‘Yes,’ Chase Pakhet says. ‘But I pinched him as hard as I could on the inner thigh and paid for it while he was screaming. I can’t blame him – I should think it was extraordinarily painful. I had quite long nails at the time.’ She shrugs. ‘More prosaically: in the first instance your interrogation narratives comprise a story about lies and truth. Someone is always lying. Someone is always telling the truth. Sometimes these things are being done at the same time by the same person. Fraud becomes reality. There are cuckoos everywhere, laying eggs in other people’s nests. I take it your subject was not enamoured of the interview process?’
‘No.’
‘No, she wouldn’t have been. Ornery old cow, that much seems obvious.’ This, from Chase Pakhet, implies an immensity of stubbornness that is daunting to contemplate even now. Neith sternly reminds herself to focus on the old woman. The one in front of her.
Pakhet goes on. ‘Fire and alchemy. The transformation of one thing into another. Nothing is only itself, or conversely everything is one thing. Death is transformation, and we see death in many forms, bringing change. Judgement. Hints of Faust, but we are offered Orpheus and his catabasis. The flow of life is broken and everything is held in stasis until it can be resumed. Honey means eternity, but bees were said to spring from the carcasses of the dead. Simulation claiming authenticity over other simulations.’
‘And over reality.’
‘Yes. Always assuming there is such a thing. Perhaps it’s turtles all the way down, and the bottom turtle rests on the back of the top one.’
The Inspector waves away this invitation to engage in existential doubt. ‘Not everything is circular.’
‘No,’ Pakhet agrees. ‘The Chamber of Isis is a single solid point. Archimedes’ fulcrum: the place where things can actually be real – or perhaps where the primacy of realities is assigned. Athenais can raise her son from the dead. The vase can be unbroken, the world made whole. The Alkahest is the solution to everything, the Holy Grail: a Universal Solvent that will heal all wrongs and empower the merest mortal to judge gods and bind monsters to her will. A new beginning is promised in the conjunction of things. The Chamber of Isis is not so much a place as it is a circumstance. A perilous one, as the chapel of the Grail always is. There must be sacrifice.’
‘Symbolically speaking.’ Kyriakos’s words, emerging as if unbidden from the Inspector’s mouth.
‘Why must everyone say that? Yes, symbolically speaking. I always used to get furious with the nuns at school when they said that modern theology understood the Creation took more than seven days, that it was all symbolic. Why? Why should it? Perhaps billions of years of astrophysical and biochemical evolution is what seven days of God’s work looks like from inside. Or if you prefer: there’s a very real chance the basic unit of our universe is information. Meaning is as fundamental as matter.’
The thunderous professorial frown obscures Pakhet’s eyes under beetle brows. Neith does not quail, but asks her next question as if working from a list, almost as if she is becoming bored. She lets her lack of affect stand as a tacit reminder that she is not an undergraduate.
‘How would you have handled it? In the room?’
Chase Pakhet twitches. Was the subtextual rebuke a resounding shout to her? Or is she just unused to contradiction, even unvoiced? She nods acknowledgement, then pauses again to consider the question – a momentous acknowledgement of complexity in itself.
‘I’d have said: okay. If that’s what you want to do, that’s what we’ll do. This is a narrative blockade. It’s been tried before, at a much lower level of sophistication. You tell stories to yourself until they become almost as real as your life, and you try to knit them into your memory so that the machines can’t tell the difference. It doesn’t work. This is clever, in that way: there’s no attempt to match reality, just a wall of dreams. We know it isn’t real, because the subject is demonstrably not a two-thousand-year-old alchemist, say – well, I suppose she isn’t – but that doesn’t help us. So I’d go with it. Let the story run out. When it’s done, it’s done, and we’re back with the real person.’
‘They did that.’
‘And it didn’t work, because the story just rolled on and on. Yes.’
‘You expected that?’
