Ghostwritten (48 page)

“Maybe.”

“If that happens, could you get a job at the department at Cork? Could she, Da?”

“The vice-chancellor would get down on his very knees, Liam,” said John, his voice upholstered with tact, “but—”

“There you go, Ma.”

Ah, Liam, the most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.

The Trans-Siberian shunted through a slumberous, forested evening in northern China. I was still toying with matrix mechanics, but getting nowhere. I’d been stuck with the same problem since Shanghai, and now I was wandering in circles.

“Mind if I join you?”

The dining car had emptied. Did I know this young woman?

“Sherry’s the name,” said the Australian girl, waiting for me to say something.

“Please, take a seat, let me move this junk for you.…”

“Maths, eh?”

Unusual for a young person to want to talk with an oldie like me. Still, we’re a long way from home, and don’t generalize, Mo. “Yes, I’m a maths teacher,” I said. “That’s a thick book.”

“War and Peace.”

“Lot of it about. Particularly the former.”

A half-naked Chinese toddler ran up the corridor, making a
zun-zun
noise which may have been a helicopter, or maybe a horse.

“I’m very sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

I felt a stab of suspicion. Oh, Mo! She’s just a kid. “Mo. Mo Smith.” Mo!

We shook hands. “Sherry Connolly. Are you going straight to Moscow, Mo, or stopping off?”

“Aye, straight through to Moscow, Petersburg, Helsinki, London, Ireland. How about you?”

“I’m stopping off in Mongolia for a while.”

“How long for?”

“Until I want to move on.”

“Good to be out of Beijing?”

“You bet. It’s good to be out of my compartment! There are two Swedish guys, they’re drunk and having a belching competition. It’s like back home. Men can be such drongoes.”

“I could get your compartment changed. Our babushka’s tame. I bribed her with a bottle of Chinese whisky.”

“No worries, thanks. I grew up with five brothers, so I can handle two Swedes. We get to UB in thirty-six hours. Plus, there’s a hunky Danish guy in the bunk below me.… You traveling alone too, Mo?”

“Yes, all alone.”

Sherry gave me that look.

“Great heavens, no! I’ve got a husband and a teenage son waiting at home.”

“You must be missing them. They must be missing you.”

What a perfect pair of sentences. “Yep.”

“Hey, I’ve got a flask of Chinese powdered lemon tea. Join me? It’s the real McCoy.”

It was nice to speak to a woman in my own language again. “I would love to.”

We talked until we got to the Mongolian border, where the train’s wheels were changed to fit the old Soviet gauge, and I realized how lonely I had become.

Maybe it was just the caffeine in Sherry’s tea, but when I next glanced at the black book I saw how utterly obvious the answer was: Trebevij’s constant broke the logjam. Mo, you’re a deadhead. I worked for what seemed a little while longer, and before I knew it the dining-car staff were starting the breakfast shift.

The islands, cities, forests, all left behind. Dawn welled up over the open grasslands of central Asia. I was an extremely tired, middle-aged, morally troubled quantum physicist with a very uncertain future, but I had gone somewhere no one else had ever been. I wobbled back to my compartment and slept for over a day.

Accepted wisdom accuses Dr. Frankenstein of hubris.

I don’t think he was playing God. I think he was just being a scientist.

Can nuclear technology or genetically engineered parsnips or quantum cognition be “right” or “wrong”? The only words for technology are “here,” or “not here.” The question is, once here, what are we going to do with it?

Dr. Frankenstein did a runner, and that was his crime. He left his technology at the mercy of people who did what ignorant humans habitually do: throw stones and scream. If the good doctor had shown his brainchild how to survive, adapt, and protect itself, all that gothic gore could have been saved, and transplant technology jump-started two centuries early.

I see what you’re saying, Mo, but how can you teach an engine to recognize right and wrong? To arm itself against abuse?

Look at the black book. If Quancog isn’t sentience, give me another name for it.

The telephone rang as I cracked my egg. It was next to John, so he answered. “Billy?”

John said nothing for a long time.

Bad news.

“Right-o.” He put the receiver down.

I knew it.

“That was Billy, phoning from The Drum and Monkey in Baltimore. There are three Americans who look like the Blues Brothers coming over. The
St. Fachtna
has developed some mysterious engine trouble, so won’t be coming back this morning, but he’s got to come back this evening. Danny Waite’s low on insulin, and there’s more rough weather for the rest of the week.”

