Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (39 page)

But he was only four months old.

‘I don’t have tear ducts, you know that? Well of course you do.’ Amber shook her head. ‘Makes it worse. Maybe it makes me a worse person, too. Maybe if I could cry, I’d still have a partner and so would you.’

What?

Rekka tried to ask: ‘P-partner?’

‘Fucking Mary,’ said Amber. ‘Fucking Mary fucking fucking Simon, that’s the problem, isn’t it? And vice versa. Shit, I hate them.’

Rekka coughed as if punched.

‘I … Rekka?’ In the image, Amber reached up with one hand. ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

‘N-no.’

Mary. Simon and Mary.

‘Simon didn’t call you? Didn’t …? Oh, God, Rekka.’

Six thousand miles apart, linked only by technology, the two women bawled; and for the next twenty minutes, Rekka produced enough burning tears for them both.

He ought to kill Hansen, assuming he found her.

I want to. I really want to
.

Roger knew he could kill. Or perhaps he only
thought
he knew. Maybe he had the emotional toughness, or whatever you called it, but lacked the physical ability. After all, Helsen had got away with so much already. She had killed an entire world.

Rhianna was staring at him, her black Pilot eyes glittering.

‘Maybe I can’t,’ he told her.

‘What’s stopping you?’ she asked.

It was a classic question from neurorhetoric studies, and she must have known it would trigger the traditional counterpart:
What would it be like if you could?

‘Helsen can alter your thoughts,’ he said. ‘Make you see things that aren’t really there.’

‘
My
thoughts?’

‘Well, mine, I guess. But—’

‘How do you know? What evidence do you have?’

Her eyes were vast, deep-space obsidian.

‘The medics who failed to see her walk past them. The, the …’

In his mind he saw enthralled men in brownshirt uniforms staring at collective visions of helmed warriors wielding blood-axes and war-hammers, and a one-eyed poet casting armed men into confusion as they slew one of their own, a young man tied by leather ropes to a longhall’s entrance-post, crying out as tumbling axes chopped into his body, butchery ended only by the casting of a mercy-spear, releasing the poor man’s—

‘… deeper and deeper,’ came Rhianna’s voice, ‘into this relaxed and dreaming state, and my voice will go with you as you sink ever …’

—shade to be borne on dread
Naglfar
, Hel’s vast ship formed of corpses’ fingernails – such a multitude of the dead – to the realm of Niflheim, unless by chance the Death-Choosers of Óthinn had taken Jarl to train among the bravest of warriors, to prepare for the distant future when Ragnarök would be upon them—

‘… because your unconscious now can keep you safe as you find the trance inside the trance to go deeper than you ever have before your eyes can close again, that’s right …’

—and they would fight, the warriors of living crystal, those who led from the high command established on an airless moon, while in the night sky there shone the homeworld of humankind, banded now with crimson and silver, once thought to be the entirety of the Middle World – of the nine worlds, the only one to support living humanity – while it seemed now that baryonic matter was the true Midgarth, while the danger came from the realm of, of—

‘… all right, everything is fine, and you can relax your breathing because all is well and here, now, everything is safe as you are safe and let it go …’

—and she was there, the only woman he would ever love for true, long dead and not yet living, his Gavi, his most beautiful Gavi with the crystal smile that grew as he—

‘… rising up to become fully awake as I count five, four, three …’

—cried out as the visions twisted away, dispelling—

‘… two, one. Now.’

—as Roger blinked, shuddering into wakefulness.

There were tears on Rhianna’s face.

Afterwards, as they sipped daistral, Rhianna explained: ‘I was in a deeply altered state myself, in full sympathy with you. It’s the fastest way to get someone to relax far into trance.’

‘I didn’t figure you for the kind of person to cry easily,’ said Roger. ‘And I was a bit surprised. But why crying, exactly? Did I tell you something sad?’

His memories of trance had faded. He could feel them waiting, tucked around some corner in his mind, retrievable perhaps in time, not now.

‘That depends,’ she said, ‘on whether you were being metaphorical or literal. What you told me was far more … wide-ranging than I expected to hear.’

‘Er, do you want to explain that more clearly?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

‘But I will teach you how to induce trance in useful ways. You already know how to pitch words within sentences so they act as covert commands. So let’s add to that. Use your peripheral vision to watch my breathing. Do it now.’

Roger directed his gaze at her face, his attention on the tiny motions of her shoulders.

‘OK.’

‘Now synchronize your breathing with mine, and if your commands correspond to the deepest part of my exhalation, so much the better. Try it now.’

‘Er …’

‘Just feel confident in what you’re doing.’

‘All right,’ said Roger. ‘So relax the muscles around your eyes …’

That night, Roger dined alone in a small restaurant called The Single Helix. Rhianna was off being her public self … and for all he knew, conducting high-level espionage at the same time. It would have been nice to fly back to Barbour to spend time with – to make sensuous love to – his wonderful Leeja. But then there would be no excuse to return here to Deltaville, where Rhianna had effectively begun a crash course in being an intelligence officer, with an eclectic syllabus geared towards his needs, at least as she perceived them.

A woman of about his age was eating by herself at a table in front of him. She was not facing him directly, but at a shallow angle: she would be aware of him from peripheral vision. It seemed a good opportunity to practise the non-verbal aspects of the routine that Rhianna had taught him, so he synchronized his respiration with hers, and in various ways altered his body language, forming a resonance between them.

Her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her head tilted forward, chin down.

Oh, shit
.

