Through the Eye of Time (3 page)

‘Aye, the times,' the woman agreed sourly. ‘The times change but folk remain the same. One of these days he'll learn. One of these days—' She held up a scrawny hand. ‘Hush!'

Queghan heard nothing.

‘Sit quiet,' the woman said, getting up herself. ‘It's Morel. He's been in the pub swilling himself stupid with ale as usual. Sit quiet and he'll pay you no mind.' She stood at the table, listening intently to the perfect silence, and suddenly her hand went up and clutched the faded dress above her heart. Her face was ashen.

‘Are you ill?' Queghan said, anxious despite himself.

She shook her head, unable to speak for the moment. Then she moistened her pale lips; her gaze steadied and sought him out. ‘I'm all right,' she murmured. ‘Don't say anything. I'm all right.'

‘You ought to see a doctor.'

‘Doctors.' The woman tried a smile but it was twisted and full of pain. ‘Wouldn't give 'em house room. Quacks most of them. Keep you ill so's they can take your money. That's the only thing we agree on, Morel and me.' Once again she fell silent and her eyes seemed to withdraw as if observing an inner landscape: a private fantasy world locked inside her head.

She stood at the table, her hands suspended in mid-gesture, as still and unyielding as a waxwork. Queghan got up and left the kitchen; she didn't see him go even though he crossed her eye-line and passed by close enough to touch.

Something that Karve always said came to him now: ‘Ignore
a coincidence at your peril,' and Queghan now had two separate events to contend with within the space of a few hours. Something somewhere was juggling with the incidence of probability, manipulating spacetime and causing it to distort.

These ‘coincidences' were the peaks of waves which his senses could detect but not so far comprehend. And the odd thing was that they were in some way connected with his search for the mysterious psi particles which constituted the basic stuff of time and matter.

The quarks were coming home to roost.

*

At dinner he asked his wife why she had chosen a scene from
Sons and Lovers
and she looked at him blankly for a moment and then shook her head. She was wearing an emerald-green velvet evening gown, gathered and held at her breast by a gold pin, her shoulders bare and gently contoured in the lamplight, soft dark recesses nestling above her collar-bones. The fine curve of her neck was emphasized by the smooth blond hair swept back above her ears which gleamed like old silver in the mellow light.

Queghan suggested to her that there must have been a reason. ‘Was it specified as an educational project?'

‘I didn't intend making it a fictional scene,' Oria said. ‘It was simply an accurate historical reconstruction.' Her eyes shifted momentarily and became vague. For some time she had been unwell.

‘I couldn't fault its accuracy – I could even smell the coal dust. But you introduced fictional characters, Paul, Morel, the Nottingham woman.'

‘But I didn't,' Oria said. Her delicate hands moved like slender pale fish in the lamplight. ‘All I had in mind was to capture authentic period detail. The characters must have imposed themselves … I don't know how or why.'

Queghan drank some wine. He smiled and said, ‘I wish you'd warned me. Finding your wife made up as a hag isn't the best sort of homecoming.'

‘I lost track of time. I'm sorry, Chris. And I didn't expect
you for at least another hour.' She smiled uncertainly. ‘I shouldn't keep doing this, I know.'

‘A harmless fantasy never hurt anybody.'

Oria nodded. She wasn't entirely certain that any fantasy was totally harmless. Later in the evening they listened to classical tribal music. Oria was restless and she became annoyed with Queghan because he didn't respond to her attempts to make conversation. In a way she didn't understand, this rather pleased her, though she still put on a show of irritation – the truth being that it pleased her when his mind drifted away in abstract speculation, excluding her and everything else; it was a trait which endeared him to her even as her feminine pride was snubbed. Had he always been attentive she wouldn't have loved him so much.

‘But I do,' Queghan said, smiling faintly. ‘I do listen to you.'

‘Perhaps if I took a lover you might be more considerate.'

‘Which period did you have in mind? English Regency? Greek Bacchanalia? Maybe something modern, post-Colonization?'

