The Restoration Game (31 page)

I read something like that, my eye tracking the lines down to the foot of the rock face. The lowest line was half hidden in the ground. I looked along it and almost idly tried to work out what the letters were whose tops I was seeing. Then I looked back, and noticed that I could see less of the letters. I thought it was a matter of the light, of a shadow deepening. I glanced to left and right, just to see that nothing and no one was casting an unexpected shadow. When I looked back, the half-sunk line had almost disappeared. I blinked, and stepped forward, peering closer.

What had been the second-lowest line of the inscription was now the lowest, and apparently sinking into the floor, at a rate of about one centimetre every two seconds. I watched for the disbelieving minute it took for that line, too, to disappear.

My first thought, and one that almost threw me into panic flight back the way I'd come, was that the entire wall of rock in front of me was slipping downward—that I had by the most freakish ill-luck chosen to come here the moment when, after centuries or millenia, the great wall of rock finally crashed away from the cliff. I pressed myself as close as my backpack would allow against the cliff wall, and reached out on both sides and scrabbled my gloved fingers to grip the rock behind me, as if that would do any good.

As I looked wildly about at the rock face opposite, I saw that its other features and irregularities weren't moving at all.

I fixed my eye on a distinctive protrusion of rock right in front of me, and it wasn't moving. The line of text beside it, however, was.

It was sinking at the same inexorable rate of one foot per minute. All the lines were.

The entire inscription was
scrolling.

For a moment, relief at knowing I wasn't about to be killed by hurtling rocks washed away the high weirdness of the sight. Then, just as a rational explanation comes to you after you've been briefly baffled and thrilled by a strange light in the sky (well, it does to me) I thought I knew exactly what was going on. A flicker of memory of the story of the NKVD film, and the puzzle of the cable along the floor, made me think of the obvious explanation: that the scrolling lines of capitals were a projection; that somewhere in the cliff behind me a film was running through a cunningly angled projector; that what I was looking at was a hoax.

I let go of the cliff and walked across the floor of the chasm, waving my hand in front of me to see if it would intercept the projector's beam. It didn't. I leaned forward and laid a gloved finger on a “V” at eye level. My finger poked right into the incision in the rock. Two parings of thermal-lined Goretex fell from the tip of the glove, one on each side, where the seams brushed the groove's edges.

So what did I do? I did what any sensible, red-blooded American geek girl would do. I tugged the glove off, peered at the smooth damage, and then touched the letter with my bare fingertip, prodding into the groove and then touching its edge, rather like someone stupid enough to test a blade on their thumb. I felt a sharp pain and saw blood well.

“Ow!” I yelped, jumping back and sticking my cut fingertip in my mouth. I stood for a minute sucking at the cut and staring at sharply carved lines of Latin scrolling down a surface of solid rock.

“The blood of the Vrai,” said a calm, amused voice behind me.

My spine seemed to contract as I reflexively jumped and ducked at the same moment. My feet jarred back on the ground, hurting my hunched neck. I spun around, to see a man standing by the cliff and aiming a pistol at me. For the second time in two days I stared into that blackest of black holes, and then I looked at the man's face.

“Tastes just the same, doesn't it?” said Ilya Klebov.

2.

In his late forties now, stouter around the middle, clad in ski jacket and trousers, thin gloves, and thick-soled boots, he was still instantly recognisable to me as the man I'd last seen seventeen years earlier. He held the weapon in his right hand, steadied on his left forearm, and looked at me with the same earnest, urgent expression as he'd had when he'd beseeched me to remember his name. I stared at him, speechless.

“My dear Lucy Stone,” he said. He didn't say it sarcastically, but with warmth and affection. “It's good to see you.”

My breath came out in something between a grunt and a laugh.

“Mr. Klebov,” I said, “how did you get here, and what are you doing?”

Which, looking back, strikes me as quite the most rational thing I could have said in the circumstances. Klebov seemed to think so.

“Good questions,” he said. “I got here along much the same route as you did, but rather more directly, because I've come here many times. As for what I'm doing here—I've come to meet you, to stop you from carrying out your mission, and to rescue you, as you may remember I once did before.”