‘I suppose. If I was doing this, I’d anticipate that and I’d manage things so that the act of looking would trigger the creation of more narrative. The observer’s scrutiny is the inception point, so as long as the interrogation continues, the story does too. A kind of feedback loop producing a functional infinity: wherever you look, there’s more. Practice would do it, like learning to know you’re dreaming. The really clever part is that over time the interrogation would reinforce the neuroplastic architecture rather than breaking it down. Exhausting, though.’
Yes.
‘Yes.’
‘So I’d … what would I do then, if I was running the interview and it wasn’t working? I’d try to make the individual storylines untenable. I’d nudge to make them painful, or sad or frightening. I’d make them more – I don’t know: crowded.’
‘Crowded?’
‘It’s not quite what I mean. I’d raise the level of coincidence. You’d keep bumping into the same people until it was just absurd. The goal is to collapse the narratives all back to the origin, the real person. The flaw in her construction is the one that has to be there – they all must ultimately revolve around a single point, which is her. Can’t escape your own head. The conjunction, the Chamber, the Alkahest … is the solution. She’s telling us how to win and then making it almost impossible to act on the information. Perhaps if the narratives become implausible in their own terms, that gets harder to resist – which is why they are all on some level fantastical. Magical thinking allows her an elasticity which neo-realism would not. In the end, the conjunction only occurs if she wants it to or if she can’t stand the alternative. Do you get any sense of her at all?’
‘She’s leaking. She should be unconscious, but she’s there.’
‘Yes, she will be. She’s holding an umbrella open in a storm. And that’s my next step, if I’m the interviewer. I’d put something in with her. A new narrative that would draw the others back together. Done right, she wouldn’t even know it was there, she’d think it was her own. Especially under stress, the mind would adopt it. If she’s good she’ll instinctively weave a new thread into what she’s already doing without even recognising that it’s a threat. She’s torn herself apart: she wants to come back together! And composition is collision, synthetic as much as original. Authors are accretors. So you’d have to prod it along, keep it yours. Hope to get inside her design and appropriate it before your design is itself appropriated.’
‘A cuckoo.’
‘Yes. A counter-narrative. It might already be in there.’
‘So if someone did do that …’
‘Then if they were any good, you can’t be entirely sure which threads are hers and which belongs to the interrogation team. No. If you were able to be sure, so could she.’
‘But she might suspect.’
‘Yes. Images of subversion.’
There was a Trojan horse in Hunter’s own mind, and despite everything, she knew, oh yes. The Inspector breathes deeply, pushes down into her diaphragm: vagus nerve reset. Nausea subsides.
‘Yes,’ Pakhet says. ‘If she could get to this point, she would anticipate the possibility. She might have designed a place for it in the hope of countering it. The more easily the mind accepts the additional thread, the more quickly it will belong to her.’
And the more quickly Hunter’s overtaxed mind would fragment. The less time she would have before she died. Was cognitive exhaustion an arithmetical progression? A geometric one? How many hours of life would one additional narrative have cost her?
‘Why did she do this?’
‘You’re asking me?’
‘I’m asking if there’s anything in the signs.’
‘Hah. You’d make me a harus
pex after all, reading her guts.’
Both of us.
Neith does not respond out loud. She just waits. Pakhet closes her eyes, touches her fingers together as if feeling for answers in the whorls of her own skin.
‘It is an obfuscation, a shell game. A rigged one on both sides. Whichever shell the interviewer chooses is the wrong one, but he can make her play over and over again until she slips up. She accepts that. In fact, she wants to be known.’
‘Why?’
‘You mean what makes me say so? Because she’s leaving you clues. If all she wanted to do was block the interview, and she was prepared to die, these narratives could be so much salad. They need not be deep or profound. They could be junk mail. Advertisements for foot powder. The endless duckshit, yes? But they’re rich. At the very least, she wants to advertise the enormity of the act of vandalism that is trespass in her head. “Look,” she says, “here is a palace of reason that you have made into rubble.” Mm?’