A sharp spade cut through the earth, roots, peat and pebbles. “Ma,” Liam was gripping my forearm. “We’ve got to get you away!”

Planck started barking. There was a bang on the door. Was it beginning now?

Liam led me through into the back. “Who’s there?”

“Brendan Mickledeen!”

The door opened. What a feverish farce the morning was turning into. Brendan was out of breath. Air from outside, sweet and sharp. “Mo, Billy told me the Yanks have come. We can get you on Roisin’s boat to Skull. From there my sister-in-law can drive you to Ballydehob. After that—”

I held up my hand. “How—how does everyone know about this?”

It was a shock to hear Brendan raise his voice. “Clear Island looks after its own! McDermott’s boat is waiting! There’s not time to squabble about who told who what.”

I imagined it, peering into that possible reality. I would start running now, a journey of peering through taxi windows, raised newspapers, lowered umbrellas, up to Belfast maybe. And then what? Overseas again, if I can get that far, to some cheap country, all the while carrying the only extant blueprint for New Earth’s computer.

What path through the park brought you here, Mo?

It had become very quiet.

John cleared his throat. “It’s time to decide, love. What are you going to do?”

“Brendan, thank you. But I cannot outrun the Pentagon using the Republic of Ireland’s public transport. I came back to face the music. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Brendan took out his asthma ventilator, shook it, and inhaled. “Gabriel, me, and the boys are ready to show the Yanks what we’re made of.”

I could pop with all the fear, irritation, and love. “There’s going to be no fighting and no running.”

Liam frowned. “Then what are you going to do, Ma?”

I hoped I sounded braver than I felt. “Pack.”

Quantum physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty. You can know the position of an electron but you cannot know where it’s going, or where it is by the time you register the reading. John went blind. Or you can know its direction, but you cannot know its position. Heinz Formaggio at Light Box read my Belfast papers and offered me a job. The particles in the atoms of the brain of that young man who pulled me out of the path of the taxi in London were configured so that he was there, and able to, and willing to. Even the most complete knowledge of a radioactive atom will not tell you when it will decay. I don’t know when the Texan will be here. Nowhere does the microscopic world stop and the macroscopic world begin.

Liam had to stoop under the roof beams of John’s bedroom. Our bedroom. I remembered the first day he managed to get up the stairs on his own, ass-first, step by step, his face like Edmund Hillary’s.

“Liam?”

“Your wart’s gone, Ma.”

“Well, so it has. Isn’t that something?”

“Ma! You can’t just go without a fight.”

“That is why I have to go. To stop fighting.”

“But you said that Quancog will accelerate warfare by fifty years.”

“That was half a year ago, at Light Box. I think I underestimated.”

“I don’t get it.”

The black book lay on the dresser. “What if Quancog were powerful—ethical—enough to ensure that technology could no
longer be abused? What if Quancog could act as a kind of … zookeeper?”

“I don’t understand. Where would that take it?”

The men were arguing in the kitchen below.

“In five hundred years we are going to be either extinct, or … something better. Technology has outstripped our capacity to look after it. But, suppose I—suppose Quancog could ensure that technology looked after itself, and—” Christ, what was this sounding like? “Liam, is your ma a complete madwoman?”

Between here and the strand a flock of sheep were all bleating at once. Liam’s face hung still as a portrait’s. The beginning of a smile went as soon as it came. “What’s to stop them taking the black book and elbowing you out of the picture?” Liam is a bright kid.

“Ah yes. The black book.”

Red Kildare’s Norton thundered down the drive and skidded to a halt in the yard. Heisenberg squawked and flew up to his perch on the telegraph pole.

“It’s Red,” said John. “He’ll have come to milk Feynman.”

Red Kildare walked into the kitchen. “They found you then, Mo! Any chance of a cuppa?”

“Does every last soul on Clear know about my contretemps with the Americans?”

“Island secrets are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders,” quoted Red, offering us all a sherbet bomb. “Shouldn’t worry. All Yanks think they can buy anything. They probably just want to raise their offer.”

John sighed. “I may be blind as a stone, Red, but if you think that these people want only to chat about job perks then compared to you, I am the Hubble Telescope.”

