If Then (28 page)

“Cough,” he says to Hector. The stretcher bearer obeys weakly. Blore squints into the wound and watches the brain tissue shiver.

“There are metallic fragments of the bullet in the wound,” says the doctor, “and they need to come out.”

Father Huxley emerges from the deeper cavern of the necropolis, carrying a small burial urn. He sidles over to James and whispers to him, “I thought you would never come.”

“Hector knew the sniper was after him. He was right.”

“Do you remember when Blore performed this operation on you?” asks Huxley.

A nervous, weak feeling in his legs, his pulse erratic, James sits down heavily.

“I don’t remember.”

“You agreed to have an implant. You were neither the smartest nor the strongest, but you had an admirable persistence. You could always be relied upon to finish a job.”

From his surgical kit, Doctor Blore takes out a long builder’s nail. It is sterilized. He magnetizes the nail with a galvanic magnet then, with utmost care, the doctor slides the nail through the round hole in Hector’s skull and along the trenches of his brain.

“This is how it was, the first time,” says Huxley.

With the onset of the vertigo, James experiences a violent sense of having been deceived; the ancient burial urns and necropolis is not a site of antiquity but rather something anomalous, belonging to a different time. The Process. He remembers how it was always less effective in low-lying areas.

Blore adjusts the magnetic charge coursing through the nail and Hector, unblinking and mechanical, begins to enunciate strings of mathematical functions. Collinson notes them down in a manner that is equally mechanical. Blore’s hand operates with the surety and speed of a machine, but his face is terrified.

Huxley holds up the burial urn. In his hands it is transformed into a smooth curved marble vase. He unscrews the lid. In an antiseptic hollow, there is a floret of brain tissue.

Blore withdraws the nail and there are fragments of blood and metal along its length. Huxley offers the doctor the urn. He takes it and gazes with horror at this terrible gift.

“It’s all coming back to me. The magnetic charge disrupts the electrical activity within the brain and prepares the artificial tissue to receive the graft.”

From above, the sound of an approaching shell, and then the earth shakes with the explosive impact. The shafts of sunlight into the necropolis thin as debris falls over the entrance to the tunnel. Another shell, closer this time; the roof of the necropolis is sealed rock, but some of the mortar is shaken loose. The tunnel into the necropolis collapses. No more sunlight. No more signal.

The priest falls silent, his face assuming the most ghastly vacancy. The soldiers hooked up to one another’s blood supply slump together, entwined. The life drains from the face of the professor. His features slacken and he slips down, chin to chest, as if exhausted. On the table, Hector is a grey inanimate golem. Only Blore and James retain consciousness. Around them, what had appeared to be dusty ancient burial urns are white ceramic pods containing tall skeletons in varying states of decomposition, each with an identical wound to the back of the skull. James notices the extended femurs, the distinctive high forehead. They are not human skeletons, not Homo sapiens. And they are strangely familiar.

“Our colleagues appear to have fainted,” observes Blore. “Clearly the process which animates them does not penetrate underground.”

Using his forceps, Blore takes the floret of foreign tissue out of its container; at its heart, there is an almond-shaped structure with keen nerve endings.

Placing the floret within the wound in Hector’s skull is sufficient to activate it; like the tendrils of an anemone, stirring in response to a warm fertile current, the extruded nerves of the implant reach out to Hector’s synthetic brain tissue and then embed themselves within it, pulling the implant down through the cerebellum. Methodically, Blore cleans then sutures the scalp wound in one layer with interrupted stitches. As he concentrates his needle and catgut, he speculates with a tone of faint amusement.

“Each of the skeletons with head wounds have been operated on in an identical fashion. In all likelihood, by me. So the question is, how many times have I performed this operation? Did I get it wrong in the past? Am I brought here again and again until I finally get it right?”

James counts the white ceramic pods. Eight.

Blore wonders, “Who are the patients?”

The elongated skeletons in their coffins. The sniper was seven foot tall and walked with a limp. His first thought was of the Long Man of Wilmington. No, not him, but someone near to him. He remembers the Institute, and the attenuated genius who stalked its dripping corridors.

“I remember him,” says James.

James reaches over to Hector’s identity disc and flips it over to read his full name. Sergeant J Hector. He unties the twine, scratches a new name on to the asbestos disc, then reties it around his own neck so that he will not forget.

Sergeant John Hector. Omega John.

