Arcadia (60 page)

‘Now,’ Rosie said, ‘this is not a joke, not a film, not a television. Do you see those people there?’

Lytten looked carefully at a few figures who had appeared at the side.

‘Jay, Pamarchon, Henary, Catherine,’ Rosie continued. ‘All perfectly real and—’

‘That other one. She looks like you.’

‘Apparently it is me.’

‘Very clever. When did you two do this? I must say, it is very like what I had in mind. They all look remarkably as I imagined them. And that arena. Shrine of Esilio?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Wherever did you film it? Or get weather like that?’

‘You don’t listen, do you? It’s real. Angela made it. From your head.’

Lytten shook the very same head, trying to think a way round the joke. It was Rosie’s seriousness that unnerved him. He had a great deal of experience of undergraduate pranks and student acting. There was something unusually convincing about her intensity.

‘According to Angela,’ Rosie went on, ‘it’s a universe. A different one from ours. I think that’s what she said. But time is short. I certainly don’t understand enough to explain properly and I can see it’s going to be hard to convince you. So you’ll just have to go and look for yourself.’

She stopped. ‘Oh, heavens! I’m coming over. You stay there. I’d better get out of the way.’

She scuttled off to the side in a hurry, leaving Lytten looking blankly as a differently dressed Rosie appeared in the pergola. Manifestly the same person, but …

*

‘Professor!’ Rosalind through the pergola called. ‘I’m so glad to see you!’

‘Rosie?’ he replied carefully. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Yes, yes. It’s me. The one and only Rosie. You’ve no idea what’s
been going on in the last few days. We really need your help here. Who killed Thenald?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Thenald; you must remember. Catherine marries Thenald. Thenald gets murdered, she inherits. You wrote all that.’

‘Did I? I remember killing him off, I don’t remember spelling out what happened to him.’

‘No, he was murdered. So who did it? You must tell me. It’s important.’

‘Why? It’s only a story.’

‘That’s the point. It’s not. It’s here and it’s real. The whole thing. I’m in it. Listen, I’ll come through and explain it all. It’s time I was back, anyway. They’ll be furious with me at school. Just a minute …’

‘No!’ said Rosie on Henry’s side of things. ‘She doesn’t know about me. She mustn’t. Stop her.’

Lytten didn’t know what was going on, still assumed it was some elaborate joke of unfathomable purpose, but Rosie’s tone held no joke in it. She was panicked.

‘How can I stop her?’

‘Do as I say. Walk through yourself and have a look. It’s not dangerous. I’ve done it. Well, you can see that. If I’m talking rubbish, then the only danger is that you’ll bump into the wall. When you’re through there, by the way, there’s one really important thing you have to do.’

‘What?’

‘Pretend it’s a play. You’re an actor in it. You have to get into your part. Don’t look at me like that; I know what I’m talking about. It’s the only way of not going a little bit crazy. You’ll be fine. You wrote the play, after all. Think of yourself as an actor-manager, or something.’

Lytten noticed she was looking very serious. She, evidently, didn’t need to step through a pergola to go a little crazy.

‘Ridiculous,’ he said again. Then, determined to end this nonsense once and for all, he did as instructed.

54

I hadn’t been in prison since an unfortunate evening in late 1938 when I got into a brawl in a bar in Marseilles. I badly misinterpreted the friendliness of some strangers, one thing led to another, and I spent the night in jail. We all became good friends eventually.

The police being the British police of course were terribly good at arresting me, but hadn’t got a clue about what they should do after that. Questioning, they said. By whom? What about? Three of them stood in the corner, muttering to each other and occasionally glancing in my direction, while I smiled sweetly and fondled the old shopping bag I had brought as a prop. Bolt upright, knees together, I was the embodiment of innocence, which was fair enough; I hadn’t a clue why I was there, but I was sure I hadn’t done it.

Eventually one of the officers came over. ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Meerson …’

‘Miss, Miss,’ I said. ‘Once spoken for, never collected, that’s me. Just an old spinster, you know.’

‘Very far from that, I’m sure, miss. I’m afraid we must ask you to stay here for a few hours, until Mr Wind returns to question you.’

