The Thing Itself (10 page)

She was silent for a bit, and then said: ‘Copernicus isn’t a good analogy. We thought the cosmos revolved around us, and Copernicus came along and showed this wasn’t true. Kant is like an anti-Copernicus. We used to think we were just a part of a pre-existing cosmos, until Kant comes along and shows that, no, actually we make the universe by perceiving it. A better comparison would be Einstein, maybe. If Kant had lived long enough, he’d have talked about how he wrought an Einsteinian revolution upon thought. The big bang – that’s not a little knot of dynamite, hanging in the middle of a huge empty cavern, exploding to fill it with stars. The cavern, its space, its time, was what was created
by
the big bang. Every time a consciousness comes into awareness and self-awareness, it’s a conceptual big bang. Space and time structure the reality of things anew with each perceiving mind.’

‘Don’t buy it,’ I said.

‘Because?’

‘Common sense.’

‘You can do better than that.’

‘It just feels – wrong.’

‘It’s logic. You can’t see behind space, or beyond time. Everything you think and feel and perceive happens in those terms. We’ve looked into it. In some detail, Charles. It turns out there is
something
in the real reality, outside of our minds, something our minds perceive in terms of space and time. The thing itself, whatever it is, isn’t metres and kilometres, seconds and hours. Not that. It’s a mode of – amplitude – of a different kind. We look at the universe and see that it is vast, and that spatial vastness reflects something important about the thing in itself. It’s not a literal mapping from its spatial scale to our sense of space, though.’

Finding all this a little hard to follow, I looked outside the car. We drove through a lit-up gateway and were rolling along a crunchy drive that seemed, in the darkness, to go on and on.

‘So,’ I said, suddenly aware that our journey was coming to an end, and that I had to say something – I didn’t know what – so that she remembered me. I went with: ‘So you
believe
in God, now?’

She glanced at me, by way of reply, but didn’t speak.

I panicked a little bit. I tried: ‘What do you do?’ A rather better way to start a conversation than end it, I thought, cursing myself. ‘At the Institute, I mean. What do you work on? Not just’ – I laughed three precise and utterly unconvincing separate laughs – ‘chauffeuring?’

‘Do,’ she said.

‘It’s research and development. Didn’t you say that? The Institute? What are you personally developing? Or researching? Or …?’

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘Instantaneous communication. I’m seconded to the astrophysics team. We’re hoping to set up a remote viewer and position its focus on or above the surface of the planets Kepler-438b, Kepler-442b and Kepler-440b.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘OK then.’

:4:

My first glimpse of the Institute was indistinct: a three-storey block in the darkness with some windows illuminated, a curving drive that hissed its snaky tyres-on-gravel hiss as we rolled to the garage. Impossible to gauge how extensive were the grounds in the darkness. Dwarf lamps set in the lawn traced the edge of the driveway. Black flame-shaped absences cut into the starry sky at the edge of vision: cypresses. It was a fine, clear night on the cusp between spring and summer, and none of what was happening to me felt real.

We sat, the engine idling, as the garage doors retreated slowly upwards, the smell of the unsullied car plastic and leather in my nostrils. I got the sense of other unlit wings to the building, away to the right, before the garage lights came on and I could see nothing but the brightness inside. Irma parked the car carefully, and we both got up.

There was space for half a dozen cars in the garage, though Irma’s car was the only occupant. Up some steps and through into the main building. Along a corridor and round the corner. Irma took me to a room – mine, she assured me – and told me I had half an hour to settle in. ‘I don’t understand: what’s to settle?’ I asked.

‘You’ll be here for a few days at the very least.’ She didn’t meet my gaze.

A flush of anger. ‘The bollocks I will,’ I replied. ‘Is this a kidnap?’

She didn’t shrug with her shoulders, but there was no mistaking the shrug-like expression on her face. ‘Walk back, if you like. It’s seven miles to the station. I’ve no idea what time the first train runs, but you could catch that.’

‘So you drive me here,’ I said, my anger a weird tangle of resentment and desire, because she was standing in the doorway and I wanted to beg her to come in, to join me on the bed. ‘But you
won’t
drive me back? Is that it?’

