I never set out to be anybody’s prophet. I didn’t see myself as a spy. I was twenty-five years old and I was ready for adventure.

Before the checkup, I went to see my father to say my goodbyes. He was in a home on the other side of Nujoma Location. I found him absorbed in a game of chess, the board set next to him on the long divan in the common room. The room was full of sunshine.

The game was automatic. When he completed his move, the crown on the black queen spun round at high speed while the board considered its position. I suspect it was more for show than because it needed the time. In a few seconds, in any case, it made up its mind. The black bishop slid into the corner, pressed by two knights. I could see checkmate against the machine.

My father stopped the clock. He looked sideways at me, his hands running up and down his legs, shrunk to the bone by age.

He spoke as sharply as ever. “You want a game, my friend? I’m running a tournament here. Seven players, six of which are the different personalities of this board.”

“I don’t play so much.”

“You looked as if you appreciated the brilliance of my last two moves. Ah, I thought I was dealing with a flesh-and-blood expert for once, a real flesh-and-blood expert.” His face fell. “Playing against a machine is never the same unless you have given them the freedom to consider all the assumptions.”

I said, “I used to play as a child. I don’t play now.”

“Then that explains it. I am very sorry to have troubled you.”

He went back to his game, putting his head down. For a quarter of an hour I watched the pawns tread down the rows. It was futile. My father never returned to a subject once it was settled in his mind. I could have stayed on the armchair for the rest of the day and he would have continued to play his position without resuming our conversation, his forehead straining as he waited for the board to counter his moves. I don’t know what I expected. He wouldn’t have given me his blessing if I could have explained where I was going. He was an engineer and believed in the future over the past. The stars over our heads above the secrets of old time.

On my way out, he turned to the door. I imagined he wanted to say something about what lay ahead. Instead, he pointed to the housekeeping cart and smiled, as if to indicate something about its construction. I smiled back, although I could feel the pressure at my temple.

From the motorway, the tenements and squares of the new city were evident for a dozen miles in both directions. Nitrogen factories alternated with school buildings. Automatic warehouses rose above the tin roofs of barracks and refugee canteens. I shuddered to think of them—pale-faced women and children in their thousands—and tried to concentrate on the case files.

I had watched the recording of the mission twice already. It was my first assignment as a case officer and I was keen to excel. We were scheduled to arrive at five twenty in the morning in Marrakesh, 16 June in the year of our Lord 1955. In Morocco, our task was to eavesdrop on a small industrial concern. Its proprietor went by the name of Keswyn Muller. We would produce a brief report on Muller to assist the consultants in making their determinations. I wasn’t used to watching myself on tape, and was impressed by the aplomb with which I handled conditions in the field. Nothing untoward had been registered on the recording. I looked calm, cool, and untouched by the stress.

For her help in preparing me to go out, I could thank Shanumi Six, the senior member on the expedition. She would give me the space to prove myself. Plus, she wasn’t the kind of agent who punished herself when out in the field. She had selected two rooms in a luxury hotel in Marrakesh, the kind of decadence the old civilizations had perfected. If I felt any nervousness about being around fair-skinned men and women, in a world that they controlled, I was wise enough to keep it to myself. Shanumi didn’t need to hear about my misgivings.

Our buildings were strung along a forested lane behind a number of hidden checkpoints. Security was discreet, but I knew that my profile and silhouette were being logged as I walked to the clinic.

My destination was a converted trailer, designed to be hitched to a truck and moved to a different location whenever necessary. The blinds were permanently pulled down so that no one could look in. The chimney belched white smoke which was soon lost amid the trees and bright sunshine. I had been through the first round of treatment and hated the experience. Once I had been through the second round, I would not be able to leave the perimeter established by the Agency. We couldn’t take the risk of transferring a virus to another place and time.

I went through the doors and sat at the examination table where my blood pressure was taken by a pair of old-fashioned cuffs. It left bruises on my arm. Samples of blood and tissue were extracted and filed away, machines singing alerts to one another. The medical cart opened to receive my offering, revealing the purple bulb in its refrigerator compartment. Lights ran across the top of its body as it produced a teardrop of universal serum.

The injection was the most uncomfortable part of the process. The medical cart had a way of lining you up, then stapling a cold pin under the skin of your inner arm, which left you with a sense of violation, as if the machine had come too close to your inner being.

Afterwards I had a ringing sound in my head. Then came a sudden spell of dizziness. I lost my balance and couldn’t walk. I lay on a couch in the next room for the better part of an hour, attended by the cart, until the sensation passed. According to the consultants, I would be completely protected from any known agent of disease, manmade or artificial, for ten days. More importantly, I would not be a carrier of infection.

When I had recovered enough to stand, I was taken behind a dense radiation curtain. I put my hands over my eyes while the walls shone a fierce white ray onto my person. I could feel the light penetrating to my bones. For some minutes thereafter, I saw no more than indistinct shapes. Slowly my vision returned, bringing back the inquisitive eyes of the cart. I had a clean bill of health on the system.

On my way out, the clinic provided me with a printout of my silhouette. It was more than a memento. Later, I could compare it with my reflection for signs of exposure. Before the dangers of serving in a foreign time had been established, some unlucky souls had begun to lose their outlines. After a while they couldn’t recognize themselves in a mirror.

But I didn’t have the luxury of indulging my fears of reflection sickness. There was no time to waste. I wanted to find my Six, although my head was swimming from the drugs. I hurried past the tennis courts, the clay baking uselessly in the heat. Sometimes you would see agents in white shorts and shirts, men and women you had never seen before and might never see again, practicing in the late afternoon.

Then came the famous library which had long been associated with the Agency. It contained the complete records of everything that had been and everything that could be—the potentials of the past, present, and future. But it could never be deciphered down to the resolution of an individual life. Many had tried and failed to find the images of their lives in its infinite algebra. The library was a fixed point. Unlike the trailers, the library was set in the Earth to a depth of thirty floors.

One day during a free hour, I had descended using the spiral staircase and discovered a room at the bottom. The librarians, their teardrop-shaped heads touching, were conspiring in almost complete darkness. They had rustled indignantly at my entrance, their faces as sharp as foxes, until one hurried me straight back to the surface.

Since then I had never returned to the vaults, although I often stood in the atrium of the library and, as many had done and would come to do, counted the names carved into the wall of remembrance. The Agency had not made direct contact with the main enemy, but in the meanwhile—as we waited for the ultimate showdown—a stream of accidents and technical difficulties had covered yard after yard on the wall with the names of the fallen. Candles burn along the top of the wall, their flames standing as straight as pencils.

I found my Six in the registration office. She had drafted the consent forms which were to be filed the night before departure. I sat next to Shanumi in the trailer, which was furnished with heavy armchairs and bookshelves, and signed the forms with the fountain pen she handed to me. She scrutinized the paperwork a second time when I gave it back, the ruby rings on her hands sparkling as she ran her finger down the lines. When she was satisfied that the forms were in order, she held them up to the terminal until they vanished into the aperture.

Turning around, Shanumi put a hand on my shoulder. I could tell it was as much to keep me at a distance as to reassure me about the next day. She didn’t have a motherly bone in her body—she liked to make that clear.

“As of now, until you return from the foreign location, your rights and responsibilities are determined by the Agency, not by the Constitution anymore. How does it feel, Agent Eleven?”

I took a minute to consider the fact. “No different. Should it feel different?”

“It is different. It is very different.” She sat down in one of the armchairs and invited me to join her, folding out her tough arms. “For the first time, you are no longer your own property and your own concern. If need be, you may be asked to sacrifice your life or even more.”

I sat down. “And what could be even more?”

Shanumi Six spoke in an unusually quiet voice. “Every person has something which is more important than mere life. He or she may not know what it is until the time comes to make a decision.”

“I never thought about it in those terms.”