Hector reaches over to his friend and his fingertips lightly brush against James’ knuckles. It is the merest contact but it incites, within James, the beginning of a dreadful sensation. The vertigo itself. The images and impressions accompanying Hector’s touch are as vivid and charged as the images of battle. Hector finds the strength to clasp James’ hand in his and this brings the vertigo on more strongly. The emotions follow in kind: anxiety, terror, horror; the horror that lies on the stretcher, the horror towards what is happening to one’s own body. Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on. He feels bitterness in all its forms: the futile anger of every wounded man, their despair that time cannot be reversed and the body restored whole and inviolate. Then anger, the lust for vengeance, the tension that can only be relieved through the tearing and choking of the enemy with bare hands. It is as if the experience of the war has been harvested from every soldier in the field and then condensed into an ichor of ghastly feeling, the blood of a dead god that when transfused into his veins makes his heart, already strained, buck in its harness.

Hector’s pale beatific expression is entirely at odds with the violent sensation brought on by his touch.

“I can see the war,” he says, and gazes at his palms, discerning in the lifelines a map of the battlefield.

23

C
aptain Tuke sends
Private Brilliant back to find stretcher squads who can fetch up more ammunition. He scuttles to the dressing station. It is a smoking slaughter pit. The scene around the entrance to the necropolis is horrific; the wounded men spared by the first shell were too incapacitated to get clear of the second. The tunnel down to the necropolis has collapsed. He takes out his shovel and begins digging.

He clears a few feet of rubble then hears digging from the other direction. A hand pushes through the earth. Brilliant grabs James’ hand and he pulls him up through the rubble and out into the smouldering charred shellhole.

The sun is strong and annihilating. James kneels. Around him the dressing station is evacuated. A pillar of smoke rises from what had been their bell tent. Collinson and Huxley carry Hector on a stretcher out of the necropolis. They set him down next to James. Smoke from the shellhole brushes itself against him like a grateful cat. The shout comes to clear the area before the Turks fire another shell. Huxley and Collinson heft up the stretcher carrying Hector and start on the long carry down toward the beach.

Doctor Blore is next out of the hole, carried on the back of Private Brilliant. He, too, is suffering from the vertigo; it is apparent in the whites of his eyes and, when he is set down, his helpless sobbing.

“Hector thanked me for saving his life,” gasps Blore, “and when my hand came away from his bandaged head, it was as if a zoetrope was set whirring in my mind, one which showed every hour since we landed, from every point of view, Turk and ally, living and dead.”

He lurches up to grab hold of Private Brilliant.

“I felt what it is like to die ten thousand times. And to kill. I thrust a bayonet into the enemy and then felt the blade in my guts.”

The danger of another shell striking the post is too great. The Turk has found their range. They must get away quick. A sedative is applied to the doctor with the butt of a rifle. Blore is lowered onto a stretcher.

There are no stretchers remaining for James so Private Brilliant heaves him up onto his back and carries him clear of the aid post. He is too heavy for the small, exhausted soldier. Once they are clear of the shellhole, Brilliant sets James down in a waist-high patch of scrub and perfumed herbs.

There is no overall command on the ridge, no one to tell the men to retreat. The soldiers dig in. Clink, scrape, shovel. The sounds of war. It is very hard to get a consensus as to what is real or what is merely imagined if all you have to rely upon is the auditory sense. The sea wind stokes the fire of the burning scrub. A black fleece of smoke moves quickly across the ridge. He will not be caught up in that again; James heads back down the goat track, his muscles tired, his heels bruised by the hard grey chalk of the path.

Without orders, nothing holds together. He meets shufflers trudging up the line, dirty and unwashed faces, heading into battle. Without orders to fall back, even the dead keep fighting; beside the track, a parapet is held by men stiff with rigor mortis, their rifles pointed in the vague direction of the enemy. He gathers up their identity discs. He remembers taking John Hector’s identity disc, and putting it around his own neck; he looks at it and sees that he has gouged a name into it: Omega John. It means everything. Omega John. He is afraid. He takes a Webley revolver from the holster of a dead captain, and conceals it in his webbing.

Back at the beach camp, there is no rest for anyone. Barker Bill sees to that. Malingerers, he calls them, filthy layabouts. With the aid post on Kiretch Tepe destroyed, the wounded must be brought back to the casualty clearing station on the beach; a two-mile carry down the steep gullies, descending slowly through the rock ledges, the wounded bemoaning every jolt. After each of these carries, the bearers are sent directly back up the ridge again.