‘I didn't mean a reconstruction,' Oria said tartly. ‘I meant live-action experience. You remember – real life?'

‘That's the stuff between the scenes?'

‘Why did I marry you?' Oria said. ‘You come back from the nether world like a whale surfacing for a breath of air. Then down again into the deep.'

‘You've never seen a whale.'

‘My grannie told me all about them.'

‘Your grannie never saw a whale. We don't have whales. They forgot to bring the embryos. We have blowfish instead, the size of office blocks.'

‘What have blowfish the size of office blocks to do with my taking a lover?'

‘You could take a blowfish for a lover.'

‘That's an obscene suggestion, not to say physically awkward and cumbersome in bed.'

‘Could be a lot of fun.'

‘Who for?'

‘The blowfish.'

Oria leaned closer. The demarcation between green velvet and white breast was very evident. She said:

‘Let's try another ploy. Blowfish aren't sexy.'

‘They are to other blowfish.'

Oria started giggling. ‘Stop it, Chris.' She reached out and stroked his cheek.

‘Which ploy is this?' Queghan asked, giving her a sidelong look. But it had been too near the truth to be comfortable and Oria snatched her hand away. She was very beautiful, still desirable, and it was a pity they had to play at games to touch reality. It was necessary to simulate the correct responses.

How long since a human being had responded spontaneously and involuntarily to stimuli? There had been an overkill of emotion and the human species had grown weary, like an actor forced to play a role until it became a mumbled ritual, empty of meaning, devoid of feeling.

Now Oria had taken on her affronted virgin pose. She had offered herself and been rejected: the young and tender innocent spurned and cast aside. The trouble with the image was that she was thirty-nine years old and had a son of seventeen.

Queghan said, ‘I'm too tired to play. Let's go to bed.'

She looked warily at him and said, ‘I'm tired as well.'

‘Really tired?'

‘Actually tired.'

‘I think we've established that we're both tired,' and he smiled into her grey-green eyes. Behind those eyes there was a universe he knew nothing about. He supposed that in some ways it corresponded to his own, that there were certain points of similarity. But to know for sure he would have to enter her mind, and so far he had only succeeded in penetrating her body.

Queghan bent forward to kiss her, wondering what he ought to feel and what his response should be.

Johann Karve had spent a restless night. As a rule he slept soundly, untroubled by whatever cares the day had heaped upon his ageing shoulders; but the latest results from the CENTiNEL Particle Accelerator had been more than merely disturbing, they had been alarming.

He sat at his desk on Level 40 of MyTT drinking lukewarm tea from a china cup, turning the pages of research data: column after column of nine-digit numbers which varied only by the last two, in some cases the last three, decimal places. These were the reassuring ones. But here and there amongst the endless rows of grey figures a red asterisk shrilled a warning like a beacon on a foggy night. His first and natural conclusion, after observing these maverick numbers, had been ‘cyberthetic malfunction'. It was the obvious explanation, the calming shot which numbed the shock to the sensory nerve system and intellectual processes. Or failing that explanation (and it had died a miserable death on reading the addendum to the report which stated that the data had been independently verified) one could always suppose that the Particle Accelerator itself had detected a freak interaction of mu-meson particles in the region of the Temporal Flux Centre
2U0525-06
. After all, it was an unusual region of spacetime where time dilation was at optimum.

Yet even this would not do. As Director of the Myth Technology Research Institute he had to rely on the expertise of hardline scientists, but he was not such a fool that he couldn't read a particle accelerator report and interpret the findings in a meaningful fashion. The decay rate of mu-mesons was precisely calibrated: cyberthetic analysis had already allowed for the fact that they lived seven times longer than was theoretically possible. Created by the collision between energetic
protons emanating from super-nova explosions elsewhere in the galaxy, their very high speeds – a fraction below lightspeed – enabled them to age slower than other particles in the same spatio-temporal co-ordinate.