“You are going to the old world where the assumptions we make about the Constitution don’t apply. You must remember, Agent Eleven, that this world, our world with its philosophy of humanity, with its attempt to care about every man, woman, and child, every last black-skinned fellow—and even the tragic albinos among us—is a recent construction. It is not so long ago that simply being born in a skin like ours would have been considered a crime. Sooner or later, whether it’s in Morocco or some other time zone, you will be faced with a choice between the different sets of assumptions.”

Shanumi poured out two portions of absinthe from a bottle on the table and diluted them with soda water. She offered me one of the glasses. I couldn’t make out her expression as she peered into the radiant green water. In the many months I had been under her supervision, I had never managed to figure out what made her tick.

It may have been that Shanumi Six liked to stay in character as much as possible, which made her difficult to understand in the present. At the Agency, she was noted for using the hyper-traditional methods of the case officer. Her handwriting, her accent, her very gestures were practiced daily in front of an ancient television set. She liked to prune the bonsai tree on her desk with one hand while studying her case files. It had been the gift of a famous Japanese painter of the Edo period.

I brought the glass to my lips and hesitated. “I have a question for you, Shanumi. I watched the recording again.”

“Why are we risking our own black skins when the Agency has observational devices in position?”

“That’s not exactly my question. I agree that we cannot simply turn history over to the machines. Otherwise I would have chosen a different line of work.”

“Otherwise, to be exact, we would have to rewire every machine in existence from top to down. Even the consultants, mighty as they are, have to work through us because of the safeguards.”

I tried the contents of the glass and shivered at the aniseed taste. “But do they ever explain why in general?”

“Why what, my young friend?”

“What the bigger picture is, I mean. Why are we following this person rather than that one? How is watching a minor figure like Muller supposed to lead us to the main enemy?”

I could see that my question had made Shanumi impatient. To my disappointment, she finished her drink and got up to go.

“Everybody who survives focuses on their part of the task, no more and no less. Focus and concentrate. No grand fantasies, mind you, about finding the main enemy on your first assignment. When the time is right for our adversaries to show themselves, I am sure they won’t neglect the opportunity. Now, if you don’t mind, I will excuse myself. I like to be alone the night before I go out.”

I tried not to let the rebuff get to me. I finished my drink and remembered the legendary patience of S Natanson who had started the Agency in an underground laboratory near Kitwe where he’d framed many of the doctrines which guided us centuries later. I remembered the supernova so few had survived. Then I left the empty trailer. The heavy metal door closed silently behind me.

In the evening I went straight to sleep in the dormitory, the fan turning on the ceiling above the row of empty beds.

I had the sensation, when I was fast asleep, that my sister was sitting on the next bed and trying to attract my attention. She had a voice like a flute, just as I remembered. But I didn’t understand the words she was forming. They floated through my dream, unwilling to slow down and reveal their true contents. Nor did she reply when I asked her to explain. She continued to talk, a flow of sounds, then wrote on the palms of her hands. She raised them to me, demonstrating they were blank.

The memory was with me at four in the morning when the alarm went off. As I made my way through the vacant halls, past the concrete reactor cone, and down the long shaft to the departure suite, I was still involved in my dream.

My Six was in the nude, packing her toiletries in a travel bag without even a towel around her waist. I undressed in the corner, hung my clothes in the locker. The bar lights on the ceiling were harsh, as if somebody had doubled the voltage. Shanumi didn’t speak but led the way into the shower, her arms folded underneath her breasts, the muscles rippling on her ebony back.

Many case officers liked to take a tablet to turn white, believing that it made the job easier. I think Shanumi Six was too proud of her skin to take half measures. She couldn’t imagine being an albino even for a day. I had adopted the same policy in tribute to her. And to be honest, I didn’t want to imagine what life was like when the mere fact of your pale complexion made you a secret object of fear and resentment.

The steam and hot water gave way to a shivering minute under an ice-cold bucket. Shanumi turned here and there in the spray, sending water everywhere, before ducking out to dry herself. She didn’t look away while I washed myself.

When I got out she was in a friendlier frame of mind, ready to talk.

“I watched Gone with the Wind last night. It must be the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen it. Do you happen to know it?”

“Never heard of it.”

Shanumi passed the electric discharger over her body. She parked it on the table for me.

“You should see it, Eleven. I should have made you see it as a condition of your education. Scarlett O’Hara is a spectacular woman. I watched Lawrence of Arabia as well. The twentieth century had actors and actresses. They didn’t rely on acting algorithms or fantasize about digital actors. For all its cruelty, I find the old world sympathetic for that reason alone. You know that I work from intuition first of all. It’s the mood, the feeling that gets into you from what is on the screen. You need that before you arrive in person.”

“Getting into character.”

“If you want to call it that. The past is a foreign country and it is a country of the imagination. A case officer, in a foreign country, lives in her head first of all. Most of what happens, on an assignment, happens in her head.”

Shanumi examined herself in the mirror, holding her breath for a minute. She went on: “In the field people will look at you. I guarantee it. Maybe they haven’t seen a black man who holds himself in a certain way. Maybe they haven’t seen a black woman like me. Maybe they want to provoke you. Maybe it’s nothing. The best policy is to tell yourself that you’re imagining it and go about the assignment as you have seen it unfold. That’s how the black child was raised.”

Shanumi Six finished changing while I used the discharger on myself, wondering what I could do with this piece of advice. I never had to worry about standing out in Johannesburg. I ran the discharger over my arms, my chest, along my feet, and up to my belly. The tingle started just below the skin. It crackled in the nerves in my teeth and left the taste of ozone in my mouth.

The velvet line of the sterilizer ran the breadth of the room, completing the cycle. In conjunction with the universal serum, the sterilizing process suppressed the myriad germs, bugs, fleas and flies, microscopic fungi and algae which we carried on our persons.

It wasn’t unpleasant. After the shampoo and discharger, you were left smelling delicately of chamomile. I sensed it on myself as I changed into the outfit provided by the costume department—dungarees and a short-sleeved shirt. I smoothed the locket away beneath the collar of the shirt, picked up the satchel which had been prepared. After many years of training, I was looking forward to being in the field.

Above our heads, the city of Johannesburg, the first and last city of our century, ticked with radiation. The catacomb city. Its reef, honeycombed with a hundred thousand miles of mining tunnels, had been our salvation in the days of the supernova.

The way to the arch was closely guarded by the computer consultants, placed in rows in the rooms adjacent to the corridor, nervous pairs of blue-and-red sparks in their faces. They were the stalwarts of the Agency. They managed the schedules of case officers and residents, calculated changes in causality and the energy budget, and deposited their findings in the immortal archives. They wrote the books of the consultants, which were as close to prophecy as a sentient being could come. But they weren’t the prophets that some people hoped for. The books they produced were of no use to any individual person. Composed in possibility and probability script, they were notoriously difficult to decipher.

The security check lasted a few minutes. Shanumi went on while we waited for the door to open.

“If something happens to you, Eleven, if somehow you and your reflection part company in the field, I will be vilified backwards and forwards in time. I will be portrayed as the one who brought the whole contraption down. In other words, I have my reputation to consider.”

“I understand.”

“I’m glad to have your understanding on this issue.” She took out a pair of glasses and polished them with a corner of her handkerchief before she replaced them in her pocket. “Today will be more important than you can imagine: to establish a proper view of Keswyn Muller’s activities in the region and report back to the consultants in short order. It’s good that we are of one mind.”

I couldn’t tell if Shanumi was pulling my leg about the importance of our assignment. Why would a first-time case officer like myself be deployed on a vital mission? What did I have to contribute? I worried about it and my own worthiness for two minutes. Then I gave up trying to understand before the barrier opened to admit us into the transfer complex. Canisters of super-cooled hydrogen were piled up at the entrance. An automatic bulldozer was ferrying them two by two deeper into the center.

