It felt good to pass the memories on.
Gavriela stayed away from Carl’s wedding at the start of October. Brooding more than usual, she wondered if Carl might have another child, and if so, whether he would treat this one more kindly. That night in bed, as she closed her eyes, her hands wrapped around her book, she saw in her imagination the note she had written while asleep on a previous notable night, when she learned of her great-niece’s abduction.
That was when dear Rupert was still alive, and he had taken her to the SIS outstation on Chester Terrace, the mansion overlooking Regent’s Park. Its parquet flooring was dug up during renovation, allowing her to hide the note and photograph intended for an unknown future recipient. You will see three. You will be wrong. G P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023; μ∞ = .02289
That was the note, she remembered as she descended into sleep, which she had wrapped around an old photo of herself with Ilse, to act as a form of identification – to the extent her actions made rational sense. It was Ilse’s granddaughter that Dmitri had kidnapped, and it seemed right to use that picture, though the name would likely mean nothing to whoever read it in the future.
The next morning, Gavriela realised she had done it again.
She awoke with the same notebook open atop the bedspread, and a new message written inside. The cruel thing was, the handwriting looked as if she had penned the letter prior to her stroke.
Dearest Lucas,
How wonderful to have a grandson! My words will seem very strange, since we do not know each other and I speak from your past. Still, I must ask you a favour, and be assured it must be this way. Even banks can fail over time, although it is to be hoped that some familiar names survive, so I am forced to contact you in this indirect way, with the hope that you will feel curious enough to investigate as I tell you.
Please, my grandson, look under the parquet flooring, in the right-hand outer corner as you look out the window at the park. Love, Gavi (your grandmother!) X X X
If Carl named a future son Lucas, then that would be the final indication, to Gavriela’s satisfaction, that she was not insane, that this phenomenon of information propagating backwards in time was real. This letter seemed to be a logical piece in a very illogical puzzle.
She had hidden the previous note and photograph, information that might prove useful against the darkness, beneath the floor in an out-station of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was the safest of locations, yet it had also seemed insane – how would the intended recipient even find the thing? This new letter was more explicit, to the extent of naming an unborn grandson.
It carried other implications: that she might never see the new baby, and in any case would never get to know him as an individual.
Should I have gone to the wedding?
Somehow, this unknown Lucas – he would be Lucas Woods, she presumed – would need to receive this letter, which in turn would enable him to retrieve the secreted note and photo. Not knowing what else to do, she folded up the new letter and tucked it inside Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book she had been reading when she fell asleep.
How do you send a message to the future?
Runes could be carved in stone with relative ease, the advantage of such angular futharks, the alphabets. But what was the modern equivalent of scratched lines?
‘There’s nothing simpler than a bit,’ she muttered.
There was a tap on the bedroom door, and Ingrid looked in.
‘I thought I heard you say something.’
‘Nothing important, but I am awake.’
‘Let’s get you to the bathroom, then.’
Accepting Ingrid’s assistance was better than using a bedpan or commode. It seemed so unfair that you could fight for so long and life would come to this; but fairness was not a characteristic of the universe, only of humans at their best.
Philosophy while you go to pee.
When the humdrum details were finished and she was settled in her wheelchair, wrapped in her dressing-gown and ready for breakfast, Gavriela made a detour into her ground-floor study – Rupert had called it his writing-room – where her Compaq lay switched off.
During operation, at any instant, every location in the computer’s memory register would be either true or false, one or zero. Right now, while it was off, the state was what Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called mu.
It was nothingness; it was neither-nor.
And it struck Gavriela as more profound than she had first thought.
‘Gabrielle? I’ve poured your tea.’
‘Ich komme jetzt, Ingrid.’
‘Also gut, Frau Doktor.’
Gavriela smiled. It was not just Ingrid, it was both of them: speaking in the old language brought the old habits of courtesy. The Inuit might not in truth have thirty words for snow – Schade, such a pity – but Whorf and Sapir were surely correct in pinpointing the constraints of language on intellectual concepts, witness Pirsig’s borrowing from Japanese to come up with—
‘Gabrielle?’
Natürlich. Of course.
‘I need to make a phone call.’ She steered her wheelchair out into the hallway. ‘Could you fetch the phone book, please?’
Ingrid pulled it out of the occasional-table drawer.
‘Let me find it for you. Whose number do you require?’
Gavriela looked up at the old grandfather clock. Ten to nine. Edmund Stafford, who as a young man had brought her books to read in Oxford while she was largely housebound after Carl’s birth, still went in to work every day, despite his emeritus status.
‘The Computing Laboratory at Oxford,’ Gavriela said. ‘It’s written as Comlab in the book.’
‘Also gut,’ said Ingrid, flicking through pages. Then she went to the phone, dialled the number for Gavriela, and held out the handset.
‘Danke sehr, Ingrid.’
Edmund had known Turing before the war. If anyone had a notion of how to transmit electronic runes into the future, he was the man.
She smiled, glad that life still offered interesting challenges.
FORTY-EIGHT
MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
It might be infinitely long, but Borges Boulevard appeared to be packed with revellers. The Battle of Mandelbrot Nebula had ended the Chaos Conflict in one sudden phase transition to peace, at least for now, and that was worth celebrating.
Meanwhile, Roger and Corinne knew, the Admiralty Council members were engaged in a series of secret planning sessions, as if the current festival meant nothing. The reason was simple: direct war against the renegades was inevitable at some point, but it might not be for decades yet, even centuries. The urgent administrative question was whether to maintain a war-ready fleet, using the command structure they currently possessed, or to stand down the combat squadrons and revert to a normal mode of existence.
Of the most senior officers, only Dirk McNamara, war leader extraordinaire, was required to leave those Admiralty sessions in order to appear in public. Every population needs a figurehead as a focus of communal triumph, even among Pilots.
‘We’re still primates.’ Roger held a goblet of something fluorescent that fizzed and popped like fireworks. ‘When it boils down to it.’
‘Damn,’ said Corinne, leaning against him. ‘You mean like primitive emotions overruling logic, kind of thing.’