‘I’ll drive you back,’ she said, looking away. ‘But Kos wants to have a word first.’

She went, ignoring my ‘Who is Cause?’, which became, as she turned the corner and vanished, ‘Or is it
what
is Cause? Shouldn’t I speak to Peter?’

‘Kos first,’ she said, without looking round. ‘Peter later.’

I gave up, shut the door, lay on the bed. It was a single, though comfy and spacious enough. Like a hotel bed. Then I got up and showered. My sense of cleanliness was compromised by the fact that I had to get back into my old clothes. I turned on the telly and watched a documentary about badgers. Then she was back, knocking at my door with a woodpecker rattatta.

‘Come meet Kos,’ she said.

Half an hour had been long enough for me to forget how beautiful she was. In the way of these things, my craving sense of desire got diverted through those masculine circuits that convert love into bitterness. ‘You’re working on extrasolar planetary science, yet they’re using you as some kind of PA, then? Secretarial staff, chauffeur? Because if that’s really it, I’d like a coffee: could you fetch me one?’

‘You,’ she said, ‘are quite the charmer.’

We walked down a long corridor past a series of shut doors. Blandly abstract art on the walls.

‘Shouldn’t I just speak to Peter?’

‘Nobody just speaks to Peter,’ she replied. ‘You speak to Kos first, and we’ll see.’

‘He sounds suspiciously precious,’ I said, ‘this Peter.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s ah. It’s not err.’ I had no idea what she meant.

Up a staircase, past the angled slide for a wheelchair lift. A dark door. Another brisk little drum tattoo on the wood from Irma’s sharp little knuckles, and an indistinct syllable uttered from within. Beyond the door was a large office: bookshelves, one wall dedicated to high-tech objects of various kinds, a desk. The curtains were undrawn, so the windows functioned as a dark mirror as I stepped through. I looked like a scruffy old man, but then again: that’s exactly what I am.

‘Hello, Charles,’ somebody said in a helium voice. A woman sitting in one of a pair of sofa-chairs. She stood up. The door clicked behind me, and I was alone with her.

‘I’m Paulina Kostritsky,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘My friends call me Kos.’ I’ve always thought people misuse the cliché
a cut-glass accent
; because the best way to cut glass is with a fine-calibre drill, and that whining dental equipment is not what people mean when they use that phrase. But Ms Kostritsky – Professor Kostritsky, I later discovered – had exactly that combination of upper-middle-class English chill and slight nasal high-pitch. Small larynx, I suppose. Grating.

‘I don’t usually shake people by the hand,’ I said. ‘On account of my fingers being all fucked up.’

Kostritsky was a little under my height; but something about her long neck, or perhaps the combination of a large round head with small-set features clustered in the middle of her face, made me feel that she was looking down at me. I flushed, on one side of my face only. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Didn’t mean to— Sorry for swearing. I’m a bit cranky.’

‘Like a toddler who hasn’t had his nap,’ she said. Perhaps the single most condescending thing anyone has ever said to me. And this woman, with her mosquito voice and big, ugly head, had only just met me. Crankiness sublimed into anger, which, as an Englishman, and according to the logic of my tribe, I expressed through exaggerated politeness.

‘You will have to excuse me, I’m afraid,’ I said, pushing my smile that extra distance into grimace territory. ‘Plucked from my flat in the middle of the night. I really have no understanding of what is going on, here.’

‘I’m sure you’ve deduced some key things. Once upon a time you were a high-flying astrophysicist. PhD, junior lecturer. Then it all went a bit wrong for you, didn’t it?’

‘Are we having a chat then, are we? Are we, now? Because I was told I should speak to Peter.’

She angled her head a little. ‘What was it that sent you on that downward spiral, Charlie?’ Oh she was annoying me now. ‘What traumatised you so, in Antarctica, that it has ridden your whole life into the garbage?’

‘I didn’t
see
anything,’ I said, stiffening internally, and feeling very much like a drink. It’s a yearning that never goes away, that. My jaw throbbed and buzzed. ‘I hallucinated. I survived attempted murder. You
could
show a little fucking compassion. Or not, of course. It’s entirely up to you.’

