There had followed – taking up most of the letter – a long, long string of numbers – a series with no apparent pattern to it. Then there were operations on these numbers. Some of these, as far as she could make out from the marginal notes, were derived from the number of letters in the successive words of her article; some had to do with the frequency with which given letters had recurred in the article; some had to do, in a complex way, with artichokes.
Banacharski was trying to sieve some sort of order out of the randomness. Nobody could do this. He was constructing equations, finding relationships, whittling the number string down… he was – as far as she could tell – trying to wrestle the data into abstract algebra. He was trying to use it to describe a shape in space time, or a manifold of that shape. He digressed, occasionally, into some impenetrable speculation about the symmetries of the artichoke.
His letter closed: ‘Write to me. There is not enough data. The work I am doing is important.’ Important was underlined three times.
Isla had tried to follow what was going on. He was mad, that was clear enough. It was a scarily powerful mind, she thought, in deep distress. She had been halfway through writing back when the second letter had arrived. It had been shorter, with moments of lucidity. ‘I am fighting with devils,’ it said. ‘Forgive me.’
She had written back, finally, with her home address in Cambridge – he never used it, continuing to write care of the magazine, whose name he sardonically recapitalised, she noticed, in every letter. She said nothing about artichokes. She was chatty, factual, friendly – and did everything she could to flatter him. She told him about work that had been done on his work. Two major conjectures, she said, had been proved. He hadn’t been active for seven years.
His letters had gone in and out of lucidity. None was shorter than twenty pages. The longest was eighty-six pages. They appeared at intervals of anything between two and ten days. One or two of the letters contained fragments that made straightforward mathematical sense. In most, the equations seemed to be somehow… bent.
Isla discussed them with a few colleagues, including – though she came slightly to regret it – Mike, but was shy of showing them to anyone. She felt somehow protective. She had a sense that Banacharski trusted her.
Frustration started to infect them, though, as time went on. For the last six months, things seemed to be gathering pace. He underlined heavily, used confusing ellipsis, the ascenders and descenders on his letters becoming longer and angrier. Some of his choices of word seemed odd, stilted – and he started to capitalise words at random within the text of his letters. He went on and on about something he called ‘the churn’, or the ‘in-between space’. It was as if she was supposed to understand something he was trying to communicate and was failing to.
His last letter – all of them, previously, had been signed, simply, ‘NB’ – was signed off ‘Affectionately, and in despair, Nicolas’.
All this has led her here. And she is looking, now, through the window of what must be his shack as a cloud passes over the sun and brings, in this high place, a slight chill.
She takes her face from the window and turns round and there he is. He is standing at the end of the wooden wall of his cabin, smiling at her. The first thing she takes in is the skin of his face. It is blotchy – a pattern of brown freckles alternating with a cross pink colour like sunburn. His eyes are deep-set. His lips are fat, old-man lips. His beard is dark grey, with a badger-stripe of white down one side, and spreads wide to his chest, across a striped and grubby shirt, open three buttons down.
Around his waist, higher than his trousers, is a length of what looks like baling twine, snarled in a scraggy version of a bow knot. He salutes her, then casts his eyes down and away, then looks up at her again. He beckons, flapping one hand while looking at his feet.
His feet are in flip-flops. His toenails are filthy.
‘Alors, oui, entrez donc,’ he says, shuffling round the corner and opening the screen door then the other one.
‘I’m Isla,’ she says.
‘Of course,’ he says, as he opens the door and ushers her in. There’s a strange look in his eye, she thinks.
‘Honestly?’ said Hands. ‘I think you have a problem.’
The interview had gone on late into the evening, though you would not know in the unchanging light of the room that it had done so. Functionaries had been and gone. Hands had spent several hours looking through sheaves of photocopies: selections from Banacharski’s letters, classified reports from Directorate sources in MIC, what scraps of intelligence were available.
The coffee in the cup marked Starbucks had been replaced by more coffee in another cup marked Starbucks and Hands had been given a very large cookie containing very large raisins, which he had eaten hungrily. The atmosphere was near enough genial.
‘The way you might want to think about it is this,’ said Hands, cupping his left elbow with his right hand and rubbing it thoughtfully. ‘If what you’ve described to me is correct, and I must stress if, then this device, or engine if you will, is going to be highly unpredictable in its behaviour. Highly unpredictable.’
Red Queen let him run.
‘There’s a point at which mathematics and advanced physics shades over, in a way it’s hard for laypersons to understand, into philosophy. It’s not the fact that it’s hard for the outsider to understand, no. It’s more the way. Laypeople, you see – laypeople very often get the wrong end of the stick. Headline writers, arts graduates, pompous novelists. They get very attracted to metaphors, you see. You know how it is: they thought Einstein had proved that “everything was relative” whereas actually he proved something much more interesting than that. Then there was quantum mechanics and the stick they got hold of the wrong end of was the wrong stick altogether.’ Hands allowed himself a professorial little chuckle at his own joke. ‘Then chaos theory. Dear me. What I mean to say is: it’s not that all this mathematics is a metaphor. It’s the other way round. It’s that – sorry, I’m not explaining it very well. What we do doesn’t reflect the universe. It describes it. See? There isn’t a realm of ideas and then the world… it’s more like… ideas are part of the world. And if this machine does what you seem to think it does, it’s possible that what has happened is that something that ordinarily belongs for all intents and purposes to the realm of ideas is, effectively, acting in the world.’
‘Are you going to tell me what this machine might be doing, Professor?’ said Red Queen.
‘I’m getting round to it. You’ll have to forgive my thinking aloud.’
Hands was leaning forward and the elbow-rubbing was slowing and increasing in time with his diction. He paused.
‘Mind control?’ said Red Queen.
‘No. I don’t imagine so. Probably rather the absence of it. One of the big mysteries is consciousness. What is creating what I’m thinking, and what – assuming, that is, that we’re not all brains in a jar, or the hallucination of some being in another universe altogether – is creating what you’re thinking and what does it mean to think? Consciousness, ideas, imagination, selfhood – all the things that make you you and me me. These obviously arise from electrical impulses in the physical brain. And the best accounts of consciousness we have – which is to say, no real accounts at all – speculate that the ghost in the machine, so to speak, may be a function of these impulses interacting at a quantum level.’
‘OK.’
‘So the brain – consciousness itself – isn’t separate from the system of matter and energy in the rest of the universe. It’s part of it. Maybe a very tiny part of it, but that doesn’t matter. Chaos theory says that something very, very tiny in the data of a system that feeds back through itself can create very, very dramatic results. So it’s not theoretically impossible that something that started life as an idea might have an effect in the world.’