‘Yes.’
‘So: clues, and there are two ways in which she might be revealed. In one she succumbs to her interrogators and she loses. She gives up everything she knows. In the other, the pieces fall together to convey a message. We must assume it is concealed in the narratives. You do not really see the painter or the banker, you see aspects of the woman herself. They are not only camouflage, they are information. The human eye – the human mind – sees relationships, not objects. A lizard on a branch is a leaf until it moves. We are things that see volitional patterns like ourselves. We see them even when they are not there, in clouds and in bathwater. When the pieces are correctly aligned – in the conjunction, yes? – all will be revealed.’
‘The Chamber of Isis?’
‘Yes. Symbolically. Or actually.’
‘What can she possibly hope to achieve?’ It comes out laced with agony, and Pakhet’s eyes open wide.
‘Oh!’ she breathes, almost gentle. ‘This, of course. This is part of it. You would not be human if you did not sympathise. She has created these stories to be sympathetic. You and she want the same thing, if in different ways. You want to know her secrets, she wants you to know them – the only difference in your perspectives is that she does not want you to know her as text, she needs you to see through her eyes. “At the last,” she tells you, “you must become like me in order to solve me.”’
‘She’s wrong.’
Pakhet purses her lips like a doctor who has just delivered the diagnosis and is now seeing a familiar reaction. ‘Classically, in a Grail quest, you must believe that because your journey is incomplete.’
‘I’m on a journey?’
‘The river of life is stopped. Only an Alkahest can set it right – an absolute solution drunk from the healing cup. She must anoint a knight who will retrieve the cup and renew the land.’
‘I thought she was the knight. She’s the one entering the underworld.’
Pakhet shifts her head again, this way, that way. ‘There can be many knights. Or many knights at different times. Imagine a game of musical chairs: each chair has a hat on it. When you sit in the chair, you wear the hat. You are the hierophant or the pilgrim. You are the judge or the hanged man. You are the sacrifice or the god. It all depends—’
‘On where you’re standing at the conjunction.’ Neith resists the urge to scream. ‘Catabasis first, the journey through the underworld. The interrogation.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then apocatastasis, the new beginning. Sacrifice and rebirth.’
‘That bit is a palindrome. The flow of time in either direction produces the same expression of events.’
‘So where are we in the pattern?’
Pakhet’s arms embrace the room. The world. She does not speak, and eventually Neith sighs. ‘I take it that depends on where we are in the pattern.’
‘Where you are; her catabasis is not necessarily yours. Perhaps that is the point of your investigation: it unites you with her and inducts you into the mysteries. You are a Grail Knight, a shield of the weak on a holy mission to heal the wounded land. You must ask the healing questions. And this is the trouble with being that person: you’re caught in the narrative. You come to me for resolution, but all I do is give you fresh and larger tasks.’
‘I don’t even have a shield,’ Neith objects.
‘Really,’ Pakhet says. ‘You don’t, eh? Well then. Take out what is in your pockets and lay it all on the table.’
And of course, when she does, there’s her Witness badge, gleaming in the half light: Aegis, surmounted by an eye.
‘Good enough for me,’ Chase Pakhet says.
Seeing Neith’s dismay, she laughs.
*
Outside it’s a winter afternoon, and everything is blinding or black with no middle ground. The Inspector boards a bus and sits in the front seats at the top, watching the city go by. Sometimes this brings her answers, or free associations that take her in new and profitable directions of inquiry. Today she just watches London and thinks of nothing, and that is almost as good.
Except, at the end of the ride, she finds herself staring at the single black hemisphere of the bus camera, and knowing it’s watching her.
*
The Inspector does not remember, opening her door, the business of returning home. So often in life it is that which we do all the time that simply slips away from us between instants. She makes coffee and stretches, feeling the improvement in her hurts, then sits in silence for a while in front of the crime wall, letting the slow shifting of facts and suppositions roll in front of her like a sea. Then she stands.