“I've never forgotten it,” I said. I knew he could tell from the way I said it that this was my thanks. “Rescue me from what?”

“Lucy,” he said, “what are you seeing?”

“I'm seeing a man pointing a gun at me,” I said.

He smiled, as if he had to smile. “Very good,” he said. He made a flicking motion with the pistol barrel. “I mean on the wall behind you. Look at it.”

I turned away—neck already a little stiff—and looked again at the scrolling stone text.

“What do you see, Lucy?”

“Lines of Latin, I think, scrolling down the rock. It's…something impossible.”

“Forget impossible,” Klebov said. “It exists; therefore it's possible. Look at what you see, Lucy! Some of the ‘V's are ‘U's, if that helps. But don't try to read every word on the lines—look at the whole thing. What are you seeing?”

“Sic, something, tunc, operor computus treos, aliter, operor computus quadrus…” I laboriously read aloud.

Computus?
I thought. The Romans had a word for
compute?
Wait a fucking minute….

I gazed at the patterns the lines made, at how they were indented, how lines got repeated and how they varied, how certain words like SIC and TUNC and ALITER always appeared on a line by themselves, and always in that sequence.

I whirled around again to face Klebov.

“Sic—tunc—aliter!” I shouted. “If—then—else! It's
code!”

“Yes,” said Klebov.

“It's high-level computer code written in Latin!” I squealed, as if he doubted it.

“In
bad
Latin,” said Klebov. “Nevertheless. Yes, that's what it is. You are looking at a programme, written in Latin, that has been scrolling down this rock for centuries. That is
remembered
to have been here before there was a computer in the world. If”—he sighed, as though over a hopeless wish—”it were merely carved in the rock, that would be a most remarkable and surprising fact, but not beyond the wit of man to explain away. That it is scrolling down the rock in complete defiance of physics and common sense—you'll notice that, though seemingly cut deep in the rock, the letters leave no trace in it of their passing—is rather compelling evidence that the world is not what we think it is.”

“Or at least that that rock face isn't,” I said.

“What?” said Klebov, sounding taken aback. “What do you think it is? Silly Putty?”

“Something like that,” I said. “But a lot more advanced. Material that can behave like this is supposed to be possible with nanotechnology—smart matter, utility fog, you know? A swarm of programmed lock-and-release micro-machines?”

“I'm aware of the concept,” said Klebov. “Are you telling me the
Romans
had nanotechnology?”

“Not in the world where Spartacus lost,” I said, much too flippantly. (I was a little light-headed at this point.)

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head and smiling. “Just a joke to myself, sorry. The point is, this exists in our world so it must follow our world's physics. Even if it comes from outside our world. Wow!”

Klebov still had me covered, but he was looking at me very oddly indeed.

“This thing doesn't disturb you?”

“No,” I said. “Not now that I've seen it as code. It's amazing. It's wonderful, it's like we're seeing—maybe we
are
seeing—the physics engine of the world.”

“The physics engine?”

“You know, the programme that controls the movements and so on of objects in a computer game?”

“Ah yes,” said Klebov. “As in the game you have so craftily written for our little country. And who do you think wrote the game of the world? What programmer wrote that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe we're living in a simulation—you know, like in
The Matrix?
—or maybe that rock is some kind of alien message that got placed here way back in Roman times and something got lost in translation, or—”

Klebov, still keeping the pistol pointed straight at me, took his left arm away from under his right wrist and raised his hand.

“Enough,” he said. “Curious speculations, no doubt, and interesting in their way. You are a more consistent materialist than I am, or than anyone else who has looked upon this sight, Lucy, I'll tell you that.”

“What do
you
think it is?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I still incline to the view that the Vrai always took: that it was written by God, and that it was written in Latin because Latin was the language of the Church. By writing—in a rock, no less!—this endless and meaningless text, instead of, let us say, the Scriptures, God is telling us that all other writings and commandments attributed to Him are false. It tells us that He exists, indeed, but has left us no instructions. We are free.”

