The Strange Attractor (21 page)

FUCKYOUTOO

and added several asterisks by way of emphasis. The programme was one that allowed Dobie to express his feelings on occasion and further permitted the computer, though it didn’t have any feelings, a purely nominal right of reply. This emotional safety-valve was Dobie’s own innovation; it was pleasant after six or eight hours of labour to be able to relieve in this wise his frustration and it made no difference to the computer either way.

Clearly it was back to the drawing-board. He didn’t need the computer to tell him there was a paradox somewhere in the programming, an anaphoric gap; he needed it to tell him where it was, so that he could eliminate it. There had to be a way in somewhere but he couldn’t see it and the computer couldn’t see it either. Well, it was early days yet. Far too early, really, to be losing your temper. It wasn’t the computer’s fault. The computer wasn’t losing its temper. Maybe that’s the whole trouble.
That
’s why NO CAN DO.

Dobie got up from his chair and began to walk to and fro, to and fro, to and fro. The key to the whole thing, he thought, is what somebody
feels
. That’s why I can’t solve the conundrum. I haven’t felt anything very much since Jenny got dead and I probably didn’t feel enough before. Not enough to understand anything. Not the computer’s fault and not Jenny’s; no, mostly mine. Now all that rather frightening yet welcome numbness is wearing off, I’m starting to hurt. I’m starting to get angry. Maybe I
need
to lose my temper if I’m ever to find the answer to this one. Because the answer has to have a human form and because that’s how that certain human form is always managing to stay ahead of me. Pushed ahead by anger. Or hatred. Or something like that. But anger at what? Hatred of whom? If I don’t feel those things, how can I tell?

He sat down again at the computer, went back to the graphic mode and started out again. Building on the screen a circle of fact, an ellipse of theory, moving the two shapes this way and that, trying to get them to coincide. Once he had found a point of coincidence, he’d move them round their common epicentre at an increasing speed until they began to fluctuate, to spin off course. Then he’d have pinned it down. The strange attractor. Or at least have established its location. But it would all take time. It would take a lot of time and a lot of patience.

At nine o’clock Kate brought him in his dinner on a tray and he left the computer in order to eat it. She sat down again in the armchair to watch him eat it; he seemed to be pretty hungry but there was that in his appearance which precluded the asking of silly questions, such as
How’s it going?
She waited instead for him to speak first, which he didn’t do until he’d finished eating. Then he went at once back to the computer, carrying his coffee-mug, and lit a cigarette. She’d already noticed the twelve or fifteen crumpled stubs in the ashtray and that had surprised her a little; Dobie wasn’t usually a heavy smoker. He looked all right, though, on the whole. Not even particularly tired. Just a little crumpled up, like the cigarette stubs.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not yet.”

“No progress to report?”

“It isn’t like that. Either you’re through or you’re not through. You’re inside or you’re outside. It’s like hacking, in a way.”

“Hacking?”

“Getting into someone else’s computer. Only this is getting into someone else’s brain. Seeing the patterns the way another person sees them. Tricky.”

It wasn’t the kind of mental activity that Kate could even begin to imagine. She got up and looked over Dobie’s shoulder at the monitor screen, to see if that helped. It didn’t. The inside of your brain apparently looked like thousands and thousands of intersecting parallelograms, all shifting restlessly about. It wasn’t, surely, a picture that any neuro-surgeon would recognise. “It reminds me of a Chinese box,” she said. In so far as it reminded her of anything.

“We’d have a Chinese box turned inside out in a matter of milliseconds.” He didn’t sound contemptuous. Just flatly dismissive. “It’s a lot more complex than that.”

“I suppose it would be.”

“Maybe you could say the symbols I’m using are something like characters in a drama. They don’t stay put, you see. They move from place to place. Until,” Dobie said as flatly as before, “they’re terminated. And even then they go on affecting the pattern, although they’re not there.”

“The butterfly effect?”

“On a magnified scale.”

“Extraordinary.” But Kate wasn’t contemptuous, either. She was fascinated. “Which one is me?”

“It doesn’t work like that, either. The characters aren’t
really
characters, they’re only arrangements of syllogistic series, actual and potential. From one point of view, all right, that’s what we are, or that’s how we are as a computer sees us. But it’s still only a metaphor. Even when you’ve picked out a significant pattern, it still has to be interpreted. That’s normally a job for the physicists. I’m not a physicist.”

“No. In fact I can’t quite make out
what
you are. There’s one thing,” Kate said, “you’ve never asked me. Perhaps you should.”

Dobie didn’t raise his head. “About you and Sammy?”

Kate sighed. “The answer is no. We didn’t.”

“We see that situation in terms of unrealised potential. So I’ll check that out as confirmed.”

Kate didn’t hit him. Instead, she sighed again. “Unrealised potential. That’s me, folks.”

“That’s
everybody
,” Dobie said. “The way a computer sees us. Computers can attain their potential. People can’t. That’s why I can’t foretell the future with this thing. All I can do is analyse. I can’t predict.”

“… What’s
our
potential, Dobie?”

“I have a feeling,” Dobie said, “that it might be quite considerable.”

“Uh-huh. But that’s a feeling? Not a prediction?”

“It’s an intuition.”

“Dobie, there’s hope for you yet.”

“Yes, indeed,” Dobie said. “For both of us.”

“Is there anything else I can get you?”

