Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (34 page)

The Chaos Conflict was over.

But the mystery of the Zajinets' destination remained.

FORTY-SEVEN

EARTH, 1989 AD

Chilly sky and green grass: morning on Hampstead Heath, dogs running and playing with tongue-baring joy, and a man in a tweed overcoat walking past, shamrock in his lapel. It was the 17th of March and three years since Rupert's death, and Gavriela missed him dreadfully. She watched the dogs and the people, hoping their lives felt fulfilled.

For herself, Carl visited seldom – she got on better with her grandson Brody, in many ways – and her friends were mostly books, in the elegant Chelsea house she had inherited with surprise from Rupert. Rupert's collection was in many ways the greatest gift he could have given her, in lieu of his continued presence on the Earth.

She hoped Brody was revising with diligence for his O-levels.

Where did the years—?

Something ripped inside her skull.

After the stroke, learning to write again was hard. She had been one of the first to use a Compaq, however, revelling in the concept of a suitcase-shaped computer whose bottom end detached to form a keyboard and reveal a phosphor screen. Apart from the PDP11s in Imperial, she had grown used to the idea of plumbed-in mainframes with water cooling, and air conditioned atmosphere to ensure no dust-particle could ever slip between a disk and its read-write head.

It had got to the stage where ordinary consumers were buying computers, though what they intended to do with them, Gavriela had little idea. Most people did not appreciate what a universal Turing machine actually was, never mind
possessing the expertise to program it. To own a computer yet be unable to code seemed like illiteracy.

But hunt-and-peck on the keyboard enabled her to write, slowly at first, and then to participate on BBSs for the first time, discovering pen-pals in this new medium, no programming involved. In real life, her speech and thought remained clear, which was a blessing; but her legs were weak, and her new best friend was the electric wheelchair she steered with a joystick, and which Brody informed her was brilliant, like a pilot flying a Spitfire: he always cheered her up.

Then there was Ingrid, her live-in nurse, on whom Gavriela depended, at first without seeing her as a friend – Ingrid's manner could be brusque – while being grateful that Rupert continued to look after her from beyond the grave, because she could never have afforded Ingrid otherwise.

There was something liberating in accepting one's own helplessness, in recognising that however self-focused she had been in her life, it was all right for her to depend on someone else. She would have liked to explain this to her exuberant grandson, but it was not right that Brody should know of such things: let him be optimistic and blind to his mortality, while he was young.

In the summer, when Brody's exams were over, he came to stay for the full six weeks of the holiday. With her, he could discuss his obsessions – with physics and physical culture (as Gavriela thought of it), the former approved of by his father, the latter remaining secret. Gavriela talked to Ingrid, who told her that the old notion of muscle-bound introverts was untrue. The upshot was Gavriela's purchase, via Ingrid, of a set of weights for her grandson: blue plastic things and a shining chrome bar that nearly gave the delivery man a hernia, or so he said.

What neither Gavriela nor Brody talked about was Carl's impending marriage – at the age of forty-seven, for pity's sake – and the way he had cut Anna Gould out of his life, and appeared to be doing the same to their son, Brody. No doubt
Carl had his own story and justifications, but in the absence of explanation, Gavriela was treating his actions as unforgivable.

Or perhaps it was simply that Gavriela was a better grandmother than a mother, getting it right the second time around. Either way, she smiled at the huffing and puffing that came from Brody's room every day, the occasional thump of weights on the floor, and the vast quantities of milk he drank.

More significantly, the day after Brody received his O-level results, mostly grade 1s, Gavriela despatched Ingrid to Foyle's – at some point, Ingrid had become more than nurse, simply by setting no boundaries on what she was willing to do to help – to buy the three-volume Feynman lectures, the famous red books which she warned Brody would be too hard for him at first, but inspirational.

‘There's, er, something else,' he said one night in the drawing room – a term he found as amusing as she did – while the credits were rolling on the Conan movie. ‘You know those letters . . .'

Gavriela touched the joystick on her wheelchair, rotating a little to face him. Of course she had wondered about the letters arriving three times a week or more, but she had patience.

‘Her name's Amy,' he went on. ‘Amy Stelanko and she's from Iowa and Dad doesn't like her but I do. Her dad, she calls him Pop, works over here, except they'll be going back when I'm in the Upper Sixth.'

Gavriela's friend Jane from Imperial had married the boy she went out with at school, and remained happy. So Gavriela took Brody seriously, instead of dismissing a teen romance.

‘Things will be tough,' she said. ‘When she goes back.'

And at a time when Brody would be concentrating on his A-levels, or should be.

‘I
do
want to go to Uni, Gran,' he said. ‘Mr Stelanko said that if I apply to Cornell or somewhere, then he'll help me.'

‘Living in a foreign country, that's
really
tough.'

‘Oh.' Brody sank in on himself. ‘Right.'

For the first time he looked like the sulky teenager his father had been.

‘Which means you'll need my help,' said Gavriela. ‘And you get that under one condition.'

Brody's face cleared.

‘You need to bring Amy round here,' Gavriela went on. ‘I want to meet the thief who stole my grandson's heart.'

Blushing and laughing, Brody agreed.

Amy turned out to be a wonderful girl, pretty and smart and interested in psychology, and who listened, wide eyed and riveted, as Gavriela told her about meeting Sigmund Freud a long time ago. Then she told Amy she was welcome to come back any time, and she meant it.

