‘She said this world had become a place in which the unspeakable was allowed to happen while everybody looked the other way. She said that her world wasn’t the same as mine: I lived in a world in which it had happened to them and she lived in a world in which it had happened to us.
‘There wasn’t much I could say when she got like that. I said to her, “Still, we’ve got each other.” She said yes but not as if it mattered a whole lot. She was never a very happy woman and August was always a bad month for her. You know about her suicide attempt?’
‘Yes, that was in the newsfax at the time – I’ve seen it at the library.’
‘I oughtn’t to have left her alone but she was hell to live with around then and sometimes I just had to get out of the house for a while. On the night of the twentieth I came back from a walk and found her drowning in her own vomit; she’d swallowed most of a bottle of Nepenthol and half a bottle of gin. Her note said: “MAYBE NO WORLD IS BEST.”’
‘She was a lot of laughs, my mum. It was wonderful doing my pre-natal time with her.’
‘I turned her over and got her to heave up most of it and when the paramedics arrived they pumped out her stomach right away so we got her through that one alive but of course she succeeded the next time.
‘She spent a couple of days at the SNG Rest and Reassessment Centre and had a little therapy and some tranquillisers and when she came home she was the cheerfullest I’d ever seen her. So we got back to work.
‘Our cover project was sensory remotes and we always had experimental prototypes and a lot of paper for the Review Board to look at. That June the Sheela-Na-Gig had appointed a tough Top Exec named Irene Heale Head of Project Review.’
‘I just met her today, she’s head of R & D now.’
‘That’s right – sweet-looking lady, isn’t she. “Iron” Heale, everybody called her back then. She and Helen had been at Elite Poly together and they’d both been working on brain mapping. Helen was Number One in her year; Heale was Number Two and it bothered her a lot. She wanted to team up with Helen on a joint project but Helen preferred to work alone and she won the Rousseau prize that year. Heale claimed that Helen had stolen some of her research and Helen denied it. There was a tribunal and the adjudicators cleared Helen.
‘Heale never forgave her for winning that prize. As soon as she was appointed Head of Project Review she went through Helen’s file, saw some references to Elijah, got curious, and came over to investigate. Heale got a lot of pleasure out of that -you could almost see her flicking her boot with a riding crop while she interrogated Helen.
‘Helen told her those Elijah ideas had never gone anywhere and Heale told her to try again and to keep in touch. Helen said she’d see what she could do. “Jewish brains they can always use,” she said to me later. “One of these days they’ll find a way to separate the Jew brains from the Jew bodies and that’ll be The Final Solution.”
‘“What will they do with the brains?” I said.
‘“They’ll transplant them into the top goyim,” she said, “which of course will make them think Jewish. So maybe the whole thing’s a Jewish plot.”’ Sixe shook his head.
‘From then on,’ he continued, ‘we worked on Elijah day and night. But we kept double books – the blackboards and diagrams anybody would see on a surprise visit weren’t the real thing. The idea was to make the jump before they knew where we were with it.’
‘The two of you were going to do it.’
‘That’s right; she couldn’t find anyone better so I was invited.’
‘But you talk about making the jump the way bank robbers in films talk about getting away to Rio. Were you expecting a completely different world where all of your troubles would be left behind or what?’
‘It’s hard to tell you how it was without sounding stupid and maybe we were stupid. And maybe your mother was crazy but it was a world-class craziness if you know what I mean – she could have told me the moon was made of green cheese and I’d have believed her because somehow she’d have made it seem believable. And what happens when you get caught up in an idea like that – it expands to take in everything, it becomes the answer to all your problems even though you know better.’
‘How close were you to doing it?’
‘Pretty close. The preliminary calculations were easy enough. The hard part came after we got the WPR figures from Lossiter. It took quite a long time and a lot of models to work out the phase-scaling fractal and sync it up: if Being is B and Non-Phase is NP, then all we had to do was make B/NP jump WPR which isn’t any harder than jumping over yourself but as far as we knew it hadn’t ever been done and it took us a while to figure it out. We were going to use oscillator implants similar to the ones for flicker drive. The difficulty was in scaling the input for the phase jump and of course there was the matter of the implants. Helen had authority to call in medical personnel but once she used it they’d be on to us. We were under surveillance but through the old family network she was able to find a neurosurgeon who said she’d do it whenever we had the oscillators ready.’
‘Let me get this straight – you were going to use the oscillators with a VMET?’
‘That’s right, but instead of transmitting ourselves to a distant point we were going to collapse our wave function into another world.’
‘Your wave function? Wasn’t all the rest of the world included in that same wave function?’
‘That’s what I said to Helen and she said the rest of the world would have to take its chance. She used to sit there at her computer working up equations and diagrams and singing under her breath while she played Bach’s Art of Fugue over and over on the audio beam. The words she sang were always the same: “I will tell you what I will do …” Just those words over and over again to that Bach tune that kept repeating itself. It was spooky.’
‘I can’t place the words.’