“Not right now,” Dobie said. His head was lowered over the keyboard again. He heard the door close behind her as she left the room. If it is possible for a door to close light-heartedly, that one did.

Of course light-heartedness is a part of it. Euphoria, even. There have to be moments when everything seems to be going good, the patterns falling into place, the fingers moving on the keyboard as though guided by predestiny. But euphoria won’t sustain you for long. It comes and it goes. You need something else to push you through the long dark hours when the mind is numbed and the fingers move as though clogged in a morass of self-doubt; you need anger, you need hatred. Things like that. When his fingers came to a temporary halt Dobie got up from his chair and walked round the room, his hands behind his back, with the tape on the cassette-player once again turning and Oscar Petersen’s turmoiled arpeggios once again accompanying the confusion of his thoughts, Oscar Petersen’s agile fingers replacing his on that other keyboard, the walls of his brain echoing to those elaborately devised chord progressions. As he walked slowly up and down, letting his anger grow…

Because he knew this wasn’t the usual enemy. This time he wasn’t up against some elusive mathematical abstraction, some concept lurking behind a thicket of Dirac equations; much less up against George Campbell’s battery of square-eyed whiz-kids in downtown Boston, all intent on flushing the bird from the thicket and shooting it dead before the goddam Limeys had loaded their shotguns. This was a bird of a different feather, another kind of enemy. This was N. An enemy who had stolen Dobie’s wife and had later killed her and who was thus no longer an enemy but
the
enemy, Pluto to Dobie’s ineffectual Orpheus. And this room, Sammy’s room, was the dark-shaded Hades to which Jenny had been rapt; she too had lain on the bed with another head beside hers on the pillow, listening idly to this same cunning music, and through that recollected music had sent her husband some kind of a message, perhaps of joy, perhaps of despair, who could tell? Now here he was in the underworld, feeling oddly at home here as probably she had also, marching soundlessly up and down, letting his anger build and build before sitting at the computer desk to send out messages of his own, tapping out the codes and symbol strings, trying to shape the outline of a face, the face of the head on the pillow.

Oh yes, this bird had a face. N had a face. A face that Dobie hated, though he couldn’t see it. He
had
to hate it in order to get to see it. He wanted to see it because he hated it. Not that seeing it would be enough. There was a key on the computer board that he hadn’t yet used. A key marked CANCEL. That would do the trick…

But he wasn’t just a transmitter of messages. Very far from it. He was a receiver as well. Behind the insistent interchange of the piano and the guitar he could hear no less insistent voices, other people’s voices and sometimes his own, voices creating other random patterns in his mind as his feet moved back and forth across the carpet, the voices and the rhythmic tread of his feet combining at times with the insidious water-trickle of the music,

It was great fun

But it was just one of those things…

and at other times overcoming it, erasing it briefly from the tape until with the cessation of the voices it could return…

It’s like going over the top of a hill. All of a sudden, there’s nothing to stop you…

He kept the pistol in the chest of drawers, under his shirts…

He’s hardly been to see me at all this past month…

When you’re that age, it’s quite easy to mistake the nature of a relationship. I suppose at any age, for that matter…

Now that I know him quite well, I’m sure he really was in love with her…

I always thought that Jenny was beautiful, too…

His own voice was one of the voices but sounding different, hollow, as though echoed from the dark water at the bottom of a deep, deep well, and other echoes seemed to be mingled with it, the distant murmur of a string quartet, the vibrating rumble of an approaching aircraft. While behind those background reverberations the voices kept on speaking.

She kept it hidden away…

But he lied about it, just the way he lied about everything else…

Something like characters in a drama. They don’t stay put. They move from place to place…

One voice, though, that he couldn’t hear clearly, couldn’t recall distinctly enough. A very important voice. It was lucky that he’d run off a copy of the tape. He went to the cassette-player and exchanged Oscar Petersen for Sammy Cantwell, the slow dark piano chords for the stumbling monotonous voice,
there was an unpleasantness, y’know?
… playing and rewinding the tape five or six times until the memory of that voice was part of the other memories and the voice part of those other voices that spoke together, interrupting one another confusedly:

… Something else had happened at bloody Corders…

… The clinic’s been broken into on three separate occasions lately…

… keys… keys… I have to know about the keys…

… because the keys, he thought, are the key to the case. The key to this room and the key to my flat and the key to the tune of the Cole Porter lyric. The black and white keys of the piano and the keys of Jane’s red-ribboned typewriter. And the flat blank door of the monitor screen, still waiting to be opened…

Four o’clock in the morning. Time to reopen the dialogue. Dobie flexed his fingers over the keyboard and tried again.

If at first you don’t succeed . . .

ACCEPT AGENT N Q TERMINATING SERIES

SEQUENCE F

CONFIRM AGENT N Q TERMINATING SERIES

SEQUENCE G

Can do, the computer decided. It sent

CONFIRMED

Dobie sent

CONFIRM AGENT N Q TERMINATING SEQUENCE H

The computer gave the matter some serious thought and then decided,

CONFIRMED

Dobie was beginning to feel tired. He ran the routine check on the programme’s logical structures and syntactical role and found both to be impeccably intact. So there it was. A three-way terminator took you way beyond the bounds of possible coincidence, though of course never quite. For anyone but a computer, though, you could call it a certainty. No longer an assumption. The same person each time. N had killed all three. Four o’clock in the morning, though, and the face was still hidden behind the thicket. It had moved no closer. Dobie moved the monitor arrow to the panel marked