Light

TWENTY-TWO Persistent Entities

It was late. People hurried in and out of the restaurants and cinemas, heads down into the wet and windy night. The trains were still running. Michael Kearney zipped his jacket up. While he walked, he got on his cellphone and made an effort to raise Brian Tate, first at Tate's home, then at the Sony offices in Noho. No one was answering-although at Sony a recording tried to lure him into the maze of automated corporate response-and he soon put the phone away again. Anna caught up with him twice. The first time was at Hammersmith, where he had to stop and buy a ticket.

'You can follow me all you like,' Kearney told her. 'It won't help.'

She gave him a flushed, obstinate look, then pushed her way through the ticket barrier and down to the eastbound platform where-the light of a malfunctioning fluorescent flickering harshly across the upper half of her face-she challenged him: 'What good's your life been? Honestly, Michael: what good has it been?'

Kearney took her by the shoulders as if to shake her; looked at her instead. Began to say something ugly; changed his mind.

'You're being ridiculous. Go home.'

She set her mouth.

'You see? You can't answer. You haven't got an answer.'

'Go home now. I'll be all right.'

'That's what you always said. Isn't it? And look at you. Look how frightened and upset you are.'

Kearney shrugged suddenly.

'I'm not afraid,' he said, and walked off again.

Her disbelieving laugh followed him down the platform. When the train came she stood as far away from him as she could in the crowded carriage. He lost her briefly in the late-night melee at Victoria, but she picked him up again and struggled grimly after him through a crowd of laughing Japanese teenagers. He set his teeth, got off the train two stops early and walked as fast as he could for a mile or so, into the light and activity of West Croydon and out into the suburban streets the other side. Whenever he looked back she had fallen further behind: but she always kept him in sight somehow, and by the time he knocked at Brian Tate's door she had caught him up again. Her hair was slicked down to her scalp, her face was flushed and exasperated; but she blinked the rain out of her eyes and gave him one of those brilliant, strained smiles, as if to say:

'You see?'

Kearney knocked at the door again, and they stood there in an angry truce with their luggage in their hands, waiting for something to happen. Kearney felt a fool.

Brian Tate's house was situated in a quiet, hilly, tree-lined street with a church at one end and a retirement home at the other. It boasted four floors, a short gravelled (driveway between laurels, mock-Tudor timbering over pebbledash. On summer evenings you would be able to watch foxes sniffing about among the licheny apple trees in the garden at the rear. It had the air of a house that had been used mildly and well all its existence. Children had been brought up there, and sent on to the kinds of schools suited to children from houses like these, after which they had made careers in brokerage and then had children of their own. It was a modest, successful house, but there was something gloomy about it now, as if Brian Tale's occupancy had disconcerted it.

When no one answered the door, Anna Kearney put down her bag and went to stand on tiptoe in the flower bed beneath one of the windows.

'Someone's in,' she said. 'Listen.'

Kearney listened, but he couldn't hear anything. He went round to the back of the house and listened there, but all the windows were dark and there was nothing to hear. The rain came down quietly on the garden.

'He's not here.'

Anna shivered. 'Someone's in,' she repeated. 'I saw him looking out at us.'

Kearney rapped on the window.

'See?' Anna called excitedly. 'He moved!'

Kearney got his cellphone out and dialled Tate's number. 'Knock on the door again,' he said, putting the phone to his ear. He got an old-fashioned answer machine and said, 'Brian, if you're there, pick up. I'm outside your house and I need to talk to you.' The tape ran for half a minute then stopped. 'For God's sake Brian, I can see you in there.' Kearney was dialling again when Tate opened the front door and looked out uncertainly. 'It's no good doing that,' he said. 'I keep the phone somewhere else.' He was wearing some kind of heavily insulated silver parka over cargo pants and a T-shirt. A wave of heat came out of the door behind him. The hood of the parka obscured his face, but Kearney could see that it was hollow and tired-looking, in need of a shave. He looked from Kearney to Anna, then back again.

'Do you want to come in?' he said vaguely.

'Brian -' Kearney began.

'Don't go in,' Anna said suddenly. She was still standing in the flower bed under the window.

'You don't have to come with me,' Kearney told her.

She stared at him angrily. 'Oh yes I do.'

Inside, the house was thick with heat and humidity. Tate led them into a small room at the back.

'Could you shut the door after you?' he said. 'Keep the warmth in.'

Kearney looked around.

'Brian, what the fuck are you doing?'

