August (13 page)

‘All right then,' Tristan said. ‘You win. She said, “You don't belong here.” That was all. She fled before I could say anything in return.'

He delivered the lie without stumbling, holding the rector's unblinking eye.

‘That is all I will tell you. You will not get another detail from me. Now where is my food?'

‘I will ask for nothing more,' the rector assured him. ‘I am not the cheating type. Open the envelope.'

Tristan will be asked what the girl said to him. He will
answer, but his answer will be a lie.

Tristan dropped the paper to the floor and bent forward, hands on knees, breathing deeply. The world swam. A droplet of sweat grew too heavy for his forehead and dripped to the floor.

‘Don't worry, Tristan, you will be fed. This part of the experiment is over. I will see you when you have eaten.'

‘I didn't mean to betray you. I thought I could outwit him, but I was a child beating my fists against a giant. I thought then I would never be a match for him.'

Telling it now, the shaking returned, the great echoing emptiness reverberating across the years.

Tristan felt Grace's impatient wriggling.

‘Another simple trick,' she spat.

‘I know what you are going to say.'

He wished she wouldn't do this: struggle as he had struggled. He wanted her to be still and listen, that her pain might not be made worse. But she would not, could not. Such was her trajectory.

‘How many possibilities are there?' Grace demanded. ‘You tell the truth, you lie, you refuse to answer. So only three envelopes are needed. He didn't say how you would lie. He didn't know the details. You have no way of knowing there weren't other boys in other rooms, subject to the same experiments. Perhaps there were six of you, enough to guarantee a hit. How do you know there weren't? How do you know chance is not the author of your story?'

‘Do you think I would be telling you this, if it was all I had?'

‘You sounded impressed,' she said.

‘I was impressed.'

‘By a cheap trick.'

‘By what followed the trick,' he countered.

‘But you didn't know what was to follow. You were stupid from the start.'

A great shiver took possession of Tristan's head, a pain like that caused by an intense burst of coldness, compressing to a point deep beneath his temple. He gagged, but his throat was dry. Again the world was moving in on him. How long was it since he had known anything, since knowing could be relied upon?

‘I wish you were right,' he said.

She moved and he felt her cheek rise to his. They lay quietly for a moment, the boy from the experiment and the girl from the chapel. Something like happiness washed over him. The wind had eased and the rain now beat a constant rhythm on the car floor above them. Tristan felt water pooling at his elbow.

‘Will you tell me what happened next,' Grace murmured, ‘if I promise to keep quiet?'

‘Just promise to do your best,' he said. ‘The rest is beyond us.'

Tristan was given food as promised, along with a clock and control of the lights. Simon delivered the meal and sat beside him while he ate, offering inconsequential conversation. The next morning when Tristan was called back before the rector he felt heavier, more solid in the world, and with this weight came ambition. The envelopes were nothing more than a series of tricks, a test devised by the rector, which Tristan would learn to master. It was expected of him. He expected it of himself.

A desk had been moved into the white room and the rector sat at it, hands clasped behind his neck, stomach denting where it met the polished wood. There was one other chair, and the rector nodded for Tristan to sit.

Between them on the desk sat a finely finished pewter binary cradle. It rocked slowly to one side and then the other, each oscillation taking the better part of a minute. The grace of the gradual tilting mesmerised Tristan. He had seen a diagram of such a piece in the library, but had not been aware the college owned a working model. When the tilt reached a critical angle a hundred tiny ball bearings rolled out of their holding rut and poured through a delicate confusion of branching passages. The running balls made a sound like the rainstorms Tristan remembered on the tin roof of his childhood home. He observed the way each potential pathway forked and rejoined, like the braids of a river. The balls jostled and rolled their way along the possibilities, like children rushing to play. The paths resolved into seven chutes where the balls collected. A finely set spring then collapsed the chutes, delivering the balls to another holding rut, ready for the next iteration. The rector said nothing as they watched the perpetual stream of crafted chance unfold. Tristan bided his time, knowing the silence would not last.

‘Observe any ball, Tristan.' The rector spoke slowly, his voice carefully modulated, his eyes fixed on the boy. ‘There is no way of knowing which of the many paths it will take. You can guess, but your guess will be wrong far more often than it is right. And yet, if we view the hundred ball bearings not individually but as a whole unit, we find a curious thing. The more balls we bring into play, the less difficult it becomes to predict their behaviour. For any oscillation the largest number of balls will end up in the centre chute and as we move out towards the extremes we will find fewer and fewer balls. And I can be even more accurate than that. I can predict the ratio of balls in the centre to balls at the ends of any of the other paths. My guesses will not be perfect, but they will be close. They will fall within what you might like to think of as a margin of error. And as we aggregate my guesses over more and more trials, that margin will become smaller and smaller. The future turns scrutable. Look closely.'