To my surprise, there were no human beings at the archway—only more consultants following the preparations, their bronze heads and hands studying the consoles. The gantry vanished into the ceiling. The hum of the solar plant rose to a furious pitch and then subsided, having filled the battery.

We stood in front of a whirlpool turning at a merry clip in the air. I swallowed. Shanumi looked at me without a hint of approval.

“Do you have the pills?”

I put a hand to my neck to remember the locket. The silver was warm on my skin. “I have both of them.”

“So do I.”

The clocks flashed on the wall. Through fluorescent tubes, a large quantity of plasma poured into the machine, keeping the whirlpool in motion before our eyes. Shanumi took her position on the grate and looked back at me. The consultants seemed to raise their heads in unison. The arch appeared around the whirlpool, its horseshoe form as unmistakeable as a letter.

I stood and counted but couldn’t breathe properly. I feared being engulfed by people who, for the most part, had disappeared centuries ago from the face of the planet. The men and women at the Agency who were in charge of my training had never entirely understood from my psychological chart that I suffered from a tendency to faint under pressure. I kept my head down and hoped that my Six couldn’t tell how frightened I was.

Fortunately for me, there was a space to recover my wits—an old custom before traveling. Just as the old Russians did before a journey, we observe a minute of silence before stepping under the sign of the arch. We steal a glance at photographs of our dear ones which we’re allowed to carry. We close our eyes and remember the name of the founder, S Natanson, along with the stories of the case officers, coming before and after us in the centuries, who made or will make the greatest sacrifice and whose thoughts and atoms are scattered in the manifold of space and time. We may even remember to curse the idea of a multiverse for the abomination that it is.

Then we put the past and the future behind us to concentrate on the here and now. We pass into the whirlpool, see spirals of gold and green extending from behind our eyelids to infinity, hear music which can never be played on earthly synthesizers, feel the cosmic wind in our face like a whoosh, and emerge into another sunshine…

I dropped eight feet and landed hard on my back. But I didn’t have time to think about the surprise. I turned, hitting the side of my head on cement, lay there for a minute, blood in my mouth too winded to speak.

When I got up, I found myself on an extensive rooftop partitioned by washing lines. My Six was in the far corner, no worse for wear except for the dust on her clothes.

“What do you see, Eleven?”

The sky was long and high, blue as a robin’s egg. The mountains stood in a semicircle around the town. Stretches of parched land alternated with irrigated squares. I didn’t remember the view from the recording. According to the itinerary, we should never have been up here.

My attention was drawn to the rail yards. A train was arriving underneath a plume of oily brown smoke, sweeping men and animals from the track as it went into the station. Tents were pegged in front of the station. A string of camels rested on a piece of open ground.

I counted the points of interest out loud so that my Six would know I was paying attention. “Moving train. Trucks. One light plane, but it is too high to be a spotter in my opinion. No outward sign of trouble. I’ll go down, Shanumi, and see what it’s like at ground level.”

The top of a ladder extended onto the roof, its rusty iron claws set in the cement. I went over and climbed down the building.

Five floors of yellow brick passed with no facing windows until I found myself alone in an alleyway. At the far end was the bright corner of a street, as clear as a window opened into daylight. From it came the sounds of men and animals, then the rattle of a. I was so relieved to be there, on the loose in the lost city of Marrakesh, that I forgot I had hit my head.

Shanumi came down the ladder and showed me her calculations.

“We are seven hundred yards out of position, compared to the recording. Unbelievable. It’s the budget cuts. How are we supposed to do our jobs? They save small change, scrimp on equipment, and put the lives of innocent case officers in jeopardy.”

“I didn’t know the consultants could make mistakes.”

“What is the doctrine? When things fail, come back to the doctrine. Every mistake, when you trace it back, is a human mistake. That is the doctrine. We have never empowered the consultants to make mistakes on our behalf. See if anyone is watching us.”

I walked to the mouth of the alley. Men passed on the opposite side without paying attention to me. They were as white as sheets. I went back, chilled. I knew that they were only Middle Easterners and North Africans, but some reactions are instinctive.

There was worse to come. The main square lay between us and our destination, the Grand Marrakesh Hotel. The streets were narrow and lined with booths open to examination. In back rooms, sheep carcasses turned on spits, running with roast fat.

On one road there was a line of tailors, old men sewing buttons or measuring their customers’ arms and legs. On the next we found jewelry shops and watch repairers, silk shops, and religious schools. My panic rose as the streets became busier. I had to get used to being in such proximity to ghostly men and women. To my relief none of them paid any undue attention to us.

There were a few other black men, digging on the side of the road, but I tried not to make any sign of recognition. Shanumi walked through the crowds without a sign of fear. She had tied a scarf around her head but she was still, without a doubt, the roughest- and toughest-looking woman for a hundred years in either direction.

The Grand Marrakesh Hotel lived up to its name. It was a six-story pale-stone building between two private houses. I remembered it from the recording. You went through a marble archway and past a carp pond attended by benches, whiskered bronze fish nosing through the greenish-black water. The foyer behind the garden was lined with rows of rattan chairs.

On the right-hand side, a dealer in precious stones was announced by a sign in five languages. He sat at a high wooden desk, a pair of scales and a loupe at his elbow. He wore brown sunglasses and never moved his head as we went past.

The desk clerk was more solicitous. He wore a double-breasted suit and cuff links. I recognized him also.

“You are not from here, I can see. How can I help, monsieur and madame?”

“We need two rooms. One for the young monsieur and the larger one for myself.”

The clerk opened his book and let us see the long-ruled pages with lists of names.

“Our visitors will usually have sent a telegram ahead, or booked a trunk call with the manager. Given the time of year, many of our rooms have been reserved for over a month.”

Shanumi produced a set of traveller’s checks. She placed them on the desk, rubbed their gilt corners, and took out her fountain pen.

“Money is not an object. Therefore, my dear sir, let us have the best available.”

Our adjoining rooms occupied a corner of the fourth floor. I went to the window to contemplate the scene. Two women in slacks were playing on the tennis courts, their strokes audible four floors up. Behind them lay the conch of a swimming pool, slopping with emerald water. High walls separated the grounds from the bustle of the town.

Shanumi Six had selected the hotel, a sign of the latitude given to her by the consultants on the planning commission. Case officers were usually placed in boarding houses or motels where nobody kept records or made much of an effort to remember a face. When I had been inducted into the Agency, the lady in charge on the first day had explained our tradition of restraint in the time-honored way. She set out a game of pick-up sticks on the floor in front of us, distributing the pieces as S Natanson had once done with his recruits. The point was to take the one or two things you needed each turn, as neatly as you could, and leave everything else in place.

Shanumi, from what I had seen, didn’t believe in playing the same game. Maybe once you got to a certain level, the rules didn’t apply.

In any case, I knocked on her door and she emerged in a slip and pair of sandals, glancing suspiciously up and down the corridor. I was afraid to look at her bare shoulders. She didn’t notice my discomfort and had me sit in a tasseled chair, returning to the bed where she had disassembled the beacon.

“All good?” I said.

“In a word, no. It’s unprecedented to have an error like this occur and have no word from the Agency. They should have picked it up even before it happened and should have sent somebody to fix it. Compare what we’re seeing with how we saw the mission unfold on the record. Therefore, I conclude that everything back home has descended into a state of high entropy, bordering on the catastrophic. And you will never know me to exaggerate.”

Indeed, I had not known my Six to exaggerate. Despite her independence she was a good case officer, and a good case officer liked to have everything happen in the precise order foretold by the recordings. Each stick picked in the right sequence. Otherwise, the world was going to end. Worse: the multiverse was going to take hold and a hundred thousand worlds would end, an untold multiplication of suffering.

