The prisoner spoke for the first time.
‘They drowned my child,’ she said slowly. ‘Not me.’
‘They put it in the sink and held your hands upon it. The flesh that touched it as its half-minute of life came to an end was yours. It was still tied to your body by its cord. You drowned it. Just as you drowned your other babies. The babies of the rapes.’
‘Yes. I drowned those.’
‘Because they were from the seed of your violators?’
‘No. Because I had learnt by then that children of the gulags are better off dead. We are all better off dead and the younger the death the less painful the life that precedes it.’
‘Why then don’t you kill yourself, KT503b678?’
The prisoner sighed. An exhalation of utter sadness that seemed to drift over the high, thick, defensive walls of her ferocious anger. She turned her face upwards. Towards the shadows of the great vaulted ceiling that once had resonated to the music of divine choirs.
‘Death is the only friend I have and I long for its embrace,’ she said, ‘but I will not kill myself.’ Her anger was returning. ‘I will make the Party kill me.’
‘The Party doesn’t kill, KT503b678. It is kind and compassionate. The Great Navigator cares for all his children, even those who have lost their way. The Party doesn’t kill. It educates.’
‘By rape and torture. By killing babies.’
‘Yes. By killing babies,’ and now it was the Comrade Master’s turn to sigh. ‘How can that be?’ His voice was suddenly suffused with sadness. ‘Infanticide as a tool of government? How did we arrive at such a desperate state of affairs?’
He drew up a chair quite close to the cage and sat down on it. His three companions gathered round him as if forming a guard. There was fear on all their faces. Desperate fear. But also a desperate sort of hope.
‘KT503b678, I should like to discuss history with you,’ the Comrade Master said.
‘And I only wish to kill you,’ KT503b678 replied.
‘No, no, you mustn’t kill me,’ the Master went on. ‘We are the same, you and I.’
‘We’re not the same, Comrade Master. I hate the Party from my very soul and you are its creature.’
‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because a man serves something he is its creature. I take a practical view. Since the only way to survive and to live in some modicum of comfort in this world that the Party made is to serve the Party, then of course I serve it. But I am not its creature. I despise it every bit as much as you do. Like you, I hate it from my soul.’
‘Did it murder your babies?’
‘Yes, it did, as a matter of fact. Although my babies were never flesh and blood,’ he replied. ‘My babies were art and culture. Learning. Literature. Paintings and poetry. The many parts of beauty, which is a tender and delicate infant, and the Party killed it before I was even born.’
KT503b678 wasn’t listening any more. She had been subjected to so many and so varied forms of interrogation in the past that she had long since ceased to wonder why the functionaries of the Party asked or said the things they did. Double-think was second nature to them. Besides, she’d spied something at her feet, a screw lost during the construction of her cage. Perhaps she could use it to pick the locks. Perhaps then she could stick it into this Comrade Master of College’s eye and press it through to the brain with her thumb. Then perhaps finally they’d have to kill her and she’d be released. To sleep at last like the man she loved and their baby.
‘But I have seen that infant’s many ghosts,’ the Comrade Master continued. ‘We keep them hidden here. Forbidden manuscripts and pictures, ancient texts and forgotten learning. Secreted deep in shadowy vaults. Squirrelled away in long-forgotten wall cavities. Buried in cobwebbed tombs – I have seen something of what has been lost.’
She had the screw now. Between her toes; she had only to continue to clench them until the point when they freed her arms and then she would have a tool and a weapon. In the past she’d killed and killed again with less resource than that.
‘And so, KT503b678, I would like to ask you a question.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Please,’ the Master went on, ‘answer my question and I promise I shall let you keep that piece of sharp metal that you have clenched between your toes.’
KT503b678 looked at him in surprise. Most Party people were idiots. So caught up in their own self-importance and self-preservation that they noticed nothing. You could trick them and fool them and they never knew. This one was different.
She nodded. ‘All right. Ask me your question, Comrade Master of College.’
The Master sat silent for a moment. He took from the pocket of his dungarees an ancient yellow parchment and looked down at it, seeming to draw inspiration from its contents.
‘If you could change one thing in history,’ he asked, ‘if you had the opportunity to go back into the past, just once, to one place and one time and change one thing, where would you go? What would you do?’
41
‘I WOULD CHANGE nothing, Sir Isaac,’ Master Bentley said firmly, while refilling the wine glasses. ‘I would leave both well and ill alone.’
‘Yes, Mr Bentley,’ Newton replied, nodding sadly and looking, if it were possible, even older than his eighty-four years. ‘So would I.’
They had been debating Newton’s question, considering the mistakes of history and the current condition of humanity, asking themselves whether some change to the former might improve the latter, and they had been forced to conclude that, deeply unsatisfactory though Britain in 1727 was, pox-ridden, semibankrupt, riven with religious and dynastic strife and in constant danger of a Jacobite revolution from the Scots, nonetheless it was developing along sufficiently satisfactory lines to make any idea of tinkering with its history too big a risk to contemplate.
‘Any hypothetical change,’ Bentley observed, ‘no matter how minor, would immediately open up the possibility of an infinite number of unknowable variables. We might make matters worse.’
‘Exactly. We might very well make matters worse,’ Newton agreed, staring out of the window, against which a heavy rain was rattling, ‘and I have wrestled with the horror of that possibility these thirty years past. It has tormented my days and haunted my nights. It has made my life a misery.’
‘But why, Sir Isaac?’ Bentley replied with an indulgent smile. ‘After all, it’s just a game. We cannot actually alter the past.’
‘No, sir, we cannot.’
‘Well, then. Put away these angry thoughts and enjoy the wine.’
‘But three hundred years from now an opportunity will arise whereby others can.’
‘Alter the past? Surely you’re not serious?’
‘Deadly so, Master Bentley. It may be that those people of the future discover this possibility themselves, in which case my conscience is clear. But if they don’t? Should I guide them to it? That is the question which makes my every waking moment a torture and every dream a nightmare.’
Master Bentley tried not to laugh. It was clear to him that Newton’s great age had enfeebled his mind.
‘Well,’ he replied, in the tone that people are apt to use towards the very old when asking if they enjoyed their supper or if they want their cushions plumped, ‘perhaps best not to worry about it, eh? Three hundred years is, after all, a long time away.’
Newton frowned angrily and shifted impatiently in his seat. The nostrils of his famous long nose flared.
‘A long time, Master Bentley? You think so?’ he asked. ‘By what measure is it a long time?’