Through the Eye of Time (2 page)

He was a man of studious contemplation, a strange taciturn man caught up in the vortices of metaphysical speculation. The office in which he worked on Level 17 was very much like a cell, an ascetic retreat with bare walls and a slanting triangular window filled with blue sky. The warm imprint of the sun moved imperceptibly across the floor, crept into a corner, illuminated a spiders web to rainbow iridescence, and stole diagonally up the wall to the soundproof ceiling. The only items of furniture were a desk, two chairs, a bookcase, a tape library and a cyberthetic print-out terminal.

There was, too, an artefact which puzzled and intrigued most visitors: a holograph encased in a small thermoplastic bubble which could simulate a three-dimensional representation of any person, place or thing that Queghan cared to visualize. This required intense concentration and it was an invaluable tool for keeping his gift of mythic projection in good working order. When visitors were invited to try it, all that they could manage was a ten-second burst of visual static very similar to a snowstorm; then Queghan would ask what they had hoped to see and project his interpretation of their vision. It was nothing more than a toy, albeit a useful one.

Above the door in the corridor was a warning red light. When lit it meant that the door was sealed and that Queghan was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. He was ‘taking a trip' as Director Karve termed it, and everyone on Level 17 was instructed to keep well away. One wag had said, ‘What if the complex is on fire? Do we let him burn?' and glanced slyly at the others standing nearby, and Karve had neatly wiped the smile off his face by replying, ‘If there is a fire Queghan will project himself back to yesterday and warn us about it, so we will prevent it happening before it starts.' Nobody knew whether or not to take this as a joke; Karve seemed deadly serious.

Neither were they sure what to make of Queghan himself. To begin with, his physical appearance was … disturbing. He was quite tall, nearly seven feet, with broad angular shoulders that seemed out of place on his lean frame; his face had been described as ‘cadaverous', and his white hair and eyebrows compounded the incongruity. His age was indeterminate. A few people, close friends, knew of the mark just below the collarbone on his left shoulder: a pale discoloration of the skin in the shape of a Q. Whether it was a birthmark or a symbol of something more enigmatic – brand? stigma? – nobody knew, not even Karve. No one ever asked if Queghan himself was aware of its significance.

As with all meaningful coincidences (Queghan would have said, ‘Show me a coincidence that isn't acausally meaningful'), on the day that Johann Karve received the latest data from the CENTiNEL Particle Accelerator set within the Dyson Electromagnetic Sphere adjacent to
2U0525-06
, the cyberthetic terminal in Queghan's room had an attack of electronic hiccups. It was a brief malfunction but Queghan pondered on it the rest of the afternoon. He had asked for information relating to the charmed quark's rate of radioactive decay, and within seconds back came the reply:

The closing remark was what passed for sardonic humour in the solid-state brain of the cyberthetic system, a machine intelligence with reasoning and deductive capability. Queghan punched back the rejoinder:

and looked again at the print-out. What possible connection could Charles Bovary and Theodor Morell have with the rate of radioactive decay of the charmed quark? The system had queried ‘radioactive', though it was a common enough word in its program vocabulary, a word it used perhaps fifty times a day. He thought of calling Systems Engineering and asking them to check out the circuit, and then decided against it. Apart from the fact that the system was self-monitoring and would automatically register a malfunction, the idea of pursuing this line of inquiry, thrown up out of nowhere, intrigued him. It had to mean something: if the system felt he should be interested in a fictional character of nineteenth-century literature and Hitler's personal physician during World War II (Pre-Col), then perhaps he ought to be.

The holograph was on the desk in front of him. Queghan narrowed his concentration down to a single beam, closing his mind to the outside world. His breathing became shallow, his heartbeat slowed, his neurochemical metabolism was held in stasis. Within the smooth thermoplastic sphere a series of images flickered and passed swiftly away; now and then he retained one for closer inspection, held back a fleeting impression for any significant detail it might contain—

A large airless over-furnished room. A man at his desk in sombre contemplation, gazing through the window at a distant church spire, his hands clasped in front of him in an attitude that might have been anguish or supplication. Like himself, Flaubert was in a far-away world inhabited by the phantoms of his imagination. The page in front of him on the table was half completed, the script a minuscule scrawl overlaid with a hieroglyph of additions, deletions, parentheses, arrows and question-marks. There were several other pages of manuscript scattered over the desk, some of them so heavily scored that the pen had bitten through the paper.

Queghan observed the scene, being careful not to upset the equilibrium of the image in case it revealed his presence. The writer would undoubtedly take fright at the sudden appearance of an apparition from the future, to his eyes a ‘ghost' materializing out of nowhere.

But there was nothing here to trigger an alarm or alert Queghan's instincts: the image had the authentic and unremarkable feel and smell of nineteenth-century France, and Flaubert too, with his perfumed hair and ink-stained fingers, fitted neatly into the tableau.

What was the cyberthetic system playing at? Queghan wondered, back once more in the bare room on Level 17. The rays of sunlight were now obscured by rags of purple cloud. He looked again at the print-out and began to smile, the heavy creases deepening at his eyes and mouth. He had been duped by his own innate gifts, for he had been seeking a dark and devious reason for the machine error when – it was now obvious – the cause was nothing more than a keyboard mistake that any trainee operator might make.

Queghan folded the print-out into the shape of a delta
wing and sent it sailing across the room towards the angled window.

*

It was disconcerting never knowing which wife you were going home to; Queghan was duly disconcerted. This time it was the harridan.

He stepped through the front door and found himself in a hot steamy kitchen with a black-leaded range taking up the whole of one wall and an oval metal bath set before it filled with boiling water. A huge dented kettle throbbed on the cast iron hob, burbling to itself and spouting steam.