Was this stuff really so powerful? Were the words not even necessary?

‘Great food,’ he called to a human waiter across the room. ‘It’s made me
come awake
. Fully alert.’

The woman jerked up, blinked twice, and continued to eat.

That’s just so cool
.

He grinned, leaned back in his chair, and wondered what other mischief he could get up to.

This was what Gavriela wrote in her diary:
Today I gave birth
.

It was a small collection of words for oceanic waves of pain, for eighteen century-like hours of waiting and effort, of things tearing inside her, her own core come to frightening, would-be-independent life and rearing to burst free, to rend its way into the world amid the stink of piss and blood, of amniotic fluid, shit and disinfectant. And then, the living form itself: shrunken, with blood-red monkey features, a tiny shock of black, spiky hair, the rubbery limbs, and the raucous wailing as the midwife said: ‘He’s a boy.’

In her arms then, the most beautiful creation in the universe, her son, and the pain inside her lost the edge of its fullness, beginning its backward ebb into the past, into the has-been. Into forgetfulness.

Today I gave birth
.

Dividing her life into two: before and after the Moment.

Over the coming days, neither Brian nor Rupert called on her, but they sent separate congratulatory notes – no sense of ownership or responsibility in Brian’s, no emotional intimacy in either – along with baskets of fruit and even chocolate: black-market goods that no one, in a maternity ward, would pay attention to.

She was in the Radcliffe Infirmary, and once released she would be living with Mrs Wilson, in her temporary digs from those first few nights in Oxford. The arrangements were Rupert’s doing, and would suffice – he had said in writing – until she returned to work.

‘What’s our handsome boy going to be called?’ asked one of the night nurses.

Gavriela, in the midst of suckling, looked up.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

Perhaps it was the aftermath of birth, of that massive effort, but she was finding it hard to be creative in her second language. All the names that occurred to her were German, therefore anathema.

‘I like Tyrone,’ called out an Irish nurse.

‘Or Clark,’ said the first nurse. ‘Like Clark Gable, you know?’

‘How about Winston?’ That was the Irish nurse again. ‘Or Eamon.’

After Churchill or de Valera, presumably.

‘Maybe.’ Gavriela smiled at them. ‘Maybe.’

When they finally released her from hospital, a friend of Mrs Wilson’s drove Gavriela and her blanket-wrapped treasure to the house, where Mrs Wilson fell in love with the baby on sight. It was a feeling that would only strengthen, for within days he was sleeping through the night and crying only when necessary, never for long.

‘If only my Peter had been like that,’ Mrs Wilson would say.

Her son, friend to Rupert during their schooldays, was serving in North Africa. Occasionally he would send a photograph of a camel or people in Bedouin dress, trying for lightheartedness, his letters unmarked by the censors because he steered away from military details.

‘Have you decided yet?’ Mrs Wilson would ask each morning at the end of breakfast.

‘Sorry.’ Gavriela would smile.

The question of the baby’s name was beginning to vex her visitors: two of the Radcliffe nurses, who sometimes popped in as they came off duty; once, Rosie, who came by train all the way from Bletchley; and a nervous young Balliol man called Stafford, who on his first visit brought a letter that served obliquely as an introduction, straightforwardly as an explanation of the books and papers he had lugged from college for Gavriela to read.

Perhaps you might like to keep your mind exercised. I know I would, in your circumstances
.

Best
,

AMT

For a codes-and-ciphers expert, it took a too-long second to realize it was from Turing.

‘He’s from the other place,’ said Stafford, ‘but we’ve met at conferences and so on, becoming … friends.’

The other place meaning Cambridge. Learning English had been one thing, but Oxford had a culture all of its own, one that intrigued Gavriela but did not entirely attract her.

‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘My brain seems to have melted. These will help me mend it.’

Stafford blushed, as though even this indirect mention of childbirth was unseemly.

‘Let’s look at what we’ve got,’ she added. ‘Does Alan realize I’m no mathematician?’

It was a logician’s treasure-trove: papers on symbolic logic, lambda calculus, abstract groups, and quantum mechanics; while among the books were the Russell and Whitehead
Principia
, commentaries of Gödel’s work, and Karl Popper’s
Logik der Forschung
. Only in Oxford could someone carry a German book without raising suspicion. Slightly less challenging were Russell’s
Why I Don’t Believe
, H.G. Wells’
A Short History of the World
, something by Dorothy Sayers, and a first edition of
The History of Mr Polly
, a Wells novel she had never read.

‘The Gödel material,’ said Stafford, ‘is not entirely irrelevant to Alan’s disposal of the deep
Entscheidungsproblem
.’

Gavriela felt a wide grin spread across her face.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Whatever for?’

‘For assuming I have a brain capable of more than baby talk.’

Stafford blushed again.

‘One takes it for granted,’ he said.

His
Entscheidungsproblem
remark pointed out the relationship between Gödel’s proof that some truths cannot be proven and Turing’s proof that the computability of some problems cannot be decided in advance of working the problem through. Neither those proofs nor any of the material here was classified, but no matter. This was challenging enough: her brain could cope with more than baby talk, but not much more, not yet.

With a grin, Stafford added: ‘In the other place, they still don’t allow women to graduate, did you know that?’

‘I presume they consider themselves the last bastion of civilization.’

‘Last bastion of a broken empire,’ he said, ‘along with ourselves. And that’s assuming we survive the war. An empire that fails to defend itself
without assistance
is doomed. Continuing to groom young men to rule such an empire is going to become, well, irrelevant.’