with florets arranged in infinite recursion, while a row of fractions watches, nudging each other and winking.
An infinity symbol comes bounding across the integers, then stops in front of her, bouncing up and down slowly, like a Lissajous figure trapped upon an oscilloscope screen.
‘I’m boundless,’ mutters the infinity.
An apparently identical infinity comes bounding into view.
‘So am I,’ it says. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
She waits while they bounce in place.
‘You look bare and boundless to me,’ she says. ‘Has Möbius been stripping again?’
The infinities titter.
‘What will happen if you divide us?’ they say. ‘What will happen then? Can you tell, or do we need to swallow you up for all eternity?’
She clears her throat.
‘I can tell straight away,’ she tells them, ‘provided you answer me two questions.’
The infinities, still bouncing, angle inwards to look at each other, then face her once more.
‘Ask us,’ says the infinity on the left. ‘We’ll tell you the answer.’
‘Anything at all,’ says the infinity on the right. ‘Really anything.’
‘Or imaginary anything,’ says Left Infinity.
‘As complex as you like,’ says Right Infinity.
She lets out a breath, knowing that these two are rascals but bounded by their promise, if nothing else. All around, the meadow of integers stretches for ever, but you can tell that the infinities are different . . . though whether from each other, it is hard to tell.
‘If you were to twist yourselves into alephs,’ she asks thoughtfully, ‘what would your subscripts be?’
‘I say.’ That’s Left Infinity.
‘That’s a little personal.’ Right Infinity.
‘Do you want to stay bound by a promise for ever?’ she asks.
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Suppose not.’
They bounce a little more, then wriggle into knots, and re commence bouncing in their new forms.
‘Unity,’ she says.
‘We beg your pardon?’ they say together.
‘You’re both aleph nulls,’ she points out. ‘So you’ll divide to produce one, and it doesn’t matter which of you is on top.’ Which would have been her other question, of course.
‘Well . . .’
‘How risqué.’
‘Little people can be so rude.’
‘Can’t they just.’
She calls up: ‘I’m not little!’
But her voice is tiny because she is shrinking, with integers growing large around her. Already they are above her head, and the twin infinities are about to be obscured from sight, which seems hardly fair because she asked only one question.
‘You promised two answers!’
‘By George, she’s right.’
‘By Cantor, so are you.’
The integers are so very big, taller than trees and still growing.
‘What is—?’ She forces her voice to grow louder. ‘What’s the pattern in the numbers?’
‘Oh, dear . . .’
‘Hmm . . .’
She spirals inwards in endless recursion.
Except that the infinite series of her transformations turns out be convergent, and so she wakes before the end of time, staring at the grey gloom and muttering to herself, ‘Too many jam doughnuts,’ a second before sleep comes back, this time minus dreams.
When Gavriela woke up, her notebook, closed, was atop the candlewick bedspread, and her fountain-pen, actually borrowed from Rupert, was neatly beside it, cap screwed in place and not an ink blot anywhere. She had no memory of taking either object to bed.
Senility strikes at last.
Pushing down the covers, she forced herself up to a sitting position, sideways on the bed, wanting to pee but needing to check something first. It was decades since anything like this had happened, but perhaps the notebook contained sentences from her unconscious mind, written while she slept, as on that wartime night in Oxford.
Out in the hallway, the phone began to ring.
The notebook opened naturally at the midpoint, to a pair of facing pages that yesterday had been blank. The left-hand page now bore a blotchy ink sketch:
And the opposite page contained only a handwritten note, a first draft of a message intended to be written by her, not sent to her, although the intent was not obvious.
You will see three. You will be wrong.
G
P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023; µ∞ = .02289
Rupert tapped on the door – it could not be anyone else – so she closed the notebook and pulled her dressing gown around her, hoping this would not take time because she really did have to pee.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she opened the door, ‘but I needed to tell you . . .’
He was wearing his dressing gown with the burgundy lapels, and the new slippers she had bought him to replace the tattered monstrosities he wore when she moved in – less than four months ago, yet already the distant past.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
The lines on his face were deeper than ever.
‘Your niece Ursula,’ he said, ‘must’ve been further enceinte than I realised. Apparently you’ve had a great niece for the past two months. I had no idea Ursula had given birth.’
‘Oh, no.’ Gavriela made a guess, hoping she was wrong. ‘The baby’s ill or even . . .’
She did not want to say it.
‘Missing,’ said Rupert. ‘The baby is missing.’
‘How could that happen?’
What kind of mother was Ursula if she could not even—?
‘—from the house,’ Rupert was saying. ‘At least three men were involved, in addition to the female decoy. Even I might have opened the door to her, because by all accounts she sounded convincing.’
Some tale of woe, whose details Gavriela could not process because in her mind she was wondering how bloody stupid she could possibly have been, ignoring a clear warning that an enemy was near, almost certainly Dmitri Ivanovitch Shtemenko, who seemed to have some inhibition against killing her – given the opportunities he had passed up – but clearly possessed the capacity to be monstrous.
‘One of the men was thin and not young according to other witnesses. Sounds like Shtemenko, though Ursula did not see him, so our people can’t be sure.’
Would he have killed the baby out of spite?
It was horrible, but Dmitri might be evil enough to do such a thing.
‘The woman,’ Rupert added, ‘was identified by Ursula from a photograph as one Daniela Weissmann, a young Stasi officer under Shtemenko’s command. One rumour says she’s his lover also, but that’s not known for sure.’
‘He’s taken the baby,’ said Gavriela. ‘Taken her home with him.’
‘Not even a KGB colonel would mount a team operation purely to snatch a two month old relative,’ said Rupert. ‘He must have been here for something else.’
Of course he was, but there was no likelihood of SIS or Five finding out, and if they did, surely there was no reason to divulge the information to a retired spymaster or the equally retired cryptanalyst who shared a house platonically with him.
But Rupert had influence still, it seemed.
‘You know the Chester Terrace out-station?’ he asked.
‘Vaguely heard of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘Nice place. Georgian mansion, overlooking Regent’s Park, ideal for eavesdropping on the Soviet embassy. Stank to high heaven last time I was there, but that was because they were re lacquering the parquet flooring on the top floor, and half the rest was dug up.’