‘I apologise,’ she said stiffly. ‘Please, sit,’ she added, encouraging me to follow suit by flopping back into her seat. ‘Sit down.’

I contemplated saying
I prefer to stand
, but decided it would sound petulant and prissy rather than dignified. So I sat. There was, I saw, a silver cafetière of coffee on the low table, and two porcelain cups. Sugar, milk.

‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘And to answer your question, no: I’m not in charge. I suppose you’d say Peta is in charge.’ I again heard this name as
Peter
, and she didn’t correct me.

‘Peter, eh. So he’s the big cheese? Is it governmental, Peter’s institute?’

‘We are not governmental. We do have some board members who also sit in both the British and the EU Parliaments. And the nature of our research – or, to be precise, the way our research has evolved over the last few years – has necessitated clearance from the Prime Minister’s own office.’

‘I feel like I’m being softened up prior to a sales pitch from some Ponzi scheme. Ms Kostritsky, you need to know: I’m poor as a church mouse.’

‘We’re not interested in your money, Mr Gardner,’ said Kostritsky, smiling. ‘Money is not a problem for us. We have many investors with very deep pockets. And to speak truthfully, if our research pays out, money really will be the least of it.’

‘Shall we cut to it?’ I almost added:
and tell me if Irma is single and might go on a date with me
, but I had – just about – enough self-respect not to do that.

Although it was a close-run thing.

‘The total picture, everything at once,’ agreed Kostritsky. Then she yawned.

‘You do look tired,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘He works you hard, then? Peter?’

At this she laughed, a strange, strangulated sea-bird noise. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘You don’t want me to drip-feed the info. You want the total picture, all at once. Here it is: the Institute was set up a little over a decade ago to develop hyperfast computing models. The fastest computer in the world has been China’s Tianhe-2 for the last seven years running: this year it managed 8.57 petaflops a second. We were working out way up the TOP500 list, and performing pretty well: spitting out various marketable by-products along the way, keeping our investors happy. Then our research veered in a totally new direction.’

‘Astrophysics?’ I said.

‘It’s an odd story. One of our researchers had a nervous breakdown. He was being haunted by the ghost of a boy.’

I experienced an unpleasant little adrenalised jerk inside me at that. ‘Say what?’

‘We had to let him go eventually. But before he left he came across an account by an early programmer – ancient history, really. Somebody who worked on computer programming in the early days – the 1980s.’

I intuited what she was talking about moments before she said it.

‘Roy Curtius,’ she said. ‘You know him.’

‘I’m here because of Roy?’

‘You want the total story, Charles,’ she said, rubbing her eyes and looking so exhausted I actually wondered if she was about to fall asleep right in front of me. ‘A total portrait with no omissions. You are intensely important to this project. And therefore you are intensely important to the future of the human race.’

‘To which, from my throne of importance, I can declare,’ I said, ‘pigshit, am I.’

‘It’s the plain truth. You and Mr Curtius both are. The two of you together.’ Ugh! The thought of Roy somehow shading into me, me into him. Horror. ‘The two of you,’ Kos stressed. ‘What’s become apparent – Peta is insisting upon it, in fact – is that we need you both.

‘You need Roy, and you think I’m the way to get him. Or else you would’ve approached him directly. He’s in Broadmoor, you know. He’s a dangerous man.’

‘We know where he is,’ she said. ‘We’ve been in touch. Peta would like him moved from his current incarceration to rooms here. I think our security would be up to keeping him safe. But even our high-placed friends can’t order the release of somebody detained under section 3 of the Mental Health Act. Especially not considering the … crimes he has committed.’

‘You mean, against me?’

‘Since then,’ she said darkly.

I elected not to poke this metaphorical spiders’ nest. ‘So you’re interested in
my
bin-man expertise only to the point where I can get you access to Mad Roy?’ I had a sudden insight: ‘
He’s
made it a condition, has he? Christ on a quasar.’

‘You want the full picture and I’m keen for you to have it. This is not about increasing our shareholder value. This is about taking us over the threshold of the single most significant advance in human history. More so than the wheel, than printing, than the internet. The biggest leap forward imaginable.’