MyTT had grown over the years. Funded as a co-operative research establishment by the nine planetary and five planetoidal states, it was situated on Earth IVn, within comfortable proximity – 4.2 parsecs – of the Temporal Flux Centre 2U0525-06 in the inertial frame of reference Theta2 Orionis in M.42. This meant that the round trip to and from the Tempus satellite Control Laboratory wouldn’t greatly affect the life-spans of the technical and flight personnel – which was inevitable even though they travelled via the E.M.I. Field. The standard greeting of those returning from deep space, upon stepping down to earth, was still ‘God bless Oliver Heaviside’, though few among them remembered that he was the nineteenth century English physicist who had first established the principle of Electro-Magnetic Interference.
The building was in the shape of a pyramid with the apex chopped off, as if a giant had taken a swipe at it with a meat cleaver, and from the flattened roof sprouted all strange manner of antenna, grouped round the opaque orange dome which housed the Black Body Radiation detection equipment. Queghan had never fathomed out why, but apparently it was necessary to compute precisely the absolute velocity of Earth IVn relative to the universe as a whole. Black Body Radiation was the universal constant, the lingering aftermath of the explosion which had created the expanding universe, and as such it could be used to relate the speed of a body passing through it.
Not that it was necessary for him to understand. Queghan wasn’t a hardline scientist: he was a Myth Technologist, an occupation which straddled the Two Disciplines.
For over a year now he had been engaged on an investigation of psi particles, and in particular their relationship (if any) with the acausal nature of time, a phenomenon known in the jargon of Myth Technology as proemptosis: ‘the occurrence of an event before the calculated date’. Psi particles were a family of ultra-sub-atomic constituents called quarks, a name which suited their mysterious, almost mythical existence. For did they, in fact, exist? The scientific establishment (in the manner of scientific establishments) had classified them in neat categories: red quarks, blue quarks, black quarks. They had endowed them with spurious characteristics: charm, strangeness, anti-charm and anti-strangeness. And they had proposed that they inhabited ‘a region of probability.’
So far so good.
But the question had yet to be answered: what the hell were they? It had been shown, for example, that they had a disorienting effect on time, so could it be that time itself was not a smooth continuous motion but composed of discrete particles, the quarks, which could be isolated and identified? Matter, it had been demonstrated, consisted of nothing more substantial than a ‘wave motion of probability’. Was time probabilistic in the same fashion? Could it be slowed down, stopped, reversed and juggled about with in the same way that quantum engineers had succeeded in tinkering with the four unified energy forces: electromagnetic, gravitational, the strong and weak nuclear interactions?
It seemed to Queghan that the universe was a question-mark. As he had once remarked to Johann Karve, Director of MyTT: ‘I get the feeling that somebody somewhere is having one hell of a joke at our expense. The Greatest Practical Joke Of All Time.’
Karve had consoled him. ‘If that’s so, we’re all victims of the Joker, whoever he is. Nobody’s party to it, Chris, that you can be sure of.’
But a joke wasn’t a joke unless it was shared, Queghan felt. Where was the fun in the Joker laughing quietly to himself in some secluded corner of the universe? Unless, of course, he was mad.
The dichotomy between the Two Disciplines was never more keenly felt than when discussing the underlying purpose – for as a metaphysical science it was the task of Myth Technology to ask the elemental questions. Queghan had friends on both sides of the divide: hardliners who believed in a nuts-and-bolts universe holding itself aloft by its own bootstraps, and those others, ‘mystics’ as they were somewhat derisively called, who were seeking the Godhead in whatever form it might choose to present itself to human consciousness. There was evidence to support both viewpoints, which was why Queghan found himself in the awkward position of agreeing and disagreeing with the two sides. It was even conceivable that both were right and both were wrong; perhaps there was no eternal all-embracing truth, simply a set of hypotheses which changed according to individual interpretation. The universe as a fact didn’t exist – truth lay in the eyes of the observer, not in some objective reality which could be codified and classified and set down on micro-tape to rot away in Archives.
Nevertheless it was depressing, when surveying the work done over centuries since the time of Colonization, not to have arrived at a more positive conclusion. The elemental nature of spacetime was still shrouded in mystery, even though mankind had developed such concepts as the E.M.I. Field, had investigated those regions of infinite spacetime curvature, Temporal Flux Centres, known to scientists Pre-Colonization as Black Holes.
Yes, it was true, much had been achieved: the human species had been liberated from its own backyard, but it still left Queghan with the simplest and yet most complex task of all: wrestling with the enigma of those infuriating, mythical, charming quarks.
*
When the terra-formers had constructed Earth IVn they had given it two moons. There was no valid astrophysical or geographical reason for this, although on the planet itself it did mean that the wave barrages bordering the oceans were able to provide fifty per cent more energy output, utilizing the contra rotation and diametric opposition of the two satellites. And it gave the songwriters a rich new vein of material: By the Light of the Silvery Moons, Blue Moons, Those Old Devil Moons, and the latest popular hit, How High the Moons.
But there were other effects which hadn’t been anticipated and which caused a good deal of consternation, not to say discomfort. One of these was the disruption of the female menstrual cycle. It now became clear that the 28-day ovulation period was governed by the moon of Old Earth: human evolution over millions of years had taken its cue from the motion of heavenly bodies, and the reproductive cycle was thrown into confusion by the effect of this additional gravitational force. Some women menstruated twice in the month while others ceased having a period at all. So medical science came up with the Anti-Pill to stabilize this unhappy state of affairs and once again women were able to resume their ‘natural’ function.
This came as no real surprise to Christian Queghan, for whom Myth Technology was as much a calling as a profession. Every sub-atomic particle – the fact of its existence – affected every other particle in the universe. Subtract a single constituent, just one, and the effect on all the rest would be incalculable. It might be great or small but it would be real and, eventually, apparent.
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:
NO REFERENCE AS SUCH. HOWEVER BY CROSS-REFERENCE INDEX CAN SUGGEST THE FOLLOWING:
(1) RATE OF SENILE DECAY FOR BOGUS MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF OTHERS (ESP. OPPOSITE SEX) AS PER POPULATION MEDIAN SHOWS NO OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTIC.
(2) QUERY RADIOACTIVE. DOCTORS IN NUCLEAR WARFARE SITUATION???
(3) QUERY CHARM-ED??? CHARM-ING???
(4) EXAMPLE OF FORMER IS BOVARY/CHARLES, FICTIONAL CHARACTER OF ‘MADAME BOVARY’, FLAUBERT/GUSTAVE, PUBLISHED 1857 (PRE-COL). EXAMPLE OF LATTER IS MORELL/THEODOR, PHYSICIAN AND CLOSE COMPANION OF HITLER/ADOLF 1936-1945 (PRE-COL).
MORE INFORMATION ON FILE RE BOTH. PLEASE ADVISE WHICH. IF THAT’S NOT ASKING TOO MUCH.
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:
DON’T BE CHEEKY, CYB
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.
‘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.