The ghost leans on something off camera, and sighs. The invisible face is slightly at an angle to them, the projection out of sync with the real world. It gives Joe the curious sense that she is looking at someone behind him. “This is where you say ‘Yes’,” Frankie adds. “And then I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Joe glances at Polly Cradle. She takes his hand and nods.
“Yes,” they say together. There’s a faint click somewhere. B-side, perhaps.
Frankie—thirty years ago and more—cocks her head. “Bien. There are two things I must say, because I do not know what is happening,” the ghost of Frankie Fossoyeur says. “There is a prescription and a proscription. As Daniel would say, the stricture of the machine is hope, but in fact it possesses many virtues, many aspects, and one of them is the opposite of hope.
“The prescription is very simple. If it has not started, you must begin the process. Switch on the machine. The bees will fly. They will gather truth and sort it from lies, as they were rumoured to do when I was a child. Lies shall wither and a net improvement of nine per cent in the human condition will occur over time. Edie knows how to make it so.
“Understand that it will not be without pain. The world will reject the truth. It always has and it will again. There will be violence. But in the end, we will not be destroyed by it. There are enough good people that the foolish and the wicked will not drag us down. There will be a better world.
“The proscription is more serious. Very serious. It is like the one for nuclear materiaclass="underline" do not push two subcritical pieces of uranium together at great speed. Only it is much more important!
“The wave that is the human soul is fragile. At Wistithiel I saw how fragile, and that was the barest beginning. Do you understand? If the Apprehension Engine is incorrectly calibrated, it exposes the mind to too much knowledge, and the mind in turn determines the world. In perfect perception of the underlying universe we find the end of uncertainty, of choice. Without choice, no consciousness. Without an uncertain future, no future at all. After a certain point, it is possible that this process would become self-perpetuating. What is possible would cease and be replaced by… immutable history. Ice instead of water. Life would become Newtonian. Clockwork.
“This is what Shem Shem Tsien desires from me. From the machine. He wishes a great, appalling determination. He will know the universe into a kind of extinction. His union with God will not be complete until he has ended what God began. Somehow, this catastrophe is what he most desires.
“He will, unless prevented, destroy everything, not just now, but for ever. Our universe will drift in the void, a solid, changeless block.
“If he is involved, in any way, you cannot trust him. No one can. If he has the Apprehension Engine, then what he intends is atrocious. You must stop him. You must.”
And the recording stops. The numinous ghost of Frankie Fossoyeur hangs in the air in front of them, pointing off to the side.
Joe leans one way, and then the other, gauging the angles. Then he lies down on his face and peers at the panelling, the floor, and then stands and taps gently at the polished ceiling. He takes a moment to reflect that this is the single largest and most beautiful mobile artwork he has ever seen. Ruskinite, he realises, from the days before Shem Shem Tsien. He could hate the man just for that, for the unmaking of the Order of John the Maker. If only there weren’t so many other things to hate him for.
There. Under his fingertips: a faint line. He follows it, up and down. A seal. Which implies a compartment. But how to open it? If Daniel made it, then it would be elegant. If Frankie designed it, it might be mathematical… no. No, she intended this for an ordinary mind. Ordinary, but familiar. So, how… oh. Of course. From his pocket he takes the car keys, moves them gently across the blank face of the panel. Yes, there—the keys twitch towards the wood, as if in a high wind. A magnet, this time on the inside, so that any metal will suffice to move the catch. There’s no pattern, though. How is he to know what movement will release the panel? He suspects a false step may have consequences greater than merely lost time. Frankie had learned caution by this point, of that much he is quite sure. He wonders if a decades-old booby trap will still work, and whether, if he doesn’t disarm it soon, it will blow him up just for being there. How long does he have? When will his grandmother’s ghost decide he is not her inheritor, but an enemy?
He drags his mind back to the job in hand.
No pattern. The line of the join? Like a number one? No. Meaningless. The square of the panel? It seems… too easy, and again, it means nothing. There is no way to be sure. Frankie was obsessed with certainty, for good or ill. With knowledge. And yet here, there is no pattern. A blank. No pattern where there should be a pattern.
He draws back, considering context, interrogating the puzzle.
What is the panel concealing?
A negation. Nothing where there was something, a very binary notion… Not a one, but a zero.
And there’s your answer.
All right, a zero. To be drawn in which direction? How does an ambidextrous French supergenius write her numbers?
Any way she likes.
“Which direction?” he mutters.
Polly Cradle kneels down beside him, kisses him on the forehead, like a blessing. She draws a circle with her finger, and he realises she has understood the same thing at the same time. Reassurance. Confirmation. He takes a moment to appreciate her presence, her amazing brain, sees it for a moment as a wonderful mechanical angel in her head.
“Clockwise,” she says. “Of course.”
Clockwise. A last message to Daniel. Do this, and all will be as it should be. Somehow.
Oh, Frankie.
He moves the keys in a circle, starting at twelve o’clock and moving around to the right. A moment later, the panel slides open. He peers in, and sees the small, solid knot of explosive. Had he moved the keys the wrong way… Well, he’s very pleased that he didn’t. He reaches in, and then abruptly he is holding a few pages of handwritten notes in his hands. He flicks through them, puts them away.
“What’s that?” Polly asks.
“The off switch,” Joe replies, and when she looks at him sternly, “Well, all right. Not a switch. A list of what to break in the right order so that the world doesn’t come to an end. A sabotage list.”
Bastion, from his place in Polly Cradle’s bag, snuffles through his tiny nose, and growls.
I am ready, horologist. Let us proceed.
Joe Spork looks at the dog.
“Simple as that, ey?”
On the way out, they close the doors and leave things exactly as they found them. At the railway station, Joe steals another car.
“Where now?” Polly asks.
Joe reaches into his pocket and passes her the Polaroid photo of Mathew and Tam. “Gentleman’s outfitter,” he says.
It takes longer to get to Uncle Tam’s place than Joe was expecting, because so many people are leaving London. The radio talk shows are twittering with concerned believers and contemptuous realists. Experts have been found and trotted out: catastrophe mathematicians, lawyers and comedians are all contributing to the mix. You couldn’t call it a panic, not yet. More a sort of jitter, like the rumour of a storm.