In unfriendly corners of the government, it was believed that the Agency itself was given to exaggeration to justify its budget. Politicians noted that despite the talk of a main enemy, lurking in the corridors of time, a true rival to the Agency had never yet appeared. What remained constant was its mandate as given by S Natanson: to preserve the past in its perfection and imperfection; to protect the narrow route that led humanity as a species through the blinding dark of the supernova; to prevent the splitting of the unity of time into endless contradictory strands.

After a few minutes, I knelt beside the bed and tried to help Shanumi put the beacon back together. I couldn’t be much use because I had to avoid the connections which were labelled with possibility characters, unwilling to remind her of my illiteracy. As the beacon took shape, my Six relaxed. She fixed the crystal on the inside, the clasp of her hair iron doubling as a soldering iron. It hissed like a snake, producing an unearthly blue spark with which you could melt any metal in the universe. I studied my reflection in the long mirror affixed to the door, trying to spot if there had been any change.

When the beacon was properly repaired and locked in the safe, Shanumi adjusted her hair in the same mirror, putting every peppercorn in place.

She talked without turning her head from her reflection. “We should be on guard, in other words something is in motion that has yet to be explained.”

“I’ll be on the lookout.”

“My plan is to stick to the itinerary and call in afterwards. If we call in now, they will simply take us out of the mission. If it goes wrong, the consultants will know where to find our bodies.”

I carefully carried the equipment to the stairs. I knew Shanumi wasn’t exaggerating. Operational security was paramount. If anybody inspected our belongings, he would find nothing more suspicious than a telephoto lens, an abacus, and what looked like a radio direction finder. I had packed a set of blank postcards which would reproduce in holographic precision any scene I wanted to capture. They would be no more than mesh until activated by a lab five hundred years distant from old Morocco.

The lookout point was an active warehouse, a ten-minute taxi ride from the hotel. From the recording, I remembered the warehouse right down to the layout of the electric bulbs on the ceiling. The loading bay was open to the street. Men were squatting around it, arguing with one another or smoking cigarettes.

The floor was covered in sheep pelts, more of which were being unloaded from a van. There was an animal stench in the atmosphere, so piercing it seemed to come out of my dream.

The overseer approached us, his face nearly white. I repeated, under my breath, what I knew he was going to say. I had a feeling of terrible power. I also had a terrible fear of him which made no sense.

“What do you two want?”

I said, “We’re here to see Cassim.”

His eyes narrowed. He spat on the side. “What does a black fellow want to see Cassim for?” He turned to Shanumi, a look of incomprehension on his face. “As for you, my lady, aren’t you in the wrong part of town?”

She pointed to the backpack. “We have a delivery.”

“You can leave it with me.”

“He has to sign and send a letter back.”

The man looked Shanumi up and down. He couldn’t have seen anyone like her in his life and I could tell that it set him back. He didn’t know whether to hate her or fear her, whether to throw himself at her feet.

“Wait in his office, then. The second floor there. Make sure you don’t take anything. I have everything counted.”

We went into an adjoining room, where the sheep pelts were piled into stacks higher than a man, then up the staircase. Confined rooms and half-open windows with bars in the shape of a cross. We passed Cassim’s office. His name was chalked on the door. The door was open, exposing a desk with a typewriter and a metal filing cabinet, its green drawers pulled half out. We didn’t go in. Instead, we climbed another flight of stairs, along a corridor that reeked of sawdust and dried blood, into a tiny chamber with a balcony. Shanumi Six lifted and adjusted the scarf around her head and I saw she was wearing small diamond earrings.

At that instant, Cassim Ferhat was detained in the basement of the Rabat police station two hundred miles from Marrakesh. He had put a cash envelope in the hands of an inspector on behalf of the company, and had been on his way back when he’d avoided a string of goats in the road and run into a motorcycle. The Agency had done him no harm. It was merely saving energy, making use of a gap opened by an accident, and leaving the rest of the world as untouched as possible. That was our art form.

Shanumi set up the camera and microphone in front of the window. She turned the dials as carefully as if she were trying to crack a safe.

“I don’t want anything else to go wrong, Eleven. Nothing unplanned. We don’t want to be blamed for creating a multiverse, no matter how trivial the deviations.”

“What else could go wrong?”

When Shanumi spoke again, after finishing with the adjustments to the lens, her tone was strained. For many days afterwards I remembered it because it applied to what came next.

“What could go wrong? The main threat, if you want to know, is ourselves. Our level of confidence is dangerous. On the one hand, we believe that an enemy exists, although we have seen neither hide nor hair of him—or her, if you believe that a woman could be so depraved. Then, on the other hand, we behave recklessly, as if this enemy were toothless. We place too much confidence in our foresight, our recordings. We see the footage beforehand and we think we know—that we have a grasp on the possibilities and probabilities, the myriad contingencies and counterfactuals, the potential for a multiverse. As you have learnt, whatever the general public has been led to believe, the three equations of historical statistics are neither unambiguous nor easy to decode. Not even the consultants can decipher their own predictions.”

I knelt beside her and tried to help with the camera. “If the consultants don’t know, then what can I, as a junior case officer, be expected to do about it?”

“Be quiet for five minutes, Eleven, and reflect on what I told you.”

I didn’t think Shanumi intended to be rude, but I felt the red rising in my cheeks. In any case, she shifted her attention to the microphone, tuning it through the earpiece until she was satisfied with the sound. I could hear the buzzing in the machine rise and fall, old-fashioned parts which the Agency manufactured to the occasion.

Some time went by. The room above Cassim’s office looked out over a narrow street adjoining the wall of another warehouse. A man with a dog on a leash was patrolling the area, his face as stern as the animal’s when he came by every six or seven minutes. I didn’t remember him from the recording. The discrepancy worried me even more than being exposed on the streets. I had been taught to rely on foreknowledge, never to drift from the dictates of the recordings. Plus, I was disappointed that I wasn’t nearly as calm as I had looked.

Shanumi unwound her scarf and smoothed out the itinerary on her legs, running her finger carefully along the tree of events. She checked her timepiece: the inevitable railroad watch with a ridged gold face preferred by most case officers, a period piece.

“In the version as we had it, at this exact instant, Keswyn Muller appeared in the right-hand window, his back turned to the street. But he is nowhere to be seen today as we stand here. Can you confirm for the record, Eleven?”

“I saw Muller in the holograph, yes, but right now I cannot see him in the indicated position. Something has definitely changed. Something is badly wrong.”

“Don’t judge. That’s up to the consultants. Simply report the facts and correlate them with the predictive matrix.”

I tried to read the itinerary. Possibility script was as difficult to read as algebra. The letters danced this way and the other, turned inside out and roundabout in front of my eyes, until they reluctantly settled down.

My Six had no inkling of my difficulties with every line. She waited impatiently while I passed the side of my hand down the page. The sun had crept into the room, producing thousands of motes in the air. The perfect sensation of acting just as I had seen myself act on the recording—as if I were effortlessly repeating the steps of a dance—evaporated. Instead, I was left with the unpleasant sense of sitting for an examination.

I tried to explain the logic to myself. “Keswyn Muller, assuming he still exists, has taken a path different from the recording. That means, by the law of energy conservation over time, that some outside party has injected energy into the situation in order to change it. For that, I don’t have an explanation.”

Shanumi put a hand on my shoulder as if to comfort me. But then she didn’t explain anything either.

Another hour went by while we waited for Keswyn Muller. Shanumi let me keep watch while she did some calculations. I could hear her talking under her breath. In the other building, I realized, somebody was going through the rooms and closing the blinds.

Soon after, a military truck drew up. It disgorged a dozen soldiers, men in brown shirts and trousers sporting steel helmets. They carried rifles with bayonets. The captain spoke to the man with the dog while some of the others began setting up a checkpoint.

