I wish, Louiza. I wish we could have met again. I wish I was still someone. I wish I was still working. I wish I could interview you, ask you questions. It would be very big, very important. Not just to me.
You can ask me now.
What do you have that no one else does?
I have the Unimaginables.
Ah yes, the invisible women.
Not invisible, just unnoticed since unimaginable. They’re here just like you and Ottavia and I are here. Like the neutrinos that pass unfelt and unseen through the Earth, that pass in the billions every day, like the dark matter that makes up the lion’s share of the universe. You just don’t know how to look for the Unimaginables. And when we are singing with them, you don’t know how to listen to us, so we pass unnoticed.
And you have Ottavia.
Yes. I have Ottavia.
And the Pip? Tibor mentioned the Pip. Ottavia said it holds all knowledge like a crystal ball, like a computer searchable in every possible language.
The Pip. There was a church outside Cambridge. A steeple, a young organ tuner.
Malory?
Ottavia told me she visited Malory. She told me that his Villa Septimania was sitting on the world’s biggest computer network, connected according to the principle of Maoist cells or Cathar cabals — no person or part knew the identity of more than six others. It was disconnected from the public Internet, entirely untraceable. The sheer information Malory had acquired would have made Mr. MacPhearson so happy, not to mention poor Vince.
But whom did it serve, all that information?
Ask Malory. He’s the one you want to interview.
But the Pip, Louiza? I need to understand before I die why Tibor did what he did. I can’t help blaming the Pip.
You think the Pip has that kind of power?
I saw Tibor. I saw what the Pip did to the top of his head.
One night, Ottavia and I found ourselves outside Baghdad, perhaps on the very spot where Haroun al Rashid had his palace. Perhaps the Pip was being pulled by the memory of that first apple tree. But even the Pip didn’t have all the information. The ground had been laid waste, many times. Many, many times. Sometime recently it had been a Toyota Dealership — the crumpled remnants of a pole and a sign still remained, along with a few burnt-out Corollas and Land Cruisers.
Information is only … what would you call it? Stuff? Noise? What computers have is the ability to collect stuff, to sort through chatter. But does a computer guide the Moon around the Earth, the Earth around the Sun? Ottavia and I, and I suspect Malory too if he only knew it, are drawn together by something else. Call it a sympathy, the same rule of attraction that guides everything in the universe, from the tiniest pip of a sub-pippic particle to the galaxy of Pippa Major and all the stars that astronomers, with much more knowledge than I have, say are older than the universe itself.
But you and Ottavia are guided by this sympathy. You’ve caught dozens, perhaps hundreds of criminals, bad men, over the decades.
We haven’t caught anyone. For a while, I answered problems that Mr. MacPhearson and Vince gave me. Who knows what they did with the answers? Vince died. And MacPhearson, he may have died by now as well. I am not sad, even if that sounds terrible. I imagine my mother, whom I loved dearly, and my father, whom I loved not at all, have died by now as well.
And Malory?
What about Malory?
All those years, all those men. Surely if you could find all those men, couldn’t you have found Malory?
On one of our journeys, Ottavia met a young physicist. We were somewhere in Switzerland or France outside Geneva, I think. There were mountains, snow, the kind of padded silence I remember from that day you and I spent in hospital in Rome. The young physicist was very excited that Ottavia was paying attention to him — his eagerness reminded me of Malory the first time I met him. He had a key to some super-powerful analytic equipment — scanners and computers. I don’t know anything about these machines that dissect reality. Ottavia had been keen — keen for years — to peer into the depths of her treasures — and not only the Pip, which she carried around in a leather pouch, but a shiny marble apple that was another of the gifts she’d taken from Malory.
The young physicist asked me if I wanted to join them to take a look, but I told him it wouldn’t be necessary — Ottavia could be my eyes. He smiled in the patronizing fashion that I’ve been used to for so long, not understanding that the sympathy between me and Ottavia is such that I do, indeed, see what she sees — although not, perhaps, in the way that young physicists might imagine. I sat on a leather sofa in a conference room outside the lab, one of those butterscotch modernistic sofas that make the Swiss feel more Italian and up-to-date. For the first time in a long time, I felt strangely but comfortably alone. The Unimaginables had stayed outside for a little snowboarding. Ottavia was inside the lab with her man and his equipment.
But as I sat there alone, I felt — I don’t know how else to put it — as if a series of switches were clicking on, a series of lights shining at different angles within me. And whether this is what Ottavia saw at the center of the apple, at the center of the Pip, I don’t know. But as each light clicked on, I saw a pyramid. And then another pyramid and another, attaching themselves to one another in a giant crystal. And then I was inside the crystal, as if inside the Cathedral at Ely, with the Norman arches and arcades and chapels multiplying and stretching away, and producing with each generation of crystals more altars and statues and, one by one, the pipes of a giant organ. Long pipes, short pipes, wooden and metal pipes, bent and fluted. And as the crystal structure grew, I felt myself shrinking smaller and smaller, like Alice in Wonderland, until I was cocooned within the center, surrounded above and below in a crystalline transparency. I was alone, all alone at the heart of something.
Was it the Pip, was it the apple? I don’t know. There are only two things I knew about this place at the center of the crystal. It was a place where distance didn’t matter. As vast as it seemed, I could reach out with my hand and touch the other side of this infinite cathedral without having to stretch. But more, it was a place where what seemed possible was beyond imagining — was greater than I’d been taught in all the books and articles and parental speeches going back to Vince and MacPhearson and my father. I was at the center of the secret and I was dying to tell someone what I saw. But I was alone — Ottavia was gone with her young man. And then I thought — Malory should see this.
And then he was there.
He was sitting next to me, as if he were sitting in that conference room on the butterscotch sofa. He wasn’t exactly the Malory I’d first met in the organ loft, or the one I’d seen in Rome, or the one who was at your party that terrible day. He was an older Malory, a Malory of less hair and worn elbows. But he was also a younger one, a boy in short French trousers and knee socks, who very patiently took my hands and placed them on a crystalline keyboard in front of me. And as I did, Malory stood at full height on a pedal — did you know, Cristina, that organs had pedals? And the music! The music that I heard!
And then?
And then, of course, Ottavia came back. Without her man. I stood up. We went back out into the snow.
Without Malory?
Don’t you understand, Cristina? Newton found the equation to describe the attraction between two moving bodies at a distance. But three bodies in motion — that was too much for his mathematics. For anyone’s mathematics.