From the tone of his voice I guessed that some of what he said was a quotation, a formula, perhaps a creed.

“And that's the secret of the Vrai?” I said. “The Krassnian truth?”

Klebov nodded. “Yes.”

“What a beautiful message!” I said. “Why did they keep it secret? Why didn't they preach it to the world?”

Klebov's laugh echoed in the canyon. “They took from it the message of God's indifference and Man's freedom. And you ask me why they didn't preach that to their serfs?”

“Oh,” I said. “Point. But if that's all there is to it, how come the serfs—the Krassnar—couldn't come near it safely?”

“A lie, as you see,” Klebov said. “I have come here safely for years. In feudal times, when they were the rulers, the Vrai made sure to murder or mutilate any Krassnar who dared to come to this place. They cut out tongues. They gouged eyes. They hammered heads and damaged brains. After some centuries of this, the legend grew that the secret place guarded itself in horrible ways. In time, the legend itself was enough.”

I shuddered. And then, as before, my mind came up with another question, another objection.

“That doesn't explain what happened in 1952,” I said.

Klebov jumped as if stung. He almost dropped the heavy pistol. If I'd been trained in martial arts, I could probably have taken him down in that moment. He steadied his gun hand again over his left wrist, and took an involuntary step forward.

“What do you know about that?” he demanded.

“Only what my Nana told me,” I said, and as I said so I realised I now knew—or could guess—a lot more than that. So I added, as if casually: “And that was just a tale I heard in childhood, Ilya Alekseyevich.”

Klebov stood stock-still, breathing heavily.

“What are you saying?”

I took a deep breath myself, as if about to dive into water. Water whose depth and rocks I didn't know.

“Your father, Aleksey I. Klebov, blew out the brains of the last keeper of the Vrai truth—Beryozkin, that was his name, wasn't it? A man who despised the Krassnar and who would have loved to restore the Vrai to their ancient glory. A restorationist, working away inside the Party and the Cheka to undermine the State from within. A man who had framed and killed many loyal Party members, including one who was himself a Vrai and who had almost given away the secret to the grandchildren of those despised serfs.”

“Your father knew this place—he was from one of the families or trades who guided the young Vrai to within sight of it. How pleased he must have been to have got rid of the old oppressors at last! And how shocked he must have been when Beria sent his men to find the secret. Of course your father knew something like that was going on—he was in the NKVD himself. He may not have known what the secret was, but he did know it had been used to oppress his people for generations, and that knowing it had made the Vrai confident and fearless enemies of the Soviet state.

“So he ambushed Beria's men, from the top of that cliff behind you. He hurled down grenades and followed that with firebombs. In such a narrow space, that should have been enough. But one man survived, perhaps because he was standing back and filming. He staggered out with the camera, and the film. The film that made Stalin and Beria quake in their boots, because they too saw it as God's writing on the wall.”

Klebov listened to all this without expression, until the end, at which point he smiled.

“So you have heard that rumour too,” he said. “A pretty story. A legend, that ends with a point, as all good legends must. You identify a legend by the fact that it
has
a point, Lucy. Your mother should have taught you that.”

“What about the rest?” I cried. “What about your father?”

“What you said is…not quite how it was, but close enough. My late father was more superstitious than you imagine—he felt it his duty to guard, not the secret, but Stalin and Beria and the people
from
the secret. He really believed it could do terrible things to people who were not of the Vrai. Oh, and you are wrong about the grenades. He used explosives from the copper mine, and petrol. Enough petrol, it would seem, to start a brush fire on the mountain that burned for a week. A pity he didn't think to bring more explosives.”

He glanced around, and down at his watch, and up at me.

“But I did,” he said.

3.

I just stared at him, feeling stupid after having felt clever.

“Did what?”

“I have brought enough explosives here,” he said in a patient, explaining voice, “to bring down that rock wall. They are planted along the crack. They are wired to this cable.” He indicated, with his toe. “I have done this over many months, in readiness for this day.”