‘Isaiah, Chapter Five, Verse Five:
And now come, I will tell you
What I will do with my vineyard:
I will take away the hedge thereof,
And it shall be eaten up;
I will break down the fence thereof,
And it shall be trodden down;…
‘Verse Six begins:
And I will lay it waste …’
‘That must have been a little worrying.’
‘It was, and when she wasn’t doing her Art of Fugue thing she’d be playing a recording of Mendelsohn’s Elijah which isn’t exactly a knees-up either. She said to me, “Listen to how Elijah out of nowhere jumps in and says how it’s going to be.” The recording was in German and she translated the opening words for me, First Kings, Seventeen, One:
As truly as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives,
before whom I stand, there shall these years
neither dew nor rain come unless I say so.
‘I said to her, “What is it with you and this no-rain business? Has there been a long drought in your life lately?”
‘She ignored that. Sometimes she talked about sex in a very common way and other times she acted as if she had nothing between her legs but four thousand years of history. She said, “You’ll notice that he says ‘before whom I stand’. He’s letting Ahab know straightaway where he stands with his Baal rubbish. Ahab is a Jew too and he knows Elijah has him by the balls, he knows he’s in big trouble.’
‘I said, “The chorus sound like Gentiles.”
‘She said, “Choruses always sound like Gentiles; what I’m saying is that the spirit of Elijah possessed the spirit of Mendelssohn when he was putting down the notes on paper. And it’s possessing me as I do my equations.’
‘I said, “OK, any possessor of yours is a possessor of mine.”
‘“Not unless you get circumcised,” she said. She was high on Elijah. I think one of the reasons she liked me was that I was hairy like him.
‘By the middle of September 2022 we had a computer model that worked and Helen wanted to wire the oscillators and get them implan
ted and have a go. I wanted to run the model against a list of “What if?” parameters which would have taken a few more days to evaluate. She said why not a test run. With what? I wanted to know. She said, “I don’t really care a rat’s arse, so why not a rat?”
‘I still wasn’t altogether happy with the numbers and I didn’t feel too comfortable with the whole thing. I said, “Let’s wait a little – at least until we’ve run all the what ifs. Even if we do it with a flea we could change the whole universe.”
‘“Big deal,” she said. “Who’s going to notice a rat-sized change?”’
‘I said, “How can we know it’ll only be a rat-sized change? Mightn’t the rat take everything else with it?” But she was the one who made the decisions, I was only a kind of kept man, never her equal. So we did it with a rat.’
‘Do you think she was crazy? Really crazy, I mean.’
‘What does crazy mean? Crazy is anything different from what the majority think isn’t crazy. Your mother was never with the majority.
‘We always had lab rats around and we had a small VMET we used for parcels. I limited the field to the rat’s cage and checked the shielding to make sure the rest of the room was safe from flare. I did an EEG to get the frequency of the rat’s carrier wave, then I scaled down the phase input figures to that output and printed up an oscillator.
‘It was a male rat, a Delta Three laboratory strain. I anaesthetised him and shaved his head. Helen drilled a hole in his skull and implanted the oscillator which was smaller than the head of a pin. While she was doing that I ran the phase input figures again to be sure they checked out. They did. The first part of the procedure was the same as flicker drive: switching on the VMET would activate the oscillator and phase the rat to M-waves. Then a second signal from a hand transmitter would jump the rat to a parallel phase and presumably another world.
‘The rat was just lying there while we waited for it to come out of the anaesthetic. I checked the phase input figures again and the calibration of the hand transmitter and I set up a videocamera. When the rat was fully conscious and moving around I pushed the button on the newsfax and the 19:45 update slid out. The headline was CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. I laid it on the table beside the cage where the camera could see it.
‘Helen put on a recording of Chopin mazurkas. It was the sixteenth of September 2022, the end of the day. The light in the window was a sad kind of purple-blue. I started the video-camera at 19:48 BST.
‘I tuned the VMET to the WPR and at 19:50 I switched on. The oscilloscope showed in-phase as the rat disappeared. I jumped phase and switched off. I had that funny dropping sensation you get sometimes when you’re drifting off to sleep. I looked at Helen and she looked a little shaken. “You too?” I said, and she nodded. A terrible sadness took hold of me and I began to cry.’
You began to cry! I thought. You and your terrible sadness. For all we know you jumped us into a different world from what we had before. You jumped unborn me and everybody else into this world we’re stuck with now.
‘I remembered my mother giving me hot milk with butter and honey in it when I had a sore throat,’ Sixe continued. ‘I remember my father reading me “The Story of Kwashin Koji”, how a boat comes out of a picture and takes Kwashin Koji back into the picture and away.
‘We looked at the rat and it was only half a rat, the rear half. “Oh shit,” Helen said, “not again.” Then she went into the lav and was sick. I just stood there like an idiot looking at what was left of the rat. The front of the half-body was all scrunched up against the back of the cage – it was pretty messy and there was a lot of blood, it was as if someone had taken a cleaver and chopped the rat in half, severed arteries and split entrails and all that. The rat was backing up when he got the chop: his hind feet were dug in so hard he’d torn through the card he was standing on.