Two knocked fiercely on the door to our warehouse. I heard their heated conversation with the workers on the loading dock. They shouted to their colleagues down the street. The guard with the dog came rushing into the building. My dream, in which every step had been foretold, had been replaced by a nightmare where nobody knew what could happen.

Shanumi stayed calm. She opened the window and inspected the railing on the outside. I had vertigo. I had never wanted to go up to the solar system because of my fear of heights.

“I memorized the layout of the building and there may be a way around. You will have to follow me,” she said.

“I really don’t have a head for heights.”

“I understand that, Eleven. I am acquainted with the contents of your psychometrics folder. But you don’t have a choice if you want to return to civilization, if you ever want to live as a free black man again. Remember that these people kept slaves. So one step after the other, please.”

Shanumi put her cool hand to my cheek, as if she cared for me like a lover. Then she tied the scarf around her head again and went out. She kept the backpack on one shoulder, holding on the wall as she groped her way out. The dog bayed on the staircase. I swayed back and forth, pushed myself through the window.

On the other side, Shanumi stopped me from falling. I sensed the perspiration on her.

“We must think like case officers. Someone had our itinerary, Eleven, and wants to prevent us from observing Muller and examining the company records. That has a number of serious implications for us, not to mention the alterations they will have to make to the equations.”

“What can we do?”

“The best thing you can do, right now, is not to look down.”

I looked down. The railing was so narrow, you had to turn your feet to the side. The bars went around the corner of the building. It had never been intended to support a man and a woman. The joints strained under our weight. I watched with horror as the iron bent.

Shanumi threw the backpack onto the roof. She knelt down in front of me.

“Climb onto my shoulders, Eleven. Get onto the roof.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll find a way to come in. Let’s deal with you first.”

I scrambled onto her shoulders, listening to the railing complain under our combined weight. The brackets started to pull out of the brick. I caught hold of the gutter, pulled as hard as I could with my hands, pushed against Shanumi, and got a foothold on the roof. I immediately fell flat on my face next to the backpack. My nose felt broken.

By the time I recovered, Shanumi had moved along the railing to the corner of the building. She tried to scale the wall by force, revealing the powerful muscles in her arms and neck. But she couldn’t get a good grip. She tried to jump a few times, keeping it as quiet as she could. Then she gave up, came back along the railing, and swung herself through the open window. She put her head back through.

“Wait until it’s settled down, not even a mouse. Then we can meet at the hotel. I need to get rid of the beacon in case somebody follows it back to our home coordinates. Or you get rid of it if you get there first.”

“Where are you going?”

She didn’t answer, only disappeared into the building. My heart was in my throat. I kept low and listened with all my might. The dog barked madly in the doorway, loud as a drum. A man’s angry voice came from the stairs. I heard Shanumi replying in her most reasonable tone.

Shouted questions, and a scuffle. A man crying in pain. The dog clattering along the steps before it fell silent. More men running up the stairs. More cries of shock and pain. I couldn’t tell who had won. There was the sound of furniture being moved. To my surprise, I fell asleep on the tarpaulin.

I woke with the sun in my eyes and turned onto my side. For some time, I lay on the roof without daring to stand up.

There was no sign of Shanumi. No soldiers, no dog quarreling on the staircase, no trucks. Nothing made a sound. Marrakesh was a ghost city, no more than a silent oblong cut into the rock, where I had come to find people long in the grave.

Then a dark-skinned man passed in the road below, leading a herd of goats. The animals had bells on their collars. I used the opportunity to drop down to the railing and got back into the building through the window.

Inside were signs of a titanic struggle. Chairs lay on their backs. The desk was turned on one end, its drawers open to their lengths. Glass was scattered everywhere on the carpet.

I went into the corridor. There was nobody to be seen. The stevedores must have been sent home. I hurried down the staircase and along the main hall, keeping out of sight. I was searching for an outside window when I heard a telephone ringing in one of the offices. I opened a door that led to a warren of small rooms and storage cupboards.

Behind a sheet of frosted glass, I could make out the figure of a man wearing a hat, his feet up on the desk. He had a light accent, which may have been Swiss, and was talking in a merry tone into the telephone.

“Then the dream has come true. We have one of them…Near Menara Gardens…no, it will be quite safe. The army has imposed a curfew. Not even a mouse will go in or out.”

The conversation became indistinct. I went as close as I dared, in time to hear a burst of indignation from the receiver. Kneeling to look through the keyhole, I recognized Keswyn Muller immediately thanks to his well-tended gray beard and the slant of his features on the recording. I thought even then that he had a face built to keep secrets.

As I watched, Muller got up and walked around the room in circles. The telephone cord followed him around like a tail. I believed he was looking directly through the door, his expression hard around the eyes.

“Their officers are under the delusion that they can try again and again, as if they have endless energy to run an experiment with the history of humanity. They claim to hate the multiverse and yet they depend on it at every turn.” Muller listened to the voice on the other end for a minute and put the receiver down. Then he went on talking to himself. “They don’t believe anything is for real except the rewind button. They don’t have a sense of the seriousness of life. That is a crucial advantage for us. We can set a mousetrap that cannot be opened.”

Muller came through to the room I was in and I walked backwards, as carefully as I could, through the door, hoping I wouldn’t bump into anything. He had almost reached me when I slid my entire body behind the door. I caught my breath. He was so near, the hairs on my arms tingled.

Up to that point in my life, I had never been so close to an albino man with power over me. I watched him stride through the hall, and thought I had learnt enough about Keswyn Muller to enlighten the consultants. I would make my way to the hotel to collect the beacon. Then I would have to find Menara Gardens and rescue my Six. I wasn’t going to be caught in anybody’s mousetrap and I wasn’t going to let it happen to Shanumi either.

I waited until I heard Muller leave the building. Finding a small window on the ground floor, I forced my way through it onto the street.

By the time I got out, the evening had descended. Queues of French cars darted along the streets, hooting at one another around the traffic circles, their headlights orange circles in the dusk.

Women in cloaks hurried in groups along the pavement, shopping bags over their arms. They weren’t interested in my existence. I had the feeling of being concealed in plain view. In the near dark, flocks of birds flew in the direction of the mountains. Shopkeepers were pulling down the grilles in front of their premises, although here and there, attended by chains of outdoor lights, small restaurants were opening.

The city was receiving its complement of mourners for the seven saints whose tombs were situated on its circumference. Tomorrow there would be Berber acrobats and snake-charmers, fortune-tellers, cardsharps, and dentists on the squares, but for now there was a hush.

At the Grand Marrakesh Hotel, cabs were arriving from the train station, their drivers arguing as they halted around the semicircle at the entrance. I went through the marble archway, past the carp pond, and waited for a minute inside the door in case anybody had followed me. Nobody was watching, as far as I could tell—except the jeweler behind his desk, who looked as if there were something in my appearance that troubled him. Suitcases without owners, bearing various city stickers, were lined up at reception. The bellhop took me to my room and immediately went back down to help the new arrivals.

I went over to Shanumi’s room and unlocked the door with a coin. I laid the backpack on the bed and took the beacon out of the safe. I placed it on the bedside table and closed the curtains. Outside, I could hear men and women laughing on the rim of the swimming pool.

It took several minutes to tune in on the dials. I was nervous about any sound in the corridor, and my hands kept slipping on the controls.

I waited some time for a computer consultant to come on. It had the eerie manner of the librarians I had discovered in the library of the past and the future.

“I have been waiting anxiously for your report, Enver Eleven.”

“We appeared here in the middle of the air, almost died on the way in.”

“The systems are down here at the Agency. You won’t understand until you come back in. Describe the situation in Marrakesh exactly from start to finish.”

“Shanumi Six, the senior case officer, has been abducted. I have good reason to believe that she is being held by Keswyn Muller rather than the Moroccan government.”