Red shrugged, and popped in a sherbet bomb. “In that case, it’s hailing pigshit on Mo. And when it’s hailing pigshit, there’s but one thing to do.”

“What?” asked Liam.

“Go to The Green Man and have a drink.”

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all morning,” I said.

“I can hear Father Wally’s tricycle,” said John.

Father Wally came in and sat down, panting. “Mo,” he said, trying to understand a world too muddled for his vision. “This is tantamount to kidnapping! You’ve committed no crime! How did all of this come about?”

Take any two electrons—or, in Dr. Bell’s and my case, photons—that originate from a common source, measure and combine their spins, and you will get zero. However far away they are: between John and me, between Okinawa and Clear Island, or between the Milky Way and Andromeda: if one of the particles is spinning down, then you know that that other is spinning up. You know it now! You don’t have to wait for a light-speed signal to tell you. Phenomena are interconnected regardless of distance, in a holistic ocean more voodoo than Newton. The future is reset by the tilt of a pair of polarized sunglasses. “The simultaneity of the ocean, Father Wally.”

“I don’t believe I’m altogether following you, Mo.”

“Father, Red, Brendan … could I have a couple of moments with John and Liam alone?”

“Aye, Mo, of course. We’ll wait for you at the end of the drive.”

“I’m going to be so lonely without you two.”

Liam was determined to be brave. John was being John. My two men hugged me.

“I’m going to feed Feynman,” I said eventually.

“Feynman can feed herself.”

“I can’t finish my breakfast. I’ve got a few juicy scraps she’d appreciate.”

The chrome on Red Kildare’s Norton gleamed. Its engine purred at walking pace. Father Wally’s tricycle squeaked. Leaves ran down the track, a cloud of minnows. “This puts me in mind of the Palm Sunday parade,” said Father Wally.

Was it really only three days since I walked up from the harbor alone? Had so much time passed? Had so little? “What day is it today?”

“Thursday?” said Liam.

“Monday,” said Red.

“Wednesday,” said Brendan.

The stream clattered across the road.

“I hear music.”

Brendan grinned. “You must be imagining things again, Mo Muntervary.”

“No! I can hear ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’!”

Planck picked up his feet as we descended the crook of the hill, sensing an occasion to show off. As we rounded the crook of the hill at Ancient O’Farrell’s, I saw a crowd of islanders spilling out of The Green Man into the garden. I squeezed John’s hand. “Did you know about this?” There was a banner draped over the door:
CLEAR ISLAND’S FINEST
.

“I’m only a blind harper,” answered my husband.

“Just a limited affair,” said Liam, “confined to friends and family.”

“I thought I was going to be smuggled out in secret.”

“Not without a quick bevvy first, you weren’t.”

“We knew you were decided, Mo,” said Father Wally.

“But we wanted to give you the chance to change your mind,” finished Red.

“Yoohoo! Liam!” said Bernadette Sheehy, sitting on the wall, crossing her legs.

“Hello, Bernadette!” sang John and I.

In the bar of The Green Man it was standing room only. Eamonn’s boy was playing his accordion. Even the bird-watchers in their anoraks were there, bemused but happy. I looked for the New Zealander, but she wasn’t there.

A bird-watcher in a leather jacket was leaning on the bar. He turned around as I entered. “Good afternoon, Dr. Muntervary. I thought Ireland was all bombs, rain, and homosexual giants of literature.” He took off his wide brown sunglasses. “This is quite a shindig. It’s a shame we can’t stay longer.”

The floor of The Green Man swelled. And then, so strangely, I’m relieved it’s all over. At least I can stop running.

“Ma.” Liam knew before anyone else. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

The jig carried on, spiraling around with a life of its own.

•  •  •

What happens to all the seconds tipped into the bin of the past?

And what happens to the other universes where electrons follow other paths, where thoughts and mutations and actions differ? Where I was captured in Huw’s apartment? Where my father is still alive and my mother bright as the button she always was, where John never went blind, where my precocity and ambition were those of a small farmer’s wife, where nuclear weapons were invented by 1914, where
Homo erectus
went the same fossilized way as australopithecines, where DNA never zipped itself up, where stars were never born to die in a shroud of carbon and heavier elements, where the big bang crunched back under the weight of its own mass a few jiffies after it banged?