Tate had made the room into a Faraday cage by tacking copper chicken wire to the walls and ceiling. As an extra precaution he had covered the windows with Bacofoil. Nothing electromagnetic could get into him from outside that room; nothing could get out. No one could know what he was doing, if he was doing anything. Boxes of tacks, rolls of chicken wire and Bacofoil cartons lay everywhere. The central heating was turned up full. Two standalone heaters running off bottled gas roared away in the middle of the room next to a Formica kitchen table and chair. On the table Tate had racked six G4 servers connected in parallel, a keyboard, a hooded monitor, some peripherals. He also had an electric kettle, instant coffee, plastic cups. Takeaway food cartons littered the floor. The room stank. It was immeasurably bleak and obsessive in there.

'Beth left,' Tate explained. He shivered and put his hands out to one of the heaters. His face was hard to see inside the hood of the parka. 'She went back to Davis. She took the kids.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' Kearney said.

'I bet you are,' Tate said. 'I bet you are.' He raised his voice suddenly. 'Look,' he said, 'what do you want? I keep the phone in another room, you know? I've got work to do here.'

Meanwhile, Anna Kearney was staring around as if she couldn't believe any of it. Every so often her eyes went across Tate with the calm contempt of one neurotic for another, and she shook her head. 'What's that?' she said suddenly. The white cat had emerged cautiously from under the desk. It looked up at Michael Kearney and ran off a little way. Then it stretched itself with a kind of careful self-regard and walked up and down purring, its tail stuck in the air. It seemed to be enjoying the heat. Anna knelt down and offered her hand. 'Hello, baby,' she said. 'Hello, little baby.' The cat ignored her, leapt lightly up on to the hardware, and from there on to Tate's shoulder. It looked thinner than ever, its head more than ever like the blade of an axe, ears transparent, fur a corona of light.

'I'm living in just the one room,' Tate said.

'What's happened, Brian?' Kearney said gently. 'I thought you said it was a glitch.'

Tate held his hands out from his sides.

'I was wrong.'

Rooting about in the tangle of USB cable, stacked peripherals and old coffee cups that covered the desk, he came up with a 100Gb pocket drive in a polished titanium shell. This he offered to Kearney, who weighed it cautiously in his hand.

'What's this?'

'The results of the last run. It was decoherence-free for a whole minute. We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before interference set in. That's like a million years down there. That's like the indeterminacy principle is suspended.'He gave a strained laugh. 'Is a million years long enough for us, do you think? Will that do? But then… I don't know what happened then. The fractals… '

Kearney felt this wasn't going anywhere. He thought results like these were probably wrong, and that anyway they couldn't explain what he had seen in the laboratory.

'Why did you smash the monitors up, Brian?'

'Because it wasn't physics any more. Physics was off. The fractals started to — ' he couldn't think of a word, nothing had prepared him for whatever he was seeing in his head ' — leak. Then the cat went inside after them. She just walked through the screen and into the data.' He laughed, looking from Kearney to Anna. 'I don't expect you to believe that,' he said.

Underneath it all — underneath the inexplicable fear, the weirdness, the simple guilt of selling the project out first to Meadows then to Sony-Tate was just a teenager good at physics. He hadn't developed past a hip haircut and the idea that his talent gave him some sort of edge in the world, if only he would always be forgiven by adults. Now his wife had disabused him of that. Worse, perhaps, physics itself had come looking for him in some unfathomable way he couldn't live with. Kearney felt sorry for him, but he only said carefully:

'The cat's here, Brian. She's on your shoulder now.'

Tate glanced at Kearney, then at his own shoulder. He didn't seem to see the white cat perched there, purring and kneading the material of his coat. He shook his head.

'No,' he said abjectly. 'She's gone now.'

Anna stared at Tate, then the cat, then Tate again.

'I'm leaving,' she said. 'I'll call a taxi, if no one minds.'

'You can't call from in here,' Tate told her, as if he was talking to a child. 'It's a cage.'Then he whispered, 'I had no idea Beth felt so badly about things.'

Kearney touched his arm.

'Why do you need the cage, Brian? What really happened?'

Tate began to cry. 'I don't know,' he said.

'Why do you need the cage?' Kearney persisted. He made Tate face him. 'Are you afraid something will get in?'

Tate wiped at his eyes. 'No, I'm frightened it will get out,' he said. He shivered and made a curious half-turn away from Kearney, raising his hand to zip the neck of the parka; this brought him face to face with Anna. He jerked in a startled way, as if he had forgotten she was there. 'I'm cold,' he: whispered. He felt around behind him with one hand, pulled the; chair out from behind the table and sat down heavily. All the time the white cat rode on his shoulder, shifting its balance fluently, purring. Tate looked up at Kearney from the chair and said:

'I'm always cold.'

He was silent for a moment, then he said: 'I'm not really here. None of us are.'

Tears rolled down the dark grooves around his mouth.

'Michael, we're none of us here at all.'