“We have some inkling of this. From the beginning, if you please, so everything can take its proper place on the recording.”

I sat on the side of the bed, bending into the microphone, and tried to remember everything relevant to the case. The consultant on the other end listened and asked some follow-up questions. She sounded worried the more she heard from me, calling in one of her colleagues and then another. They ran some calculations in possibility script.

I imagined the three brass skulls bowed in unison above the microphone, muttering under their breaths or lying back in a bath of electrostatic fluid. In the middle of my report, the three of them went offline for a few minutes to create a new itinerary and requisition the necessary energy. They would be making a new picture of the situation.

I wouldn’t have understood a thing even if I were in the room with them. The times I had looked at the diagrams the consultants generated, they’d resembled trees branching and bending endlessly. I was supposed to understand the basics of reverse causation—creating an effect by patiently assembling its causes, putting the heap of history together stick by stick. In practice, it was as much an art as a science, one at which automatic intelligences excelled, given their ability to consider infinite worlds.

When the consultant came back, her manner was bright but the news she had to deliver was grim.

“You’re going to have to dismantle the beacon. You know the protocol.”

“I do.”

“Nothing remains intact except for the targeting crystal. That comes with you because it contains reserved technology, inappropriate to the time period.”

“I know that also.”

“Let me go over some of the fine details. There have been a few updates to the mechanism since you passed your examination.”

I didn’t need the lecture. I might have difficulty reading certain characters but, thanks to my father, I could take apart a piece of machinery in pitch dark. As the consultant was talking, I spun a lever on its axis to open the device, turned two gears in the counterclockwise direction, and pulled the panels apart, like solving a Rubik’s Cube. The outer parts dissolved into a silver haze. The cogs and rods broke into splinters, then into nothing more than sand.

In the end, I was left with the crystal and several hundred grams of dust which the fan would blow into the atmosphere.

I didn’t allow the implications of dismantling the beacon to enter my mind until the consultant said it out loud.

“You have the two capsules?”

“Of course.”

I put a hand to the locket around my neck. Nobody went on an assignment without the two capsules. They were part of our ritual, dreadful to consider. One was blue, lit from inside by tiny neon tendrils. It pulsed as slowly as a heartbeat when you placed it on your palm and inspected it. The other was black, and inert, absorbing the light in your eyes when you glanced in its direction.

The first pill brought the imitation of death, so close to the reality that not a heartbeat stood between the two conditions. No mid-century anatomist could tell the difference.

The latter, the black pill, blocked respiration throughout the body. Within ten minutes of ingestion, no trace of the person remained apart from a peppery haze: a case officer’s death.

“At some point between midnight and two o’clock this morning, you will ingest the blue pill. This is a recommendation from the corps of consultants, Agent Enver Eleven. It represents our consensus. Do you accept and make the decision of your own mind?”

“Yes.”

“I recommend you find the Marrakesh Protestant graveyard. We have had trouble, in the past, recovering our agents from Muslim cemeteries. They are not as serious about mortuary preservation. Over time, the bodies tend to move or the parts can be combined. Somewhere safe and quiet is better. And, I say, good luck to you. Good luck to you.”

I never understood the tone that the machines liked to strike in their dealings with agents in the field. The consultant was about to ring off when I stopped her.

“I don’t understand at all. What about my Six?”

“Given what we see of the probabilities, considering the unfolding circumstances at the Agency, we need to extract you from the situation. I cannot release you to pursue your leads.”

“I understand that.”

“Agent Eleven, we agreed that if you asked, we would convey an additional piece of information. We would have preferred to delay until psychiatric adjustment was available to you. I have confirmation that not more than a few minutes ago in your frame of reference, in a greenhouse located in the Menara Gardens, Agent Six took the black pill. She is as much a part of the present as the past.”

“Of the future as the present.”

“And may her memory be our hope.”

The familiar words didn’t help. I uttered them by rote, as I had said them at my mother’s graveside, and yet I didn’t believe them in my heart. I couldn’t believe what the consultant was telling me about my Six. Not even a calculating machine would be so unmoved by the death of a senior case officer in the field, unforeseen by the recording. Back at home there would be an inquiry.

But I couldn’t afford to think about Shanumi for the moment. I concentrated instead on the practical problems of taking the blue pill; I would need some basic equipment if I was going to bury myself.

The bellhop at the hotel assisted me. He was a young brown man in a gold-buttoned blazer, piping on the sleeves, the suggestion of wool on his cheeks, dark enough so that I felt comfortable talking to him in a corner. He didn’t blink an eye at what I wanted. He told me to follow him to the back.

We went through the kitchen to the groundsman’s quarters outside of which a boy was sitting cross-legged on the Earth, diligently polishing brassware. The boy didn’t raise his head while the bellhop laid out various items for my consideration: a spade, tatty blue raincoat devoid of buttons, gumboots, and a tarpaulin cover. Everything I required.

I didn’t have the heart to bargain him down as he expected. I counted out the money, in French francs. The bellhop counted the stack again, his fingers as fluent as a bank teller’s, and held some of the notes up to the lamp to check the watermark. Then he slid them into his buckled shoe, tied the tarpaulin around the spade, and held out the raincoat so that I could put it on. I took it over my arm instead.

“You want hashish, sir?”

“No, thanks.”

“I thought you might be German, sir. They usually want hashish.”

“Do I look German?”

“I can’t say who is German and who is not German, who is Austrian and who is not Austrian. It is not up to me to decide, sir. They can be black or they can be white, as they please.”

I was in the lobby, passing the jeweler’s desk, before I had second thoughts.

Carrying the raincoat on my arm, I went back through the kitchen where the bustle was immense. There were stripped rabbits on a board and plucked chicken carcasses pegged to a washing line, waiting to be plunged into the boiling pots below. The scent of cinnamon hung in the air. Trays were stacked on the near end, arriving from the dining room on a lazy Susan. The pastry cook was applying fronds of silver icing to a cake.

I found the bellhop sitting on the outside step. He was bent over, steadily polishing his shoes.

“So we can do some more business?” he asked.

“It depends.”

“You changed your mind about hashish, sir.”

“Nothing at all to do with hashish.”

I sat down next to him and put my hand on his back. We were about the same size.

“You’re unhappy with your purchase. I am sorry, sir. I have already spent the money.”

“Not that either. You said something strange before about the Germans and the Austrians. It struck me right afterwards.”

“I said that it is not my business to decide who is German and who is Austrian.”

“You get a lot of them? Visitors from Austria, Germany, Switzerland? If you were looking for someone from that region, who was right here in Marrakesh, where would you begin?”

“You can put a notice in the German bakery. It’s next to the bar and restaurant. They also have a church there. I will draw you a map.” He produced an envelope and a pencil stub. “But it will be closed now. The bar might be open. Are you caught in a trap, sir?”

I looked past the bellhop into the kitchen where pots were boiling ferociously, their sides almost touching, on the blackened, pig-iron stove. The cooks and waiters were too far away to hear us.

“My friend, do you think you could find me some additional equipment?”

The bellhop paused for an instant, but he didn’t hesitate. I noticed that his eyes were the exact shape of almonds. They looked away from you while you were talking and made you believe he was gazing into his own dream while you were lost in your own.

“That depends what you mean by equipment, sir.”

“I would like to be able to protect myself.”

He shook his head and gave me the map. “I am sorry. It’s my responsibility not to put myself or any of our guests in danger.”

In the Royal Bavarian Bakery, on a dead-end road in an industrial section of town, the lights were on, although nobody was in evidence behind the large plateglass windows.

The taxi had long disappeared while I stood there and admired the hundreds of crammed baskets of bread on display. Around the bakery lingered the aroma of yeast.

Next door, in the Green Dolphin Brewhouse—“Serving Since 1946”—the menu was printed in Arabic and German. There was activity long into the evening. Tables of men gathered around tall amber glasses and dishes of pretzels, pressing tobacco into their pipes.