‘How exciting. Will you lock me in a cell? It’ll give me something to tell the girls at our next luncheon.’

Lovely. A nice quiet cell and a few hours of undisturbed rest. I persuaded them to bring me some water, popped another half tab and settled down to do a bit of serious work.

*

I should explain how this operates. What you do is unpack all the raw material and turn it over to the stimulated part of the brain. The result is presented a little like the memory of a dream; that is, through symbolism and association. The knack is to unwrap the significance of the images afterwards in order to retrieve the detailed calculations underlying them. In that sense it is a bit like the Tsou script, but vastly more subtle.

I assembled my information, inserted my problems – the arrival of Chang, an entire transcript of his conversation, Rosie, the difficulties of shutting down the machinery, Lucien Grange, Emily – and lay back.

What I had at the end was the most complex piece of work I had ever achieved. A railway line with points, and a train waiting. I, Rosie and Henry were passengers. Henry was shouting something about Shakespeare, but Wind was hitting him, rather like a Punch and Judy show. On the ground, an old man was reading a book given to him by a young girl dressed like a peasant. He pulled a lever and the train began to move. As it went over the points, the girl laughed, ran to the train and jumped on. Rosie tried to get off, but couldn’t open the carriage door. The old man was left behind as the train vanished down the tracks.

So what did this mean? Henry shouting about Shakespeare was the easiest. Once, in the South of France, he gave me an impassioned discourse defending Shakespeare’s plots, saying that outrageous coincidence was more natural than carefully formed, reasoned action.

Rosie was also simple; she couldn’t come back. I had set the machine to prevent anyone from Anterwold wandering into this world. Rosie had come back and the machine would now think the copy was indigenous to Anterwold. Changing that would mean rebuilding the entire machine and there wasn’t going to be time. If she stepped through, then she would simply vanish, from this world and from Anterwold.

Next came the image of the train. The old man looked triumphant as he changed the points and the train went forward
again, down a different track. The girl jumped onto the train. She looked a bit like Rosie in my mind, but was not.

That took the real work to understand, but the result was devastating. All causes are balanced by consequences, and each is merely a different form of the other. They are interchangeable, like energy and matter. What I had done by creating Anterwold was not just the cause of history changing; it was the consequence of it as well.

There is no difference between cause and effect. That is an illusion created by belief in time. If I drop a cup, the cup breaks. The dropping is the cause, the breaking is the effect, because one happens after the other. Remove the notion of time and that no longer works. Each is the required condition for the other to take place. As the cup breaks, I am required to drop it. It is like the pair of scales again, where conditions in one pan determine the state of the other one.

Ordinarily, it is relatively simple to calculate such things as there is only one line of existence. However, my experiment had created another one and they were interacting. I could not close Anterwold because Rosie was in it. If she had come back then I might have kept control. But she split in two, because she was wearing rings on her toes.

The same applied to the Devil’s Handwriting. It existed because of actions taken in my future. But those actions equally depended on its existence.

That was it. In my vision, nothing was done by any of the actors on the train. They just watched out of the window. The central actions came from outside, from the man pulling the lever.

It was obviously Oldmanter; I had never met him nor seen a photograph but my unconscious always had a weakness for poor puns. The girl telling him what to do could only be one person. That’s why I was worried. I wasn’t battling Hanslip, or even Oldmanter; I could outthink them easily. I wasn’t certain I could outthink my daughter. I’d seen her file. She was possibly smarter than I was.

From that point it was fairly simple to sketch out a potential chain of events. Chang told me Hanslip knew of the Devil’s Handwriting. Hanslip would assume there was a reason this document was hidden where only a historian would be able to find it. So he sends More to contact Emily. Of course he does.

More goes south. Oldmanter would certainly track that; it was clear from Grange he wanted my project. Emily would be attracted to More – I found him rather handsome and we would have a similar outlook on the subject. Besides, she would be intrigued by the connection to me.

But how does the data get to Oldmanter, and why would he not conduct rigorous checks to ensure it was safe? Here conjecture had to come in, but the only variable I had left was Emily.