Just as his eyes were becoming accustomed to this gloomy domestic scene a hag of a woman entered the room, seeming not to notice him, and with a mumbled curse took the kettle from the hob and poured boiling water into the bath. Steam rose in clouds, enveloping her head, so that wisps of hair clung damply to her shiny forehead and sweat ran down the hollows of her scrawny neck. Her shoulders stuck out like those of a scarecrow, the drab material of her dress hanging slackly across her thin back and concave chest. She straightened up wearily and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, catching sight of him and peering through the rising steam.

‘Is that you, Paul?'

‘No, this isn't Paul. It's Chris.'

‘Chris?' she said. ‘Chris?' She leaned forward, her eyes narrowed. ‘Where's our Paul?'

Queghan didn't want to break the spell (it would only have upset her), so he replied that Paul hadn't come home from work. He wasn't entirely sure which period this was supposed to be, though by the look of the kitchen he surmised that it was Nineteenth-Century Working Class – possibly a mining community judging by the waiting bath.

‘I suppose you've come to see Paul,' the hag said. ‘You might as well sit yourself down.'

Queghan edged past the sideboard and sat down in a rocking chair whose stiff rusting springs clanged alarmingly. The period detail was good, he noted, right down to the flagstone floor and the mouse holes in the warped skirting. Now that he
was included in the scenario he might as well play the part. But he wondered who Paul could be.

‘Would you like some tea?' The woman had adopted a pose, the sticks of her wrists bent backwards resting on her hips, her shrewd eyes observing him keenly. There was a purple mole on her chin with a single stiff bristle growing from it.

‘Yes. Thank you.' He decided to reinforce the image. It would be amusing and maybe even educational. ‘Where's Paul working these days?'

‘Nottingham,' the woman said tersely, taking a pot-bellied earthenware teapot from on top of the range and pouring a thick dark-brown liquid into a mug. It looked like tea. ‘Bit strong,' the woman said. ‘I mashed it ten minutes ago.'

Queghan hid a smile. Good choice of phrase. Authentic dialogue. She had researched this one well. ‘What's Paul doing there?' He refrained from using dialect; the woman would have to accept him as an educated outsider.

‘Got himself a job in an office. His father' (she pronounced it ‘fae-ther') ‘wanted him to start down't pit but I put me foot down and said no. It might have been good enough for th'owd feller but it's not good enough for my Paul.' She placed the mug on the corner of the table, a dull spoon sticking out of it.

Queghan was watching her. He said curiously, ‘Your husband works in the pit?'

‘Aye, that's reet,' the woman said, sitting down in a straight-back chair and resting her elbows on the red and green squared oilcloth. She rubbed her eyes with prominent whitish knuckles. ‘Bin down't pit these twenty-odd year. Nowt better for him, never was, though there might have been once, as a young feller. Didn't take his chances. Too fond of his ale, Walter is – allus has been. Were a fine upstanding chap one time, could have charmed the birds off the trees, but it's all gone now. But I've got my Paul, he shan't ruin him, I'll see to that.' Quite unexpectedly she started to cry. Her eyes appeared to be dry and yet the tears ran down and plopped on the oilcloth. She sniffled into a rag of a handkerchief and said, ‘Good heavens, drink your tea now, pay no attention to me.'

Queghan was embarrassed to be near such emotion, even though he knew it to be fabricated in the same way as the
flagstone floor, the mouse holes, the creaking rocking chair, the thin bleached knuckles …

And something else was troubling him. The scene had the nagging familiarity of a half-remembered dream, of something experienced long ago, or depicted on the screen, or read about. Of course he had seen details of the period before – the frugal surroundings, the hardships, the raw nerve of living on the poverty line – yet somehow she had caught not merely a similitude of the environment and the conditions but a specific human situation at a certain time and place.

This wasn't, Queghan felt, the enactment of just another historical reconstruction, an amusing diversion: it was nearer to the nub of things, closer to some underlying truth than a clever replication of period detail.

He said, ‘Don't upset yourself. I'm sure that what you're doing is for the best. Your husband will understand.'

The woman blew her nose and sniffed her tears away. She smiled at him. ‘What must you think of me, weeping in front of a stranger? You mustn't mention this to Paul, he'd be angry with me. He says tears should only be used for happiness, not for sorrow.'

‘You love your son very much,' Queghan said.

‘I live for him,' the woman said simply. ‘He is my life.'

‘He's very fortunate to have someone like you.'

The woman tossed her head and laughed, a little harshly. ‘You try telling
him
that. He thinks I interfere too much in his affairs. He's very stubborn. I say, “You don't have the experience, you're very young, Paul”, but he thinks he knows best. The girl at the farm, she's turned his head, filled him up with ideas. But whenever I warn him he says, “I can look after myself, mother. No girl will ever come between us. I watch them. I see their little snares and wiles; they won't trap me. Never.” But he's so young, he doesn't know about life. He doesn't understand women.'

‘And what about the one in Nottingham?' Queghan said.

The woman reacted sharply. Her hands went together and clasped themselves in a knot on the oilcloth, the pale bones showing. ‘Who told you about her?' Her brows were drawn into fierce, rigid lines. ‘Is it common knowledge?'

‘Rumour,' Queghan admitted cautiously. ‘People talk, and something like that is bound to get around. A married woman and a younger man.'

‘They do talk,' the woman said, barely controlling herself. ‘That's all some of them can do, talk.' She closed her eyes wearily and shook her head from side to side. ‘I've warned him, begged him to be more careful.' She opened her eyes and looked at him directly. ‘Of course it's her that's to blame. These women nowadays, these so-called modern women, they have no shame. They're nothing more than brazen …' She fumbled for a word to express her meaning without offending him. ‘Trollops.'

‘It's the times,' Queghan said placatingly.