Land of opportunity, Father Crookes responds. Civilization. Read about it in their schoolbooks, quite natural they’d want to see it for themselves.
It’s our fault then, Father Dundon says gloomily.
What I mean to say is – Father Green attempts to steer the conversation back around – do you think it possible that those same children we taught might by pure chance have ended up living in Seabrook? Wouldn’t that be… wouldn’t that be marvellous?
Father Zmed’s brilliant diamantine squint searching him out across the table. What is he thinking?
I’d imagine most of ’em would be dead by now, Jerome, Father Crookes says through a mouthful of dessert. Know what the life expectancy is for the average African man?
Father Dundon sighs. I often wonder did we do the right thing at all. Heard a chap on the radio blaming the Church for the spread of AIDS over there. Said the Pope was responsible for the deaths of 22 million people.
Well, that’s just –
Of all the silly –
That’s twice as many as Hitler, Father Dundon says.
Oh, come – they know this is wrong but they do not know why; they look to Father Green to refute it. We can’t rewrite the word of God, he says obligingly. And disease does not give one licence for immorality. Even in Africa.
Not everyone is like us, though, Father Zmed says to Father Green – fixing on him again with that curiously penetrating gaze, that barely visible smile. Not everyone has the… moral strength for abstinence.
Then they must pray for it, Father Green says, and crumples his napkin summarily.
Dead, so. Heart eased, he stays with them at the table till well into the night, trading old war stories, what they’d done, what they’d achieved. Young men faced with an impossible task, a continent, a whole continent subsumed in witchcraft! Natives who’d kneel down to pray with you, then after sunset melt away into the bush, returning at dawn daubed in blood, eyes rolling like lunatics. Every night you’d lie half-awake waiting for the footfall outside your tent – drift off expecting to awake on the altar yourself! Or cooking in a pot! No time for subtleties – only surefire way was to terrify them. His name is Satan. He lives in a place of flames. That they could understand. Pointing white-eyed into the desert. Yes, yes, Hell. Only God can protect you. Reading to them from Dante. Sometimes you’d scare yourself! But it worked, that was the thing! They came to heel! They could learn, they could be lifted out of that squalor! For all its savagery there was hope there! The sheer volume of souls saved, one came home feeling one had done something! Is it any wonder that they themselves retreat there now, into these stories each has heard a hundred times, when the present is nothing but ambiguity and accusation, intent on dismantling everything they believed in?
Perverts, monsters, brainwashers.
Retiring to his room, Father Green stays up for another hour correcting homework. He sits in a small pool of lamplight, reviewing the bright dull portraits of the world – bicycles to be rented, purchases to be made – that the textbook presents for the boys to complete. He works steadily, unhurriedly, and although he knows exactly where Daniel Juster’s copy lies in the pile he pretends to himself that he doesn’t; when he reaches it, he does not stroke the page, imagining the boy’s own hand travelling slowly across it; nor linger over the handwriting, its guileless, meticulous loops and crosses, nor sniff the paper, nor kiss, ever so softly, the bitter ink.
Handwriting. Chalk on slate. Plane trees outside a church, wind rolling in from the desert, laughing carefree children, zigzagging half-naked, ebony-thewed, through the stern young priest’s classes… Those children! Irrepressible! You couldn’t help but smile – and now, alone in his bed decades later, with the children dead, safely dead, a smile plays again over Father Green’s face, carrying him down into sleep, a sleep of flames, a thousand tiny white-hot desert tongues licking and searing and scalding him everywhere, an agony of guilt that is also, dreadfully, an ineffable ecstasy.
Ruprecht is up to something. For two days now he’s been feigning illness to get out of class – stuffing his bed with pillows and relocating himself to his lab. But what he’s doing down there remains a mystery even to his room-mate; until, late on Friday night, Skippy awakes to find a portly silhouette standing over his bed. ‘What are you doing?’ he mumbles through the remnants of his dreams.
‘I’m on the verge of a historic breakthrough,’ the silhouette says.
‘Can’t it wait till morning?’
Apparently it can’t, because Ruprecht continues to hover there, breathing snuffily in the darkness, until Skippy with a groan throws back his covers.
An hour later, he and the others shiver on pieces of styrofoam packaging, still waiting for whatever it is to happen, while Ruprecht, in goggles and some sort of cape, attaches cables to circuit boards and makes adjustments with a soldering iron to what looks like several hundred euros’ worth of tinfoil. The basement is ice-cold, and patience is beginning to wear thin.
‘Damn it, Blowjob, how much longer is this going to take?’
‘Nearly finished,’ Ruprecht’s answer returning somewhat muffled.
‘He keeps saying that,’ Mario mutters dourly.
‘Ruprecht, it’s the middle of the night,’ Geoff pleads, rubbing his arms.
‘And this place is full of spiders,’ Skippy adds.
‘Just one more minute,’ the voice assures them.
‘Can you at least tell us what it is?’ Niall says.
‘It looks sort of like his teleporter,’ Geoff observes.
‘It’s a similar principle,’ Ruprecht agrees, emerging momentarily from a forest of cables. ‘An Einstein-Rosen bridge, only recalibrated for an eleven-dimensional matrix. Although the aim of the teleporter was merely to create a conduit between two different areas of spacetime, whereas this – this…’ he pauses mysteriously, then disappears back inside his creation with a spatula.
‘It doesn’t look like a bridge,’ Mario says, scrutinizing the tinfoil wigwam.
‘I wonder what it’s a bridge to,’ Geoff ponders huskily.
‘Nowhere, you clown,’ Dennis snaps. ‘The only place it’s going to take you is up the garden path. God damn it, it’s Friday night! Do you realize that out there, right at this very minute, millions of people are having sex? They’re having sex, and they’re drinking beer, while we sit here watching Von Blowjob play with his toys.’
‘Mmm, well,’ Ruprecht replies on his way to one of the computers, ‘I doubt very much that having sex and drinking beer will be of much use to humanity when its entire future hangs in the balance. I doubt that they’ll be drinking much beer then, when the whole planet is underwater and life is on the brink of extinction.’
‘I feel like I’m extinct already, listening to you,’ mutters Dennis.
But it seems the moment of truth is finally at hand, for now Ruprecht steps back from his silver pupa and adjusts his cape. ‘Mario?’
‘Yo.’ Mario waves his camera phone. ‘Ready when you are.’
‘Excellent.’ Ruprecht straightens his cape and clears his throat. ‘Well, you’re probably wondering why I brought you here. The concept of the multiverse –’
‘Cut!’ says Mario.
‘What?’ Ruprecht regards him captiously.
Mario explains that his phone can only record in twenty-second segments.
‘That’s fine,’ Ruprecht says. Narrowing his eyes, he continues his historical speech in twenty-second bursts. ‘The concept of the multiverse is not a new one. The idea of parallel worlds goes right back to the Greeks. With M-theory, however, we have our strongest indication yet of what the structure of the multiverse may look like – an eleven-dimensional ocean of Nothing, which we share with entities of various sizes, from points to nine-dimensional hyperuniverses. According to the theory, some of these entities are less than a hair’s breadth away from us; that is to say, gentlemen, they are here in the room with us right now.’ A tightening of the silence succeeds his words, save for the near-inaudible hiss of hairs standing up on the backs of necks. Steepling his spongy fingers, he fixes each of them in turn, the crespuscular light of the computers glistening on his damp brow. ‘The problem is, of course, access. The higher dimensions are wrapped up so tightly that current Earth technology cannot supply anything like the amount of energy required to break through to them, or even to see them. But the other night I had what I can only describe as a revelation.’