The rector reached for the cradle and for a moment stilled its rocking so that the balls paused, ready for release. He traced a path with his finger. ‘Imagine a ball set free at the centre. At the first fork it might go left, and at the second fork, left again, and then left at the third. But to go left at each of the six branches requires a degree of unlikelihood we can easily calculate. One half to the power of six, or one chance in sixty-four. So one in sixty-four balls will end up here, on average. On a run of a hundred balls you will see one ball here, or sometimes two, other times none. You will not see nine or ten. That is the law of averages. But while there is only one way of making it to the outside, there are many, many ways to end up in the centre. A left followed by a right perhaps, then another left. Or perhaps two lefts, followed by a right. Chance begins to cancel itself out. Watch, now they run, and see the way this happens: many paths converging into a few. From the chaos emerges pattern.

‘You will remember when I showed you the ball on a ramp, you told me the ball had no choice but to smash the bust. You said you knew this from the fact that you were able to predict its behaviour. But now we see there was something wrong with your reasoning. For in the cradle we cannot say the ball has no choice. Indeed the ball has a succession of choices. Left or right, again and again. The individual ball in the cradle, unlike the ball on the ramp, is highly unpredictable. Yet we do not say the balls, forced though they are to make choices, have will. When we observe the balls in the cradle we say their actions are random, that the forces operating on them, though determining, are too complex for us to model. And tacitly we assume this determination to be the antithesis of will.

‘But beware the unspoken, Tristan, for quickly it becomes the unexamined. We take will, if we are honest, to be that thing which is not determined; we believe that for it to have any meaning it must spring up within us, separate from the constraints of our physical world. And that, some have always worried, makes free will an impossible thing.'

He watched Tristan carefully as he spoke, always the teacher. Pride kept the pupil's mind on the explanation, wrestling with it, probing it for weakness.

‘This brings us to Augustine's paradox,' the rector continued. ‘For just as the world of the ball is shaped by physics, we are taught the world of the human is shaped by God. How can there be real will in such a world, when we are subject to His greater plan? Might our free will reduce to nothing more than an illusion—“apparent free will”, as the philosophers once liked to call it? Is it not possible that the way we behave is inevitable? After all, we are taught that God knows in advance how we will act. What then is left for us to decide? Are we not mere actors playing our roles? Wouldn't that process—if the causal factors were complex enough for us to lose sight of their individual components and see only the broader effects—feel just like free will? Think again of a single ball in the cradle. What if it had developed a consciousness sophisticated enough to explain each random path it took in terms of choices and motivations it had invented. Would it not be tempted to believe it was free, even though you and I can stand above it and see a different truth, just as God stands above us? Isn't there also a temptation for us to begin to believe we possess a level of control that in fact does not exist? And is this belief not itself a form of blasphemy? What do you think, Tristan? I am interested in your answer.'

‘It would be as blasphemous of me to consider that I had solved the paradox,' Tristan replied.

‘Very well, let me release you from your sense of propriety. I take it you are familiar with the heathen philosophers. What is it they say on the matter?' The rector straightened his back and Tristan heard vertebrae clicking into place. He knew he was being manipulated. This topic was familiar territory; he could range over it with a fluidity no other boy had ever matched, and because of this he couldn't resist. He would answer, and with every word he would trade away a little of his soul.

‘The heathen philosophers would say you have already given the answer. If there is no way of knowing the difference between being free and simply feeling as if we are free, then may this not be a way of saying the difference is ill defined? The problem of free will is not one of substance, but rather one of definition. You may say the way we behave is the way we were always going to behave, that faced with exactly the same circumstances we would behave the same way again. Yet, to be faced with the same circumstances, down to the smallest detail, is to find oneself not just at the same place, but also in the same time. And if this is the requirement then our repeated experiment contains no repetition at all; it is simply the same event restated. We are left with the proposition “what happens happens”, a truism which adds nothing to our understanding. The problem of free will is seductive only because it is poorly framed. This at least is what the heathen philosophers might argue.'

The rector leaned forward in his chair, bringing his great hands together with a delighted clap.

‘Yes, yes, this is precisely what they say. And yet, there is a flaw in the clever argument. What is it, Tristan? Tell me.'

Committed to the case, Tristan had no choice but to proceed, even as the trap became suddenly clear—he was a prisoner forced to announce the terms of his own execution.

‘Augustine struggled with the definition of time. He knew that to understand time is to understand existence. I do not claim to have reached such a point, nor do I ever hope to, but in the noble attempts of our forebears we can find important clues. It is true, as they say, that we cannot move back through time to repeat an experiment, but we can move forward in time to anticipate one. This is the luxury afforded us by our imagination. We alone are the creature who meets the future prepared:
Homo predictus
. And if we can predict the behaviour of a man in advance,' Tristan conceded, ‘the distinction between real and apparent free will is no longer an abstraction. We can define the free man as one whose actions remain inscrutable, whereas the man who is only apparently free can in principle have his every move predicted. An experiment presents itself to those who argue against the will.'