"You want me to go back to 1900?"
"Yes. And there's no point in arguing because in a sense you've already done it. That's why I'm here helping you now."
I ignore as much of that as I can. "You want me to go back to 1900 and mess with the head of a retired schoolteacher who bred 'fancy mice'?"
"Yes, that's right. Miss Abbie Lathrop. As I just explained to you, she virtually invented the laboratory mouse. Go to any lab and you'll find mice there bred from her original stock. I'll give you an example. The C56/BL6/Bkl. This is a strain of mouse that you can buy from any distributor. They are all black, all inbred, and all originated from Miss Abbie Lathrop's stock—the mating of male 52 and female 57, to be precise."
"Why?" I say, as my brain tries—and fails—to process any of this. "Why do you want me to do this?"
"The boys in Illinois tend to pray to me to do something about the plight of the laboratory mouse. Well, I can't think of anything better than wiping out the woman who invented them, can you?"
"But I can't wipe anyone out!"
"Oh really? You're saying you haven't changed people's minds since you've been in here? Got people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily have done? Isn't that how you escaped from the men in the car?"
"But..." This is frustrating me. "That was happening in real time. You can't change the past. What about paradoxes?"
"Everything that happens in the Troposphere happens in the past, in your sense."
"And paradoxes?"
"Oh, at the moment everything's a bit of a paradox. It wouldn't matter."
I see images in my mind of men in white coats bending over tanks of mice. One minute they're examining some creature with an ear growing on its back, or a tumor; the next minute there's nothing in the tank. But if the woman who bred the mice had been stopped from doing it way back in 1900, then the mice would never have been there. The men would therefore not be there. The whole world would change. I try to explain this to Apollo Smintheus.
"Oh, no," he says mildly. "No. That wouldn't be a problem. The mice would all just dissolve into the air, I think. The world wouldn't change. No one would notice."
"But..."
"You've already done it, so there's no point arguing."
"If I've already done it, then why are there still mice in cages in laboratories?" I ask.
"Are there?" he says. "I can't see any."
"And what about you? If there were no lab mice, then maybe the cult in Illinois wouldn't ever have formed, and you would never exist..."
"Oh, I've been around since the Greeks. Anyway, part of being a god is doing things to destroy yourself. It's like being a human. We're all trapped in the same economy."
There are so many paradoxes here that I'm developing a headache. At least I have a little more energy now. That must be from the drip attached to my physical body in the hospital.
"She's called Miss Abbie Lathrop," he says again, "and she lives on a farm in Massachusetts. You'll need to get to her towards the end of 1899. I'll leave you a message with the full details when you come back."
At least he doesn't want me to do this right now.
"But..."
"What?"
"I do have one more rather important question," I say.
"Which is?"
"Won't it kill me? I mean, going back less than a month would have finished me off if you hadn't come to help me. And—no offense—I still don't know if I'm going to get out of here alive."
"I don't know why you're so fond of this 'life.'" Apollo Smintheus sighs. "But don't worry. I'm going to show you something I think you'll find useful."
"What is it?"
"The underground system. I think that's an OK translation."
"The underground system? What, like trains?"
"Yes. That is how your mind would see this. Yes, I think it will be trains."
The suburbs are getting more dense. We're walking down a steep hill and I can see a main road glowing at the bottom of it. There's still no traffic, of course. No traffic, no rubbish, no people. We turn right once we get to the road and walk along a row of brightly lit department stores that are interspersed every so often with large gray office blocks. We walk on a little more and I begin to experience the sensation of there being more edges than there should be on all the things around me. I can see large off-white tenement buildings that have multidimensional launderettes and jazz bars as their outsides. There is way too much stuff here, and I can almost feel the density of the landscape physically pressing on me. Just when I think I can't stand it anymore, Apollo Smintheus points to some concrete steps up ahead that seem to burrow down underneath the street. As we get closer I realize that this looks just like the entrance to a London tube station.
"Here we are," he says. "It's not the easiest way to navigate the Troposphere, but it's the easiest way to get back to yourself."
I start walking down the steps; then I realize he's not following me and I stop.
"Aren't you coming?" I say.
"Oh, I can't go down there."
"So what do I do?"
"You should have a timetable with you, on that thing ... The interface..."
"What, my console?"
"If that's what you call it, yes."
"But where am I trying to get to?"
"Yourself. I would suggest alighting at yourself before coming into the Troposphere this time. Then you can avoid the unpleasantness of the hospital visit, and those men catching up with you and so on."
"What, you mean there's going to be a station marked Ariel Manto, pub in Hertfordshire, five minutes before embarking on the journey by which she discovered the way to get back here in the first place? I mean, the paradoxes..."
"When will you stop talking about paradoxes? Your whole world is a paradox. Officially it has no beginning and no end. Nothing about it makes any sense, but it's what you seem to have created."
But I'm not really listening. I'm thinking, So the men do catch up with me, then, in the hospital scenario. I have to get out of here. Is this going to work? I don't know. But I am totally lost here in this too-dense, dark place: a city at night that I've somehow created, that somehow relates to the minds of all the people "outside." We've walked for about, what, ten Troposphere minutes to get here? It's hard to tell.
Then I hear it: the squeak of wheels. Apollo Smintheus hears it, too. His gray face crimples into a frown, and his ears twitch.
"You'd better go," he says.
"What is it?" I say.
But then it's clear what it is. The two blond KIDS are coming down the hilclass="underline" one on a skateboard and the other on a rusty bike. They're still quite far off, maybe only a quarter of the way down.
"Go," says Apollo Smintheus. "I'll do something about them."
"What if they follow me?"
"They can't go underground. Just go, now. Don't let them see you're here."
"But presumably they already know I'm here. I mean..."
"They're not following you. You're still lost. They've been following me. But I can deal with them. Just go, before they see you."
He walks off, towards the KIDS. I wonder what he's going to do to them.
"Apollo Smintheus?"
"I'll see you when you get back," he calls over his bony shoulder.
The sky is still dark, and there's another brief flash like lightning as I run down the steps. Am I safe now? I must be. But that was pretty close. I can't hear my footsteps; all I can hear is an echoey sound of dripping. The visibility down here isn't very good; every so often there's a dim orange light fixed to the concrete ceiling, but nothing other than that. As my run turns into a walk, I try to look behind me, but I can't see anything. There are more shadows than light down here. But I created this space, I think. Why didn't I just give it more lights? I try to think more light into the space, but nothing happens. It's as if this is what an underground station is, for me; and there's no way I can change my ideas about it. I keep half walking and half running through the tunnel, going deeper and deeper underground. But I can't hear anything behind me and, after several minutes of this, I conclude I am safe—for now. Now I am worried that long concrete tunnel will never end, or change. Then, suddenly, there are signs everywhere, and some dim, black-and-white computer screens presumably showing departures and arrivals. I notice that there are now stairs leading down on either side of the tunnel. The sign on the left says PLATFORM 365; the one on the right says PLATFORM 17. Where is the sense here? And how on earth am I going to work out how to get back to myself in this system?