I could not see her agreeing to help find the data unless she knew what it was; she would discover it was not only valuable but also dangerous. Of course she would; she would not assist merely so some institute could make money. To get her help, someone like More would have to tell her that finding it was important for the safety of the planet. She would understand immediately that it offered the chance of accomplishing in an instant what she was otherwise prepared to wait for over centuries. As a renegade, she believed the world of science would bring about its own ruin; this would be a spectacular demonstration of that.

Rather than making sure it was never used, she would do her best to ensure it was. But at the cost of her own life, and of those who thought like her? Not if she was like me. How could she possibly accomplish that, though? That I couldn’t figure out. I didn’t have enough information. What was Oldmanter going to do to change the points on the railway line? What form would his intervention take?

I was getting close now, I could feel it, but I would have to test the conclusions thoroughly. What I had was only marginally more likely than many alternatives; it was not solid enough to rely on.

Then that stupid man Wind arrived and interrupted me yet
again. Worse still, I was heavily under the influence, so I didn’t make a very good impression.

*

‘I need some answers,’ he said as he came into Angela’s cell and sat down. ‘Are you all right?’

Angela was sitting on the bench that doubled as a bed. Her eyes were wide and her pupils dilated, and she twitched almost uncontrollably as he spoke to her. She seemed to him as though she was having a panic attack. Guilt? Or just plain fear? he wondered.

‘Perfectly,’ she replied. ‘Fabulous. I am asking myself questions as well, so you can’t bother me at the moment.’

‘I’m afraid I must insist.’

‘On your head be it, then.’

‘Are you ill? You look very odd.’

‘Oh. No. It’s a sort of …’ She waved vaguely at her head. ‘Comes on me, every now and then. Nothing serious. Did you say you wanted something?’

‘I need to ask you about the man who vanished.’

Angela wrinkled her nose in disappointment.

‘Eh? Oh, him. An extraneous factor, doesn’t really affect the outcome. Just a data store, really.’

‘Do you know who he was?’

‘I have never seen him before.’ She giggled. ‘That is the truth, because “before” is such a useful word. Germanic roots, I think.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m so sorry. Mind all over the place today.’

‘I have been going through your files.’

‘I didn’t know I had any.’

‘There is no trace of you whatsoever before 1937. We have been unable to track down your parents, old addresses, anything.’

‘Not very good files, then.’

‘We have established that information you gave when you
became a translator in 1940 was false. Schools, addresses and so on: none checked out.’

‘Doesn’t say much for your vetting procedure.’

‘The form was, in fact, filled in for you by Henry Lytten, who also acted as your referee and sponsor.’

‘Because of my languages, you see. There was a war on. All hands to the pump, he said.’

‘We also noted that between 1945 and 1952 you came to England for a brief stay, then went on trips – to Vienna, Berlin on one occasion, Stockholm and Geneva. Why?’

‘Henry asked me to deliver manuscripts for him. He didn’t trust the post and he was keen to rebuild the academic community. I helped out, and always took a little holiday while I was at it.’

‘I see. Let me ask about yesterday. This mysterious stranger. Bringing him to the house was your idea, so the policeman says. Did he say why he was watching Henry’s house?’

‘I didn’t ask him. It was none of my business.’

‘How did he escape?’

‘You were the one guarding the place. Now, are there any more questions? Is that what you came for?’

Angela moved close to him. Her eyes cleared and she held him by the chin as she studied him, then tittered in a high, slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Oh, I see what you are getting at.’ She let him go, then pushed him away and leaned back against the wall. ‘Of course. That’s how it might work. You are such a silly man, Sam Wind. Has anyone ever told you that?’

55

‘We must go to the circle soon, so that we may welcome the suppliants,’ Henary said to Rosalind the following morning.

‘You said there must be someone to preside. Who will that be?’

‘The spirit of Esilio presides,’ he said with a smile, ‘but as this procedure has not been employed for a very long time, I really do not know how it will work. I have read as much as possible in the last day, but there is little to discover. For Jay even to think of it was very ingenious and unorthodox. I suspect it will take the form of an ordinary trial, which would mean that the spirit will move through the most qualified. I’m afraid that will probably be Gontal, now that I am bound to Pamarchon.’