‘When Helen came out of the lav I said to her, “What did you mean when you said, ‘Not again’? Has this happened before?”
‘She said, “Not with a rat.”
‘“With what then?” I said. She didn’t answer. “Tell me, Helen,” I said. “With what?”
‘“You mean with whom,” she said.
‘I said, “Oh my God. What are you saying?”
‘“It happened with my brother,” she said.
‘“What?” I said. “What happened?”
‘“He did it in the middle of the night when I was asleep,” she said. “It was a Wednesday, the thirteenth of April. He’d set a timer to switch on the VMET and he’d got up on the table and arranged himself in the field. Then his head went somewhere but the rest of him stayed behind.”
‘“Where did it go?” I said.
‘“Who knows?” she said. “We lost touch.”
‘“Why did he do it?” I said.
‘“Hard to say,” she said. “He didn’t leave a note.”
‘“Did he do it with a phase jump, the same as we did with the rat?” I said. “Did he have the same kind of oscillator implant?”
‘“The one we used for the rat was wired from Izzy’s diagram,” she said.
‘“Well, if it didn’t work for Izzy,” I said, “why’d you do the same circuitry again?”
‘“It should have worked,” she said. “I checked it every possible way – the only explanation is that Izzy and the rat changed their minds and overrode the phase jump. Izzy certainly started out willing; he planned the whole thing very carefully. He’d been complaining of headaches and dizzy spells and he’d been to hospital for what he said were a couple of days of tests. He wouldn’t let me go with him – we had a regular driver who helped him into and out of buildings – and that’s when he must have had the implant done.”
‘“And you think he changed his mind at the last moment?” I said.
‘“Yes,” she said, “it’s the only explanation.”
‘“We’re talking quantum mechanics here,” I said. “How could changing his mind affect that?”
‘“Maybe all it takes is a little variation in the brain’s electrical output,” she said. “Reality, after all, is subjective.”’ Sixe took some papers from his pocket, selected one, and read:
‘Centricity of event as perceived by a participant in the event is reciprocal with the observed universe: the universe configures the event and the event configures the universe. Each life is a sequence of event-universes, each sequence having equal reality subjectively and no reality objectively. Objective reality is not possible within the sequence, therefore subjective reality, regardless of consensus, is the only reality.’
‘What a load of bollocks,’ I said to Sixe.
‘Izzy wrote that.’
‘I think he must have been a couple of quanta short of a probability by then.’
‘Helen recited that to me, she knew it by heart. I said to her, “Do you really believe that?”
‘She said, “Izzy was a genius. You saw what was left of the rat; I saw what was left of Izzy: both of them changed their minds.”’
As Sixe spoke I saw again the face of Izzy Gorn spread across the darkness of space. Had it tried to speak? I thought I might be going mad. I thought of Izzy lying on the table with his head torn off. ‘What did she do with the body?’ I said.
‘That’s the same question I asked but it was no big problem -one of her medical friends signed the death certificate with cause of death listed as VMET accident, there was a fast and private cremation with a closed coffin, life went on, and here we were with half a rat. Between that and the subjective reality business I was pretty confused, besides which I was worried about that dropping feeling we’d both had.
‘I replayed the videodisc and the date on the newsfax was the same: 16 September 2022. The headline was still CHS FOR UNDER-25S ONLY. The rest of the news hadn’t changed either: Top Exec A had resigned from her post following allegations of financial fraud and B was under investigation for having procured young girls for C; wirecar service would be disrupted by industrial action; and the latest survey sh
owed that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed lied when being surveyed.’
‘But that doesn’t mean there was no change,’ I said. ‘Whatever recent past you recalled or saw evidence of would be the recent past that came with the collapse of the quantum wave into an alternative here-and-now, wouldn’t it?’
He ignored me. ‘The music on the audio beam was still the Chopin mazurkas. The clock said 19:59.1 looked all round the room, looked out of the window, looked at Helen. For a moment I didn’t know where I was and whether I’d ever seen that place and that person before. Then I was myself again but feeling weird.
‘The time was on every frame of the videodisc. There was the rat moving around in its cage at 19:48 when I started the camera. At 19:50 when I switched on the VMET it disappeared. When I jumped phase after that there was a blur that came and went. I restarted the disc and went to single-frame-advance. The blur was the very faint transparent shape of the rat as the light seemed to get brighter but it was impossible to say what was happening. The newsfax on the table seemed blurred as well. This ghost-image was only on three frames. I replayed and froze frame. The headline appeared to have another faint headline superimposed on it like a cross-dissolve. I zoomed up the frame and fiddled with the focus but I couldn’t get it clear enough to read. I took prints of those three frames and put them under a magnifier but had no better luck. The next frame after those three showed the newsfax and the half-rat as we’d found them after I switched off the VMET.
‘I said to Helen, “It’s the same world, isn’t it? The rat – half of it anyway – jumped back from whatever it was getting into and maybe the headline started to change but it changed back.”