With his adjutants, Barker Bill goes from dugout to dugout, kicking over the tea pots and rubbing out campfires with the tip of his cane. The stretcher bearers shuffle to their feet and obediently sleepwalk back up the goat track. At twilight, they run out of stretchers, and so stumble down through the scree with the wounded men on their backs.

James passes unseen through the ranks of milling troops. In the absence of orders, a few swimmers wade out to the sea. Among the mule teams, the word is that the lieutenant general himself is on the beach. Sir Frederick Stopford, the commander of the landing, confined up until now on board
HMS Jonquil
with a swollen knee, has come to add impetus to the advance. Then, in the queue for water, James hears a different rumour. Stopford has been relieved of his command. A new lieutenant general will be appointed.

Command headquarters are stationed at a camp in the lee of Hill 10, inland from the mule lines and north of the casualty clearing station at the cut. A modest eminence in the low ground north of the salt lake, it was at Hill 10 that the men gathered before the fateful assault on Chocolate Hill in which Jordison was killed.

He wants to find Hector before the injured stretcher bearer is evacuated. James stumbles across the beach toward the casualty clearing station. The prickling tightening sensation in his scalp intensifies the closer he gets to Hector.

Collinson stops James on his approach. “We have set Hector apart from the other wounded men.”

The professor takes out his pipe and distractedly rummages around the various pockets of his webbing for tobacco.

“A few men remarked that they found his presence disturbing.”

James says, “Can’t you feel it?” His scalp is sore with it, as if his hair has been combed violently against the grain.

Collinson shakes his head. “I appear to be immune. I have observed the effect in others. Some very badly wounded men have attempted to crawl out of range of this
phenomenon
. I don’t know what to call it. It’s like something from the Society for Psychical Research.”

“Now are you prepared to speculate?” asks James, recalling their earlier conversation on the ridge.

Collinson hesitates, then opens his notebook. “Hector told me that he can see a landscape of equations; that is, numbers are represented in his imagination as a contoured landscape of various colours.”

In the notebook, a diagram of the landscape with terms scrawled in the margin:
Galton’s spatial sequence synaesthesia
,
smaller values are perceived as being nearer to the subject.

Collinson explains, “It is this visualization of numbers that allows savants to make calculations that seem inordinately fleet to the rest of humanity. My speculation is that the parts of the brain responsible for computation are adjacent to those of sensory perception, and Blore’s particular method in treating head injuries is causing an overlap between these functions of the mind. Blore has stumbled across a surgical method for creating mathematical savants.”

James shakes his head. “It is more than just sums. His mind is giving off an aura.”

“It cannot. There is no organ in the brain capable of transmission. Some other mechanism must be at work.”

“Have you tried holding his hand?”

Collinson is puzzled.

“Transmission through touch? I carried him out of the stretcher myself. I suffered no visions.”

“I did,” James winces. “Blore also. We suffered the most terrible vertigo. I have to see him.”

Collinson stops James as politely as he can.

“We are in a very febrile state of mind. Quite understandably so, given the circumstances we are labouring under. Calm heads, sir. Cool thoughts.”

Under the tarp, Hector sits on the sand, sketching shapes in it with a stick. Huxley kneels beside him, another reverential witness. James sits down cross-legged. The back of his head aches and the old scar tissue around the implant is livid as if infected.

“The fighting has stopped,” says Hector.

The artillery is quiet but in the distance, the machine guns in the battle of Kiretch Tepe continue to rattle.

“I stopped the war,” says Hector. “Not entirely. If I reduced the will to fight among the Turk to zero, then we would slaughter them, and vice versa. I have left just enough will to fight to maintain a stalemate.”

“How did you stop the war?”

“Did Collinson show you his notebook?”

The diagram of the landscape, notations and equations over each position.

“The professor has a language to express what I see, and therefore influence it.”

“How is this possible?”

“You said it to me by Chocolate Hill. The other force within you that draws you in yet remains hidden. But it is not a force. It is a process. The mind is a process. It’s not a thing. My mind is a process of interaction with everything around me. The war is a process too. One feeds into the other. I close my eyes and I can see the entire battlefield and every soul upon it, in motion.”

“When we touched, I felt a vertigo.”

