Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (38 page)

 
          
They
waited.

 
          
‘Thess?’

 
          
‘What?’

 
          
‘I
once heard it said that the whole universe exists only as a thought in the mind
of a god. It’s a pattern like a
holographos
- real to us, imaginary to the god. People who become aware of this can work
what seem to be miracles.’

 
          
‘Like
Gupta becoming invisible?’

 
          
‘Something
like that, but what I’m thinking is . . . has it ever crossed your mind that
maybe the whole of Babylon, us included, exists only as a pattern in the mind
of some piece of
tekhne
at the
Akademia of the Future? How could we tell if that was so? When we possessed the
little scroll - when you called it a control scroll - I thought for a while
that maybe it was part of what controls our reality. I thought it was a part
which somehow had materialized inside Babylon - the way a god might reach into
the world he imagines, and insert a miraculous object. I thought that maybe
Babylon is a
holographos
visible to
all the Akademics; and right now maybe they’re stepping right through our
ghosts, observing how we steal the gold!

 
          
‘And
maybe only an invisible man or woman can spy them watching us. Only someone who
is full of clarity and detachment. Only someone who can trick the eye and
mind.’

 
          
Thessany
knit her brows. ‘That . . . sounds like a most delicious kind of intrigue. But
Alex, what’s this Akademia of the Future you’re talking about? Is this some
secret society Gupta has told you of?’

 
          
‘The
Akademia at Heuristics, Thess.’

           
‘At where?’

           
‘I know it’s against the law to
mention it! Surely we two can talk about it privately?’

 
          
‘If
I only knew what we were supposed to be talking about! I’ve never heard of a
place called Heuristics; or of this Akademia!’

 
          
‘But
Thess . . . ! Look, you came to
Babylon
with your dad - what is it, five, six years
ago? Where do you think you came from?’

 
          
‘I.
. . yes, we did come from elsewhere. From another country, I forget which one.
How remote it seems.’ ‘You came from
America
.’

           
‘I’ve never heard of such a place.’

 
          
Alex
shivered despite the heat. ‘Thess . . . something has altered. Something in you;
something in the city. Something has been changed.’

 
          
‘Of
course I’ve changed. I’m pregnant.’

 
          
‘I
don’t mean . . . ! Answer me this: where did the piece of
tekhne
in the temple come from? And the one in your chapel at
home?’

 
          
‘Some
Greek scientist crafted those. Aristotle ... or was it Archimedes? Maybe it was
Archimedes. With a name like Archimedes his ancestors must have been princes of
the Medes, and magi. No, I think it must have been Aristotle, the king’s
tutor.’

 
          
Alex
gripped her hand. ‘Thess! Think of Greeks: thousands of Greeks arriving as
visitors! How do they get here? They come in a
tekhne
carriage that floats on air. The carriage comes from
Heuristics.’

 
          
She
laughed lightly. ‘I think the strain of our current exploit is telling on you.
Lots of Macedonians and other Greeks came with Alexander’s armies and settled
here in the city. But not recently.’

           
‘They arrive at the Ishtar Gate
every day in that hovering carriage.’

 
          
‘You
have my leave to go and stand at the Ishtar Gate for a week to try to spy this
strange device. You won’t ever see it. There’s no such thing. People come to
Babylon
in coracles, with donkeys. Or on foot, or
on horseback.’

 
          
‘Are
you being honest with me, Thess? You aren’t teasing?’

 
          
Again,
she laughed. ‘
You're
teasing me.’ A
puzzled frown crossed her face. ‘I seem to remember . . . some kind of dream I
had. Something like this fancy of yours. No, it eludes me. Dreams always do.
They don’t mean much.’

 
          
Something
had indeed shifted in the pattern of the city and its people, but it hadn’t
shifted in Alex ... He remembered how he had once suspected his own sanity. Had
he once, in fact, been mad? A visionary who dreamed of the distant future?

 
          
No.
He struggled now to recall the
tekhne
of that future. If Thessany wasn’t japing him - and she certainly didn’t appear
to be - then surely what had occurred was that sometime during the past
half-year the pattern of the city had reached completion. Before, fresh
information, fresh personae were still being input into the system. Personae
had to be interfaced compatibly. Each carried a kind of key to open the locked
city and fit into it. The city pattern had to be able to accept the influx. Now
Babylonia
was full up. The keys - logical connections
to what went before - had been deleted.

 
          
Not
from Alex, though. He still knew. He still remembered.

 
          
Why
not from Alex? Was he a sort of cursor, a mobile marker threading the web of
Babylonian life? Maybe he had merely been overlooked.

           
Had others been overlooked? How
about Gupta, the invisible man?

 
          
Or
was the explanation simply that the city had by now accumulated more than a
half a decade's worth of events?
Babylon
’s processing capacity had begun to
overload? Unnecessary memories had been dumped; or stored?

