Edie went.
She traced Frankie to Salzburg, then Budapest, then Delhi and Beijing, then back again. Frankie was a genius. She had a way of distracting you. People saw curious machines and worried about them. They celebrated breakthroughs in mathematics made by obscure, hard-working local academics who had had a random conversation with a slender, bookish woman in a café or a bar. They got stock tips derived from some strange, inspired formula, made a fortune and went on holiday. Frankie herself, with a schoolmistress’s bag in one hand and the secrets of the universe in her head, leaving a trail of brilliant, cometary solutions to impossible problems, was weirdly invisible. All the same, you could find her from time to time, if you knew how. Edie could. Shem Shem Tsien could.
They played cat and mouse—or cat and mouse and dog, perhaps—from one corner of the world to another. It got to be a bad joke among the intelligence services of thirty countries. Where one went, so also the other two, and mayhem and bombs and guns inevitably followed. They fought, they fled, they raged, and nothing changed. It was as if the world was elastic, and always returned to the same rotten, stupid shape.
To this day, Edie has no idea where or when Frankie died, only that she must have, because at last she truly wasn’t there any longer.
On the bus, Edie cries dry tears and silently tells Frankie she is sorry for waiting so long to change everything. From the ugly handbag comes a consoling nose. She laughs. Yes. Whatever else, Bastion is for ever.
He arrived very small and badly injured, late on a September evening. He had marbles instead of eyes and a vague, confused expression of discontent. A stray, Edie thought, of course. Frankie could never resist such a thing. And with the dog, a last letter.
Edie tipped the waiting cabman and carried the whole package indoors. She knew she should call Abel Jasmine, or rather, whoever had taken over his job. But by then she had persuaded herself she no longer cared, and for sure she no longer trusted anything to do with governments.
Dearest Edie,
Please look after this one. He has a hero’s heart, for he was raised among elephants from Addeh Sikkim, and all his brothers and sisters were casualties of Shem Shem Tsien’s most recent monstrousness. I have done what I can for him. He reminds me a little of you. He does not know when to give up. He loves hugely and imprudently and his forgiveness inspires awe in me, as does your own.
When I saw Mathew in the street with Daniel the first time, I thought I had gone mad. I saw with my own eyes their deaths listed on the municipal noticeboard. Daniel told me they escaped and came to England, but he thought I was dead.
I do not love him. I do not know my son. But their existence has changed everything in me and now I understand what I must do. Do you remember Germany?
I should have understood then, but I had you, and I had no son. I should have understood when England ignored Hungary’s pain in ’56 or Prague’s in ’68. I should have seen it in Vietnam and in Hiroshima. We can land on the Moon, Edie. We cannot be good. We are wicked. This is a wicked world. There are islands of joy, but they are small and the tide is rising, and even on dry land there are those who would embrace the tide. It cannot be. Not any more.
It cannot stand. The world must change. We must change.
I will make us change. My book will be written in words which cannot be ignored. A veritable Hakote book, a book of mathematics and revolution against the nature of man. I mean to publish it very soon now.
And if I do not, there is another way. I have made a copy of the book and of the calibration drum, Edie. The book alone will only begin the process as I have arranged it. I have sent it to that funny little museum, with a bequest so that they will not discard it. If my copy is lost, that is where you must start. But Edie, this is vitaclass="underline" if ever there is a reason to change the settings of the Engine—I cannot think what it would be—you will need the calibration drum. I have given it to the only other person I trust. He will hide it, Edie, but if you ever need it he knows to give it to you. If I am prevented in my purpose, go to Wistithiel, put things in motion. Change the world for me.
I love you for ever. I am sorry I cannot love you now. Frankie
With decades between her and Frankie’s confessional letter, Edie alights from the single-decker bus and clutches her bag like a woman who fears the temporal world for its sin and iniquity. She wanders as if aimless or bewildered, and her long, roundabout route brings her by happy coincidence to a convent on a dull, dreary street, where Sister Harriet Spork keeps her vigil for a life lived in wickedness.
Edie sits on a public bench and feeds the pigeons. She sits for an hour, with a Bible propped against her hip in case anyone comes, and watches and waits. And finally, her patience is rewarded. Not Joe Spork, whose approach she suspects will be less direct, but a long black car with tinted windows. Edie peers myopically at a seagull, and gets up to shoo it away from her breadcrumbs. She waggles her hands vaguely at the bird, and it glowers murderously before taking wing. Her return path brings her into the orbit of the car, and she glances in to see a robed, shrouded figure at the wheel and another in the second seat, whose stooping, hesitant motions she finds nauseatingly familiar: quick quick slow. And then she looks into the back and sees the passenger as a car, passing in the other direction, illuminates his shrouded head from the side, and his profile is briefly visible beneath the veil.
Edie stares. Belatedly, she hides her face, panic and outrage rising inside her.
Impossible!
But Edie no longer uses that word, having long ago learned its worth.
XII
Nzzzzzeeeeyaoooooowwww;
not strictly a nun;
taken.
Mercer Cradle stands in his sister’s living room with a vastly valuable and possibly insanely dangerous gold bee in one hand and makes zooming noises. It is the defective bee Joe was given by Ted Sholt, of course, the others being out and about causing consternation in the wider world. Mercer is holding the thing between thumb and forefinger and trying to persuade it, by means of demonstration and sound effects and occasional words of encouragement, to take wing.
Mercer did not begin this scientific experiment immediately upon viewing the small collection of trophies which Joe and his sister brought back from the riverside storeroom. His initial position was that the bee should be imprisoned and X-rayed, MRI’d and electron-microscoped, until it yielded whatever alarming secrets it possessed. Joe Spork observed that these options required equipment they did not have and Polly Cradle speculated that attacking the entity might provoke it, whereupon Mercer adopted a strategy of aloof watchfulness in which Joe was permitted to examine the patient while Mercer loomed nearby with a lump hammer—a sort of short sledge—which Polly had formerly used to drive the iron pilings into the walls of her house.
When the bee remained quiescent and indeed rather boringly inert, Mercer became less cautious. His first approach was a very tentative poke, administered with a pencil held at arm’s length, in case the bee should turn into an evil machine of death before his eyes. When this elicited no reaction, he nudged it solidly with the blunt end, and it fell over. He blew on it. He shouted at it, coaxed it, wheedled it and scolded it. Finally, he touched it with his index finger, and when he remained unexploded and unzombified, he picked it up and shook it. Joe was moved to protest that it was delicate, and Mercer agreed not to stand on it or throw it at the wall, but refused to hand it over to Joe for closer inspection using his jeweller’s loupe. It was at this point that Mercer began his attempt to educate the bee by example, and Polly Cradle, who had appeared on the brink of objecting that Joe was the expert in curious automata, was apparently stunned into silence by the image of her brother spinning in place with the bee on his outstretched palm and making buzzing noises.