From a record player on the counter emerged a rueful woman’s voice, as if from a long-ago movie. At one of the tables sat a band of military policemen with flashes on their shoulders and revolvers in their holsters. They looked too thin to fit in their uniforms, with narrow chests and hips, and watched me in an unfriendly fashion.

I sat in front of a carafe of tonic water, which fizzed unenthusiastically, and calculated the number of hours remaining before I had to take the tablet and stop my heart. I had wanted adventure. I had found something else: the small death. Under the table, the spade rested on my leg, a cold reminder of the future.

I kept expecting to find Shanumi Six across the table, about to make some logical point that a junior case officer should know. The dream which had formed around me in Marrakesh was as insubstantial as a shadow in one minute, as if I could wish it away, and in the next minute as dark and deep as a well. I stayed there for an hour, muttering to myself, as more men came in and took their chairs. The new arrivals contended good-naturedly with the bartender, played backgammon, or simply stared into their glasses.

People who don’t risk their own skins in the field pose the usual paradoxes, commonplaces that have caused nothing but confusion since Zeno of Elea proved motion is impossible and time an illusion. In my opinion, those questions are useless. Certain paradoxes, the useful ones, address the heart instead of the mind. A case officer is a shadow chasing a shadow, the shadow of the future intersecting with the shadow of the past. If she dies in a foreign location, she is a shadow of a shadow. I was so disturbed at the thought, which was almost as distasteful as the travesty of a multiverse, that I stood up in the middle of the Green Dolphin.

In the same moment, I heard the voice from the warehouse. When I turned around, shielding my face with one hand, I saw that Keswyn Muller was at the next table. He was sitting opposite a young woman and entertaining her with a story. Smiling broadly, as if he had won a competition, he took out a fountain pen and drew a map on a coaster. For an instant I thought that the trap had closed on me, until I assured myself that he would have no idea of how I looked.

The woman was around my age, or no more than a few years older, and had her brown hair in a low bun. She was wearing long earrings, out of place in the Green Dolphin, and a narrowly tailored jacket with a rose-lettered blouse. Her legs, under the table, were bare from the knee. Her complexion was fair, by the standards of civilization, and yet I experienced no horror. There was no discomfort, no sense of repulsion from what God and man had made ugly. The opposite. The more I watched, the more I realized that she was very beautiful, a sign whose meaning became clearer and yet farther away in the darkness of the room.

I sat down and tried to move my chair gradually backwards, closer to their conversation. My heart was beating so loudly I almost couldn’t hear what they were saying.

“It was too good to be true, my dear. I couldn’t believe our luck.”

“To have the chance to ask one of them questions?”

“In the entire correspondence of the Board, there has not been one occasion on which we had a chance to interact with one of them on our terms. We believed they had supernatural powers, as if they could control every detail of physics and chemistry in pursuit of their depraved agenda. Now we can see they are mere fanatics. The value of life means nothing to them. We have finally exposed them to the world and there will be no turning back.”

My ears burned. I had never heard anyone speak of the Agency with such vehemence. I leant back in the chair, hoping not to fall over.

“Are you sure she intended to kill herself? Even a fanatic—”

“Even the fact that they use women as their sacrificial victims. She burnt to death before my very eyes. It took ninety seconds from start to finish. At the end, there wasn’t even a shoelace left. Spontaneous human combustion. The myth comes to life, or rather to death. You should have seen the expression in this black-skinned woman’s eyes, my dearest Soledad, looking out of the blaze as she was consumed. I have not witnessed scenes of this kind since the last days of Berlin.”

She poured two glasses of wine. “You want to pack up tonight?”

“We have our passports. We have sufficient money. We still exist, as far as such a thing can be known.” He pinched her arm sourly. “So we will elude them if it is humanly possible. In their flippant way, when their interests are threatened, they are quite ruthless about reversing the verdict of history, especially since we can trace the loss of an innocent woman’s life back to them. If they identify us under our true names and trace our ancestry then you know all too well what will follow. They will make it as if not a single member of the Board had ever been born. You will be gone, just like that, my dear Soledad, but you will have no parents either, no brother, no sister, no relations up to the second degree.”

It took a minute to realize Muller had turned his chair in my direction, as if to address me directly. He moved his chair closer, and closer, and then took me by the ear. His hand was cruel.

“It seems that someone has long ears.”

His strength was extraordinary. He turned my chair around, never letting go of my ear, so that we were sitting face-to-face.

The rise and fall of conversation continued around us. Beer hissed out of the tap into the glasses which the bartender removed to the trays. The door opened to admit two men who joined the policemen at their table. Every soul in old Morocco could have been on the far side of the planet for whatever help they could render me. I had never feared anyone so much or resented the touch of a man’s hand, as stern as the lid of a trap. Where I had descended, led by the ear like Cerberus the dog, there was only pale-faced Dr. Muller and myself, and the stare of his companion. She was more beautiful than I had recognized. Her complexion was the color of a certain wood.

“Do you understand German, my friend?”

I didn’t reply. I was overwhelmed by fear and expectation. Scarcely two hours remained before my rendezvous with the small death. I hadn’t yet found a safe place, and I was in the hands of an enemy. I put a hand on the spade, wondering if I should hit Muller in the head, but then he let me go. He continued in Arabic:

“You people are very curious in this country. Nobody knows how to mind his own business. What is your name, my friend?”

“Enver.”

“Are you from around here, Enver?”

“Skoura. In the mountains. Far away.”

Muller settled back in his chair. “Skoura. You don’t look quite Moroccan. Sudanese, in my opinion. A black devil. May I ask what you are doing, my inquisitive friend, so far from home, in Marrakesh?”

“I sell electrical equipment. Voltage converters and transformers. I am here to find customers. On the other end I buy from Siemens, my main suppliers. Their engineers taught me a few words of German.”

“Did you understand anything?”

“Not a word. I am disappointed.”

I could have mentioned the names of my imaginary father’s cousins, electricians in Skoura, who had been involved in a lengthy feud. I could have provided a bank account for the company and the names of its customers. I knew the results of every soccer game in the region past and future, and could have made a fortune gambling if I hadn’t renounced betting, not to say the benefits of compound interest, as a condition of service.

Dr. Muller turned the wine bottle around, showing me the yellow label. It was in French. “You would like a drink?”

“After an introduction like that, you want to drink with me?”

“I would like the chance to apologize. In my line of work I have to be careful, Enver.” He put his hand against the wall. “In England they have an expression—they say that the walls have their ears.”

What might I have done? I might have killed Keswyn Muller in the corner of the Green Dolphin, using the side of a broken bottle. I might have slipped a black pill into his wine glass, strangled him at the urinal. I might have set fire to his body, disposed of the remains in a dune ten miles out of Marrakesh, attended by the wild rush of stars in the sky and the cries of bush dogs.

As a case officer, however, I was trained to do the opposite, to tread lightly as possible, to follow the traces which might lead us in the direction of the hidden enemy. I could settle accounts with Muller later. Next time I saw him I would make sure to have constitutional clearance in hand, not to say the permission of the three equations, and the weird nod of the consultants when they smiled on our suggestions.

Muller introduced me to his companion, Soledad. He filled and refilled our glasses without asking. Soledad wasn’t his daughter or wife, as I had assumed, but the assistant in his organization. She hadn’t appeared in the recordings, so I wasn’t familiar with her background other than what she told me across the table. She was a geologist, born in Brazil in Minas Gerais, educated at a technical institute in Berlin. Soledad’s eyes were as black as charcoal. Her accent was neutral and her name was Spanish more than Portuguese.

I couldn’t find out more about her, however, because Muller kept asking me questions about specific pieces of electrical equipment he wanted to obtain. Their tolerances. Their costs. Their range of dependencies and outputs.