 
          
But
not his.

 
          
In
Thessany’s womb a foetus was thinking foetal thoughts, hearing mysterious
sounds of unknown speech vibrate through the drumskin of her belly. Child
within mother: one dawning new consciousness, taking up extra space in the
pattern of
Babylon
. . . Therefore the mother had lost part of
her memory? Could that be why Thessany had forgotten
America
except as a faded, irretrievable dream?

 
          
Perhaps
all these explanations were true, and together summed up to the change which
had occurred.

 
          
Could
his love, who carried his child, be persuaded to remember what she now, to his
horror, denied?

 
          
‘Here
I am!’ Gupta, in his dingy cobwebs, hauled himself aboard, laden with more
ingots.

 
          
The
gold seemed stupid: fool’s gold. The real gold wasn’t any function of this feat
of invisibility which Gupta had just pulled off, this hidden act of stealth.
The really golden prize would be
to see
what was invisible.
To behold what had vanished. To spy the secret
onlookers.

 
          
Maybe
there were no invisible onlookers strolling amidst the Babylonian ghosts,
admiring, amused, intrigued by their antics. In that case the golden prize
would be to perceive the
tekhne
-mind
which was the true god-creator of
Babylon
: the mind which contained analogues of
human beings whose originals lived out their lives elsewhere in places such as
Oregon
and
New York
and
Calcutta
.

 
          
‘All’s
done that can be. Let’s collect your father.’

 
          
Thessany
flicked the reins. ‘Gid-up!’

 
          
‘Gupta?’

 
          
‘What
is it, Alex?’

 
          
‘I’m
troubled.’

 
          
‘I
need to relax. Tell me later.’ And Gupta commenced a breathing exercise.

 
          
In
the disposition of the gold Alex played no part. It was another seven days
before he could get a chance to talk to Gupta alone, at the end of the Indian’s
weekly visit to train Thessany in subtle arts - a week during which worries
about Muzi almost succeeded in distracting Alex.

 
          
Muzi
had noted with the keenest interest the mysterious excursion undertaken by the
four on the day directly after he had both saved, and challenged, Alex. Yet he
pressed no questions upon Alex, nor in Alex’s hearing did he press any upon
Thessany, or upon his father. (Lord Gibil now radiated contentment, with the
merest thread of anxiety attached.) However, Muzi watched like a hawk and
harked like a hare.

 
          
Alex
had decided not to tell Thessany what Muzi had said to him, particularly since
what he had told her while they were waiting in the carriage had struck her as
so fantastical. In the house he avoided meeting her eyes and tried to be
inconspicuous, cultivating his own version of invisibility, even though such
behaviour was susceptible to a number of false interpretations.

 
          
One
such misinterpretation, on Thessany’s part, might be that he was virtually
quarrelling with her; that his words to her in the carriage had been wayward,
sick inventions, pretexts to distress both himself and her, thus to stretch and
even sever the emotional tie between them for reasons perhaps not unconnected
with her coming labour. In which case in a sense he was deserting her,
withdrawing moral support at a time when she would need it; for remarks which
he heard exchanged between Thessany and her father-inlaw indicated that Dr
Cassander still loomed in the wings, along with the threat to cut Thessany’s
baby out of her belly when the time came. Thessany appeared to be doing her
best to combat this threat by reminding Lord Gibil, via allusions to
Hephaestion’s funeral, that she had some sway over him; that she held a lever
in her hand. However, Lord Gibil - complacent with success - showed signs of
fending off this lever, and resisting this sway, in the matter of the family
heir at any rate.

 
          
A
possible misinterpretation on Muzi’s part might be to suppose that Alex either
misconceivedly considered himself warned off by a jealous husband, or else was
deliberately disobeying Muzi’s overt message: to keep Thessany content. Thus to
save his own neck; and his cock.

 
          
Fortunately,
though Thessany was distracted by the prospect of Dr Cassander’s interference,
she also appeared to note Muzi’s new watchful mood and to try to parry this
nonchalantly. Perhaps she suspected Muzi of brooding equally about the supposed
need for surgery, but in a proprietorial, gung-ho fashion.

 
          
A
week after the robbery, Alex lurked along the lane with his water-barrow.

 
          
Gupta
came out of the gate. A few dozen strides brought him to where Alex waited.
‘Ah, my troubled friend! Have you overcome your moral anxieties now that there
is no aftermath?’

 
          
‘That
isn’t why I was troubled.’

           
‘Anxieties about Thessany, then? I
think my exercises may help her in childbirth.’

 
          
‘Meaning
that she’ll be able to vanish and give birth somewhere far from doctors’
knives? Are you a midwife too?’

 
          
‘Be
careful what you say. Who knows but Irra might be skulking on the other side of
this wall?’

 
          
‘Or
Nettychin.’

 
          
‘No
need to worry about Nettychin.’