And not only were the mu-mesons behaving strangely. The really worrying aspect was that a whole range of elementary psi particles, companions of the neutron and proton, denoted Σ, Λ, Ξ and so on, had suddenly taken it into their heads to alter their rates of decay. If time dilation wasn't the culprit this left only one possibility, but it was the one Karve was reluctant to accept.

In simple terms it meant that the fabric of spacetime was disintegrating.

The atomic structure of elementary particles, which constituted the stuff of energy and matter, was behaving erratically and breaking all the rules of physics. The figures in front of him were evidence of this – these ordered grey columns which foretold that organic structure, and time itself, were breaking down. There would be no cataclysmic explosion, no supra-galactic event to signal the end of time – merely the creeping infinitesimal process of disintegration and decay.

And how would this process announce itself? Karve picked up the china cup and supported it lightly by the outspread tips of his fingers. Inside this ‘dead' piece of matter a thousand billion billion particles were busily humming away in their orbits: atoms within molecules; electrons, protons and neutrons within atoms; and within these sub-atomic particles the infinitely smaller constituent parts which were the wave-forms of pure energy. Nothing very dramatic was required to make this whole elaborate structure crumble into nothingness, to dissipate itself in a burst of radiation. True, the amount of radiation generated would be enough to devastate an area several kilometres square, but essentially the atomic structure would simply have to break the rules and stop behaving as it had done since the formation of the primeval atom all those thousands of millions of years ago.

Then – nothing.

The cup would cease to exist. The atomic structure which obligingly kept to the shape of a cup for the purpose of drinking
tea would quite arbitrarily decide to take on some other formation, or perhaps not to assume a definite pattern at all. Chaos would rule. Particles would interact at random in a formless plasma of non-matter. Or perhaps entropy would come, once and for evermore, to hold the universe in a state of lukewarm apathy. The ultimate heat death in which everything stayed where it was because it couldn't be bothered to go anywhere else. In the absence of matter and energy interchange, communication would cease. Lightspeed would become a meaningless and futile concept. Spacetime would be defunct. And without these universal ground rules time itself would stop. Dead.

Karve believed intellectually in the probability, if not the actual possibility, of these thoughts; he was too much the scientist to refute them and turn his face away in blind obstinacy. Intellectually yes, they could happen, but emotionally his own senses rebelled against the dogma of clinical scientific objectivity. The
feel
of the cup touching his fingertips could not be measured by any device known to man. The sense of well-being he experienced from the broad shaft of sunlight warming his hand, and the memories it evoked of other sunfilled days, could not be contained in a scientific treatise or marked by the indices on a Gaussian curve. Even looking out, as he did each day, from the apex of the pyramid, imbued his whole being with the inexpressible wonder of vibrant life so that the entire body of human knowledge lay in its shadow. The fact of existence, the mystery of creation, were still the abiding and elemental truths.

The sheets of figures, the innumerable grey columns, called him back to duty. He was an old man, his days of innovation and creativity long past. His brain was now the repository of a million facts, a human card index lacking the spark of synthesis which was the basis of scientific inquiry.

Only connect
, he thought. The answer was that simple.

His First Assistant came through on audio. Karve listened patiently but yet with a trace of weariness to some meandering second-hand complaint from RECONPAN. It had been filed by deGrenier, who had insisted on a personal interview with the Director.

‘I would have thought,' Karve told his First Assistant, ‘that Systems Engineering or perhaps Archives could have settled this to everyone's satisfaction.' The two areas he most dreaded becoming involved with, and this particular problem combined them: hardware and administration.

‘DeGrenier has taken the matter up with both sections, sir, and neither can offer an adequate explanation.' The First Assistant paused, and then like a mother hoping to reason with a recalcitrant child: ‘I think under the circumstances it might be wise …'

Karve pushed the CENTiNEL report to one side. ‘Send deGrenier in,' he said, and while he waited studied the china cup and saucer on the desk as if expecting them to dematerialize before his eyes.

DeGrenier was brisk, businesslike and to the point.

‘I'm sorry to take up your time, Director, but somebody has been tampering with the information retrieval system. Yesterday I requested biographical details to build up a Subject Profile and this is what came up.'