At first I had the impression Muller was supercilious, but he became warmer and more familiar as the minutes wore on and I passed his tests. I watched the clock out of the corner of my eye.

“Are you an engineer, Dr. Muller?”

“Not exactly. But I have problems to solve which require a certain amount of engineering.”

“Why do you try to solve them in Morocco? There is not much industry here, from an international point of view. Even Egypt would be better if you want mechanical parts, electrical components, and such. They have developed a very good industrial base.”

“I am starting to ask myself this very question, Enver.”

I calculated that I had twenty minutes to get out of the Green Dolphin. That left no more than an hour to find a good location. The graveyard was a possibility. Otherwise, an abandoned mine, somewhere the Earth might lie undisturbed. In a pinch, a building site where the foundations had been poured. I couldn’t delay.

At the same time, I wanted to put something more in my report than casual conversation. I wanted to understand his motivations, not merely in my role as a case officer but as a human being who had lost something.

“Is there something you’re looking for in Morocco? Is it something here I can help you to find? I would be only too happy to put my contacts at your disposal.”

Muller’s expression tightened. He poured the remainder of the bottle into my glass. He ran his fingers along the side of the table, as if he were deciding to wager a sum of money. “You are a very curious man, Enver.”

“I only want to see if there is any business we can do together.”

Muller sat back in his chair. He showed the waiter the empty bottle, beckoned for another. I thought about the fact that in an hour I would be as good as dead. I would be better than dead.

“Maybe, in the first place, I am looking for certain minerals. There are deposits in this country which are unique in terms of their density. Let us say they are deep in the Atlas Mountains. There are regions which are difficult to enter, where the tribesmen have rifles. And there are stories about such places which we don’t have to believe but which frighten the local businessmen away. Let us say, in the second place, that I am looking for people. I want the right individuals for certain opportunities. And they must be people who can fit in, like you.”

I saw the clock on the wall. I was out of time. I let my hand flick out and push over the bottle. It spilled on the table and the three of us got up from our chairs. I pointed to the clock.

“I am sorry twice over. Unfortunately, I have to go. It is unavoidable, but if you will give me some way to reach you? I will think about your problem. In any case, I will leave you the private bag number for my company.” I wrote on a serviette the address of a box in Tangiers which was monitored by the Agency. I kept talking, as if to distract him.

“It has been a pleasure. I believe we will meet each other again, even if it is not for professional reasons. Marrakesh is not a big town.”

“So late at night? To have an urgent appointment? I believe you have pumped us for information and now you abandon us.” Muller smiled. He stepped back and mopped the wine from his trousers. He didn’t seem to notice that I was carrying a spade. “Well, I cannot ask to detain you. If you ever need to find me, in turn, you can leave a message at the counter.”

The waiter arrived with clean towels and a bucket of water but I didn’t wait. I was surprised to find myself alive and unharmed outside the Green Dolphin, closing the door behind me.

I saw nobody on the streets except a military policeman, leaning on his rifle, guarding an intersection through which no cars came. He wanted to see my papers before he let me through. In the apartment buildings, the only lights were in stairwells and forlorn rooms where a pilgrim was at his devotions. The private houses were dark in their ranks. High in the sky was a moon that grew larger as I left the center of town. There were no passersby, only dogs baying in backyards.

I ran faster, hardly pausing to catch my breath, avoiding any sign of activity. I had an idea where to go and it led me to a lane in which there was a sentry’s hut at the entrance to the Protestant cemetery. The graves, indistinct in the darkness, were surrounded by flowerbeds and a low masonry wall. They were breathing slowly in the ground.

Nothing to fear. I told myself that the dead of any one period, from a case officer’s point of view, were only waiting for their resurrection in the time before. To others, far off in the restricted centuries where the Agency had never managed to penetrate, I had already joined the endless numbers of the dead, divided to the last atom.

I paused at the back of the guardhouse. Through the half-open door could be seen a man in a long robe, as fat as a barrel, hardly breathing in his sleep as he lay stretched on a bare mattress, his torso covered by a checked black-and-white scarf. A cat lay asleep in the basket at his feet.

Time was short. I took the blue tablet, unlatched the gate, then closed it behind me. The freshest soil was at the far end. I set my tools down and began to dig as quietly as I could.

It was hard work. The ground was full of pebbles and the heavy lacework of roots. After a few minutes, the sweat ran into my eyes. I loosened my collar and redoubled my efforts. My strength was slackening. I could feel the blueness of the pill starting to run in my veins.

It seemed like an eternity before I had excavated a section deep enough for a single person. I settled myself inside, arranging the spade beside me, pulling the tarpaulin over my legs. My breathing was beginning to halt. Every gasp of oxygen slowed down in my breathing pipe as I pulled the ground down on myself. The clods mounted up. The sky was gone, and then any suggestion of light.

I scrabbled at the sides of the grave, hoping to conceal myself in my cool green burrow. I hadn’t yet given a thought to my companions in the ground, the lengths of bone and lingering flesh around me, but soon the reek filled my mouth and my nose and the entire inside of my skull. Strange smoke. Cannibal smoke.

I didn’t have much time to worry about it. My feet were cold and trembling, the heels caught in an uncomfortable position. The soil was like quicksand around me. I couldn’t move my arms or bend my fingers. My legs turned to stone. I couldn’t move my chest. I was suffocating under the ground. My eyes trembled. The pill hadn’t saved my life.

Between one beat and the next, my heart ceased to beat. The last thing I remembered was the soft footing of the cat above me, searching for a way into my tomb. Then I fell deep into death.

I expected to spend a maximum of twenty-four hours in the graveyard. Agency policy is to retrieve a case officer or an exposed resident within the calendar day, subject to the need for energy conservation. The three equations of historical statistics would be consulted, the three terrible sisters who governed the past of humanity. At the directions of the equations, the planning commission would dispatch a team to retrieve the hibernating body. No body was left in the field for more than a day. But I lay uneasy in the grave.

Underground, I dreamt of the consultants. Their cold brass heads were bent over me. They were monitoring my pulse and temperature, mazes of electronic light forming and reforming in their eyes. One came very close so that I could feel the whirring of his fan. He was as hot as a toaster. With cruel fingers, he inserted a wire into one of my ears and coaxed it through to the other side so he could pull it out again, finding a path through my head.

At the motion, I awoke to find myself held up to blazing sunshine. I couldn’t see anything but the blankness of this golden light. Something was spraying violently into my face. I raised my arms to protect my eyes while the stinging liquid went into my lungs. I was held from behind through a spell of coughing. It wasn’t a harsh embrace. Eventually the spray went off and I stopped coughing.

When my eyes adjusted, I found three shapes around me in a semicircle. Each was surrounded by a capsule of blue light.

One stepped forward and wrapped a padded silver towel around my body. He was wearing a suit like an astronaut’s, a gold-tinted bubble over his head. His face was visible through the visor, a bald man with eyes as big as saucers, his skin stained as beautifully dark as cedar. He was staring at me. I stared back.

“I thought you would never come.”

“We never did. Ah, we never did.”

Tears were streaming down my face. They got thicker and thicker. They made me ashamed. I put my hand on his suit, balancing on my feet without confidence, and saw that there were many thousands of lights in the sky. The ground around us was bare and burnt in every direction. There were no buildings.

The man put the arm of his suit around me. The logo of the Agency was printed on his chest. I couldn’t have been more relieved to see a dark face and feel that I had returned to the embrace of civilization.

“How long do you think you were out, Agent Eleven?”

“I had dreams.” I hadn’t completely woken up. The lights in the sky were as bright as phosphorous. “I don’t know. I had a thousand years of dreams when I was in there.”

I began to cry out loud. The man put his other arm around me.

“You’ve been asleep, in that grave, for a hundred thousand years.”