Kearney stepped forward quickly and, before Tate could react, pulled back the hood of the parka. Fluorescent light fell mercilessly across Tate's face, stubbled, exhausted, old-looking, and with an abraded appearance about the eyes, as if he had been working without spectacles, or crying all night. Probably, Kearney thought, he had been doing both. The eyes themselves were watery, a little bloodshot, with pale blue irises. Nothing was odd about them in the end except the tears pouring in a silvery stream from their inner corners. There were too many of them for Tate's grief. Every tear was made up of exactly similar tears, and those tears too were made from tears. In every tear there was a tiny image. However far back you went, Kearney knew, it would always be there. At first he supposed it was his own reflection. When he saw what it really was he grabbed Anna by the upper arm and started dragging her out of the room. She struggled and fought all the way, hitting out at him with her luggage, staring back in horror at what was happening to Brian Tate.

'No,' she said reasonably. 'No. Look. We have to help him.'

'Christ, Anna! Come on!'

The white cat was crying too. As Kearney watched, it turned its thin, savage little head towards him, and its tears poured out into the room like points of light. They flowed and flowed until the cat itself began to dissolve and spill off Brian Tate's shoulder like a slow glittering liquid on to the floor, while Tate rocked himself to and fro and made a noise like:

'Er er er.'

He was melting too.

An hour later they were sitting in the brightest place they could find open in the centre of London, a pick-up bar at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street. It wasn't much of a place, but it was as far away as they could get from the cold endless suburbs and those streets of decent, bulky stockbroker homes with one lighted room visible between laurels and rhododendrons. The bar did food-mainly odds and ends of tapas-and Kearney had tried to get Anna to eat something, but she had only looked at the menu and shuddered. Neither of them was speaking, just staring out into the street outside, enjoying the warmth and the music and the feeling of being with people. Soho was still awake. Couples, mostly gay, were hurrying past the window arm in arm, laughing and talking animatedly. There was some human warmth to be had by holding your glass steady in both hands and watching that.

Eventually Anna finished her drink and said:

'I don't want to know what happened back there.'

Kearney shrugged. 'I'm not sure it was actually happening like that anyway,' he lied. 'I think it was some sort of illusion.'

'What are we going to do?'

Kearney had been waiting for her to ask this. He found the pocket drive he had taken from Tate, weighed it in his hand for a moment then put it on the table between them, where it lay gleaming softly in the coloured light, a nicely designed object not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Titanium has a look to it, he thought. Today's popular metal. He said:

'Take this. If I don't come back, get it to Sony. Tell them it's from Tate and they'll know what to do with it.'

'But that stuff,' she said. 'That stuff is in there.'

'I don't think it has anything to do with the data,' Kearney said. 'I think Tate is wrong about that. I think it's me this thing wants, and I think it's the same thing that's wanted me all along. It's just found a new way of talking to me.'

She shook her head and pushed the: drive back towards him.

'I'm not letting you go anyway,' she said. 'Where can you go? What can you do?'

Kearney kissed her and smiled at her.

'There are some things I can still try,' he said. 'I've saved them until last.'

'But -'

He slid back his stool and got up.

'Anna, I can get out of this. Will you help me?' She opened her mouth to speak, but he touched her lips with his fingers. 'Will you just go home and keep this thing safe and wait for me? Please? I'll be back in the morning, I promise.'

She glanced up at him, her eyes hard and bright, then away again. She reached out and touched the pocket drive, then put it quickly inside her coat. She shook her head, as if she had tried everything and was now consigning him to the world. 'All right,' she said. 'If that's what you want.'

Kearney felt an enormous relief.

He left the bar and took a cab to Heathrow, where he booked himself on the first available flight to New York.

The airport was stunned into calmness by the late hour. Kearney sat in an empty row of seats in the departure lounge, yawning, peering out through the plate glass at the huge fins of the manoeuvring aircraft and throwing the Shrander's dice compulsively as he waited for night to turn into dawn. He had his bag on the seat beside him. He was going to America not because he wanted to, but because that was what the dice had suggested. He had no idea what he would do when he arrived. He saw himself driving through the heartlands trying to read a Triple A map in the dark; or staring out of a train window like someone in a Richard Ford story, someone whose life has long ago pivoted on to its bad side and is being held down by its own weight. All his strategies were bankrupt. They had been hollowed out years ago by a kind of persistent internal panic. Whatever was happening to him now, though, was new. It had a culminatory feeling. He was going to run again, and probably be caught this time, and perhaps find out what his life had been about. Anything else he had told Anna was a lie. She must have expected that, because just before 5 a.m. he felt her lean over him from behind and kiss him and close her thin hands over his so that he couldn't throw the dice again.

'I knew you'd come here,' she whispered.