When the end of summer came, Gavriela's sense of heartache grew large as she realised just how much Brody's presence had brightened her world. With a shock, as he came into the drawing-room dressed in T-shirt and jeans on the evening before leaving, she realised he had turned from a boy into a muscular young man during just six weeks.

‘I'm over two stone heavier,' he told her. ‘Fourteen kilos, and hardly any fat.'

Clearly the weights and the milk had come at just the right time in his development. They talked over the logistics of getting his boxed-up weights sent home, then the conversation trailed off, until Gavriela found herself saying. ‘We've talked about your future, but there are some things I'd like to tell you about. I mean my past.'

‘Dad says . . .' Brody shrugged his now-bulky shoulders. ‘He says you had a tough time of things, and won't ever talk about it.'

Gavriela guessed Carl had worded it differently.

‘There's a great deal I've never been able to share,' she said. ‘My war work was classified, but people are starting to learn about Alan Turing and Enigma, though much of it will stay secret for a lot longer than—'

‘Bletchley Park?' said Brody. ‘You mean you
worked
there?'

‘We called it BP, and I certainly did . . .'

It felt good to pass the memories on.

Gavriela stayed away from Carl's wedding at the start of October. Brooding more than usual, she wondered if Carl might have another child, and if so, whether he would treat this one more kindly. That night in bed, as she closed her eyes, her hands wrapped around her book, she saw in her imagination the note she had written while asleep on a previous notable night, when she learned of her great-niece's abduction.

That was when dear Rupert was still alive, and he had taken her to the SIS outstation on Chester Terrace, the mansion overlooking Regent's Park. Its parquet flooring was dug up during renovation, allowing her to hide the note and photograph intended for an unknown future recipient.

 

That was the note, she remembered as she descended into sleep, which she had wrapped around an old photo of herself with Ilse, to act as a form of identification – to the extent her actions made rational sense. It was Ilse's granddaughter that Dmitri had kidnapped, and it seemed right to use that picture, though the name would likely mean nothing to whoever read it in the future.

The next morning, Gavriela realised she had done it again.

She awoke with the same notebook open atop the bedspread, and a new message written inside. The cruel thing was, the handwriting looked as if she had penned the letter prior to her stroke.

Dearest Lucas
,

How wonderful to have a grandson! My words will seem very strange, since we do not know each other and I speak
from your past. Still, I must ask you a favour, and be assured it must be this way. Even banks can fail over time, although it is to be hoped that some familiar names survive, so I am forced to contact you in this indirect way, with the hope that you will feel curious enough to investigate as I tell you
.

Please, my grandson, look under the parquet flooring, in the right-hand outer corner as you look out the window at the park
.

 

If Carl named a future son Lucas, then that would be the final indication, to Gavriela's satisfaction, that she was not insane, that this phenomenon of information propagating backwards in time was real. This letter seemed to be a logical piece in a very illogical puzzle.

She had hidden the previous note and photograph, information that might prove useful against the darkness, beneath the floor in an out-station of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was the safest of locations, yet it had also seemed insane – how would the intended recipient even find the thing? This new letter was more explicit, to the extent of naming an unborn grandson.

It carried other implications: that she might never see the new baby, and in any case would never get to know him as an individual.

Should I have gone to the wedding?

Somehow, this unknown Lucas – he would be Lucas Woods, she presumed – would need to receive this letter, which in turn would enable him to retrieve the secreted note and photo. Not knowing what else to do, she folded up the new letter and tucked it inside
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, the book she had been reading when she fell asleep.

How do you send a message to the future?

Runes could be carved in stone with relative ease, the
advantage of such angular
futhark
s, the alphabets. But what was the modern equivalent of scratched lines?

‘There's nothing simpler than a bit,' she muttered.

There was a tap on the bedroom door, and Ingrid looked in.

‘I thought I heard you say something.'

‘Nothing important, but I am awake.'

‘Let's get you to the bathroom, then.'

Accepting Ingrid's assistance was better than using a bedpan or commode. It seemed so unfair that you could fight for so long and life would come to this; but fairness was not a characteristic of the universe, only of humans at their best.

Philosophy while you go to pee.

When the humdrum details were finished and she was settled in her wheelchair, wrapped in her dressing-gown and ready for breakfast, Gavriela made a detour into her ground-floor study – Rupert had called it his writing-room – where her Compaq lay switched off.

During operation, at any instant, every location in the computer's memory register would be either true or false, one or zero. Right now, while it was off, the state was what Pirsig, in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, called
mu
.

It was nothingness; it was neither-nor.

And it struck Gavriela as more profound than she had first thought.

‘Gabrielle? I've poured your tea.'

‘
Ich komme jetzt, Ingrid
.'

‘
Also gut, Frau Doktor
.'

Gavriela smiled. It was not just Ingrid, it was both of them: speaking in the old language brought the old habits of courtesy. The Inuit might not in truth have thirty words for snow –
Schade
, such a pity – but Whorf and Sapir were surely correct in pinpointing the constraints of language on intellectual concepts, witness Pirsig's borrowing from Japanese to come up with—

‘Gabrielle?'

Natürlich. Of course.

‘I need to make a phone call.' She steered her wheelchair out into the hallway. ‘Could you fetch the phone book, please?'

Ingrid pulled it out of the occasional-table drawer.

‘Let me find it for you. Whose number do you require?'

Gavriela looked up at the old grandfather clock. Ten to nine. Edmund Stafford, who as a young man had brought her books to read in Oxford while she was largely housebound after Carl's birth, still went in to work every day, despite his
emeritus
status.