“It distressed you,” Hector says. “The suffering minds are connected as in an electrical circuit. By touching me, you were connected to that circuit. The suffering here will never end. It has become energy. Indestructible and ever present.”

James removes the identification disc from around his neck and gives it to Hector, who reads it.

“Omega John?” he laughs. “Curious. I won’t forget you, James. Before I go, I will search the war for some way to make you safe, to help you escape.”

Hector gathers a thin blanket around his shoulders.

“Do you have any water?” he asks. “I’m damned thirsty.”

James gives him his water bottle. Hector drinks deeply and then coughs.

“We must keep him safe,” says Huxley. “You cannot tell others about him.”

The priest’s tunic is torn, and sweat glistens in the narrows of his throat.

“Do you believe he can really affect the war?”

“James, all of this…” Huxley’s gesture encompasses the wounded, the beach, the sea, the ridge, the dead “…it is all for Hector. To bring him into existence. Us also. Our connection to each other is vital. I am convinced of this. I have felt it from the moment we landed on the beach. That is why we are here. To understand what has occurred. To protect it. We are witnesses to the coming of Homo evolutis.”

The term is unfamiliar to James. Huxley explains its meaning: when man becomes conscious of the universe, he will take control of his evolution and the evolution of the other species. Father Huxley has to clench his fists by his sides to restrain his passion.

“If the profiteers and the warmongers hear of his existence they will not think twice about killing him.”

“Enough,” says Hector.

An eerie silence falls over the distant ridge. The machine gun fire ceases – it’s as if the whistle has blown on a shift, and now the workers can trudge wearily back to camp.

“Upon my return to London, I intend to stop the war across the whole of Europe.”

Hector turns onto his side and pulls the blanket up to his chin.

J
ames sits
on the shadowed side of a moonlit dune. Collinson and Huxley, Hector between them on a stretcher, join the morbid procession of stretcher bearers down to the evacuation point at the pier; under the cover of darkness, the black barges berth and the loading of the wounded begins. Collinson and Huxley disappear in the crowd gathering by the waterside.

The prickling sensation in James’ scalp subsides and he feels a great release of tension. The veil falls, briefly, exposing a truth that can only ever be glimpsed: the enormity of what he has done and what has been done to him. He remembers gazing through the Zweiss glass and seeing, in its magnified circle, the terrified faces of men and women as they ran down the steep hillside. The faces of the evicted, all people he had cast out of the town. The naval guns swept them aside. It was a massacre.

When was the last time he cried honestly? Without having to force it? So long ago. Even in childhood, he could hold back tears. He was not emotionless. On the contrary. But he was raised without hope that his desires would ever be met and that he must accommodate his needs to the greater imperatives of society. To what must be done. How had he learned this terrible lesson? Poverty. Powerlessness.

He cries alone. A minute or so suffices. He will never recover from his exertions on the Kiretch Tepe.

The green and red electric lights of the hospital ship wait in the bay. The silhouettes of the stretcher bearers flank the waterside. And then he sees him, a silhouette taller than the others. A foot or so taller. The silhouette of the sniper.

The sniper limps through the lines, watching as the stretchers are loaded aboard the black barge. The first barge slips out into the cut, and then the tall figure walks north toward divisional headquarters. James checks the gun in his tunic and follows him.

I
nside the great tent
, Omega John is sat upon a camp chair in the uniform of a lieutenant general, conferring with Barker Bill and his adjutants. The rising tip of his oval skull is a soft mass of skin and tough membrane. His general’s cap is tucked in the crook of his elbow, and he fiddles with the ends of his thin white moustache. A bandage around his knee distorts the line of his trousers, which are too short for him, exposing his long ankles.

“Hello James,” says Omega John. “How do you like my war?”

James hesitates. He is scared in a way he had not anticipated. The air of the tent is warm and close. The lanterns fizz with midges. The officers go about their duties like ponderous automata. One officer lies face down in the earth, arms twitching, and entirely ignored by his fellow soldiers. Barker Bill speaks to Omega John in his cracked and indecipherable code, although by his tone, supplicant and queasingly familiar, he seems to be telling some kind of joke. Barker Bill does not acknowledge the stretcher bearer from his division.

James salutes his superiors.

Omega John tells him to stand at ease.

“Permission to speak freely,” says James.

“Denied,” says Omega John, handing the briefing notes back to his adjutant, and accepting another sheaf of orders.