She demands, and instantly receives, a full curriculum vitae of Oliver Smith and a proper introduction to the role and governance of the Turnpike Trust. As soon as she starts to review the documents, she realises that they are enormous and rejects them, requiring the Witness to present her with a working precis. Smith has all the best qualifications, which she doesn’t care about, and all the usual connections, habits, personal life and quirks, which she also doesn’t care about. He has been working in his current position for an average number of years, has been promoted rapidly (she tells the Witness to establish by whom and for what, and prepare a summary) and is seen as the coming man. The Turnpike Trust is one of those deceptively boring backwaters of government where power begins as the consequence of a willingness to take on jobs that are necessary but unglamorous, and thereafter accumulates because they’re already doing so much and doing it tolerably well. It is not technically part of the state, but is a chartered and contracted non-governmental actor, CCNGAs having replaced the infamous QUANGOs and PPPs of long ago and far away. In fact, the Trust is not new but very old, having been formed to provide highway infrastructure before the Victorian era and never entirely gone away. Like the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers, who took to their bosom the engineers of jet engines, they have adapted and evolved from upstart to powerhouse and now are infrastructure, no more noticed and no less vital to the apparatus of administration than electricity, or indeed than the fibre-optic cable they maintain.
Neith puts that aside, and asks one more question. The answer is interesting.
Oliver Smith has never used the kinesic assistant in a personal setting.
The Inspector allows that this does not mean he did not use it that way with her. Her instinct, however, tells her it was otherwise.
He had something he wished to conceal, and that something relates directly to the Hunter case.
She pores over his life, drinking more coffee. At some point, the crime wall now projected on the wall opposite her bed, she is forced to acknowledge that even the most fraught investigative day must eventually come to an end. And if her dreams are Diana Hunter’s, well: surely a change is as good as a rest.
Only when she stands at the gates of sleep does it occurs to her that Oliver Smith is an even bigger liar than she realised.
Plant your pole. The same voice, richly persuasive, loving its own sound. Or do we not do that any more, with the pa
rabolic skis?
She stares up at the ceiling in the darkened room.
Bloody hell. It was him, interrogating Hunter. It was him.
i’ll give you a counter-narrative
THE UNIVERSE HAS cancer.
It has one tiny, appallingly deadly tumour which cannot be excised. In the future, the tumour will expand and it will eat into the universe until there is nothing left, and then the cancer will be the universe, but we won’t be in it. We’ll be dead, and in fact we’ll never have existed at all, because the cancer will have swallowed time and unravelled it and nothing which has ever happened in this universe will exist anymore, not even as history.
There’s a certain justice in that, because it’s what our universe did in order to come into existence in the first place: it devoured what was here before, although you can’t really say that because whatever was here before never existed and there was no such place as ‘here’.
You see this cannibalistic behaviour up and down the cosmic scale, with stars and microbes and so on all eating their parents. There’s a kind of spider which does basically the same thing. It’s a perfectly ordinary event in the life cycle of a universe, but obviously it’s unpleasant if it happens to be your universe that is being erased, and I don’t really care if the next universe is going to be a kind of heaven where everyone is happy and there’s no pain and no wickedness. I don’t care if the next universe is the perfect one and this one is warped and disgusting, if other universes in their selfish little bubbles of reality give it a wide berth because it mutters to itself and smells. I don’t care if the universe I was born in is the leper universe and the next one is the Christ. Fuck the next universe. Just fuck it. I don’t like it and I’m going to kill it.
I am going to kill it, and I am going to hollow it out and we are all going to live inside its corpse like a hermit crab in a shell, and I’m going to do the same to the one after that, and the one after that, and so on for ever and ever, and that makes me some sort of monster but I don’t care.
I am Gnomon, occasionally called the Eschatogenesist, or sometimes the Desperation Protocol. Come with me if you want to live.