Two tables away from Peter, Otto and Nora talked animatedly. She laughed loud and often, whereas he smoked a cigarette thoughtfully, staring at his cup of coffee, nodding occasionally.
They had set up a new protocol for in-person meetings which involved surveillance avoidance before making contact. Peter had requested a meeting because the Special Committee had sent him to Blenheim to try to prepare a comprehensive report on what had gone wrong with the Dzhugashvili operation. His day had been full of debriefings with shocked operatives, followed by a drink with Rachel White. He was looking forward to speaking to someone he did not have to lie to.
He was supposed to be alert and ready to move, but his thoughts kept wandering back to Rachel White.
She had opened up in the same way as others before her, when a bridge of trust suddenly crossed the chasm between the asset and the handler. Her motivations were classic: a feeling of being underappreciated heightened by personal tragedy. She was competent and driven, and the task of retrieving the CAMLANN file was well within her capabilities.
It should have been easy to maintain detachment, but there was a moment when he wanted to tell her the whole truth. It had felt unfair not to share something after she revealed the seed of her pain. It was like closing himself off to Astrid, only worse. He only wished there was something he could have given her in return, some reflection of the clarity he had found in Unschlicht’s room in Cambridge years ago.
* * *
Unschlicht’s suitcase had contained a machine, which Peter later learned was a predecessor of the Fialka: a typewriter keyboard with both Cyrillic and English alphabets, wired rotors and a long roll of typewriter paper.
Unschlicht flipped a switch and the machine hummed to life. Peter brushed the keys and then snatched his hand back. The metal was so cold it almost hurt to touch it.
‘Go on,’ Unschlicht said. ‘Ask him anything.’
‘What is it supposed to do?’
The philosopher made a face. ‘Not it. Him. No doubt, with their usual imprecision, Doctor Morcom and his friend Turing would call him an oracle. A more accurate term is das Dasein—how do you say?—Ah yes, the Presence.’
Back then, Peter had no idea about the existence of the Soviet overmind; Lenin’s death and transformation had not been made public. For all the world knew, the great revolutionary was still alive, leading the Red Empire with inhuman efficiency.
‘What should I ask?’
Unschlicht threw his hands up in frustration. ‘Mr Bloom, it is utterly impossible for me to comprehend your interiority or, indeed, understand it even if I could access it. I can only state what I would ask, in identical circumstances: things which I would consider intractable to conventional reasoning. For example, is there a rhino in this room, right now? That is not something I can definitely, with human reasoning, refute.’
Peter stared at him. It would be very like Unschlicht to organise some kind of bizarre philosophical experiment, a teletype machine and a graduate student who provided answers.
Very well. He was going to put the experimenters to the test.
THE GREEK SAYS ALL GREEKS ARE LIARS, he typed. TRUE OR FALSE?
The keys were stiff and their chill stung his fingers. The machine made a moaning, otherworldly sound. Then it chattered and an answer appeared on the roll of paper.
BOTH, it said.
Definitely a graduate student, thought Peter. Well, at least Unschlicht had managed to provide a diversion from his despair. Peter owed it to him to play along.
PROVE IT, he typed.
With lightning speed, the paper started filling with symbols of predicate calculus. Peter watched, perplexed, as in an impossibly concise yet perfectly lucid fashion, the Presence proved the most beautiful theorem he had ever seen.
It stated that self-referential paradoxes like the Liar were inevitable in mathematics. If you started with self-consistent assumptions, you were bound to find them eventually, no matter how rigorous your thinking. But there was a way out. Every paradox hid a leap of faith within. You had to assume that the Liar was either true or false and take it as a new axiom—thus creating a new system of thinking which, in turn, had its own Liars. And so on and so on, a tree of branching paradoxes, forever.
The Liar did not imply that mathematics was broken. It implied that mathematics was infinite.
And that was something true, not just in the world of the living or Summerland, but in all possible worlds.
Peter stared at the final line, transfixed. QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM, it said.
‘That’s impossible,’ he said.
‘Mr Bloom, I am not even going to dignify that statement with a remark.’
In The Science of Death, Mr West had speculated about the creation of artificial electric networks complex enough to bind luz stones as they fell from the Unseen, machines with souls. Was this one of them? If so, it was infinitely more advanced than the theoretical designs discussed in Dr Morcom’s lectures.
Later, he would learn how far away from the truth his notion was.
‘Tell me what this is,’ Peter said. ‘I will do anything. Please.’
Unschlicht looked at him, head in his curious bird-of-prey tilt.
‘Why, Mr Bloom, he is the Presence. The only way to know him is to become him. Now, am I to understand that this is the extent of your curiosity? How very disappointing.’
Peter stared at the keyboard. It felt like the machine filled the entire world. Its humming song vibrated in his teeth and bones.
His second question felt small and meaningless, childish even. It was not the kind of question you would expect a soulful machine to be able to answer, no matter how intelligent. But Peter was exhausted to the point of delirium, adrift in a waking dream, and in dream logic it all made sense.
He put his hands on the keyboard and typed, WHERE IS MY FATHER?
* * *
When Peter asked for the bill, Otto and Nora got up and walked away, arm in arm.
Peter followed them carefully, keeping them just within line of sight. They walked at a leisurely pace along the loud, busy street, crowded in spite of the chill and icy light rain. He ignored the sounds of electric buses and the colourful adverts for Dr Patterson’s Pills, focusing instead on faces, coats and umbrellas that might have been following Otto and Nora.
After a while, they switched places, with Peter in the lead. He used Proops Brothers, a store that sold aether-mechanical and radio parts, as a choke point. Finally, Otto indicated satisfaction by sitting down on an empty bench under dead trees in Whitfield Gardens, a small public space surrounded by Victorian houses that provided some shelter from the cold wind. Nora took her place next to him and laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.
Peter joined them on the edge of the bench and rubbed his hands together. Rediscovering the sensations of the living had its pleasures, but in all honesty, he had not missed the London winter all that much.
‘I need to come in,’ he said.
‘Already?’ Nora said. She wore a thick fur coat that made her look even bigger and rounder than last time.
‘I’m sure FELIX has his reasons,’ Otto said.
Peter said nothing for a moment. Suddenly, the idea of joining the Presence did not feel as joyful as it once had. Maybe the oversoul itself was pure, but clearly operatives like Dzhugashvili could misinterpret its instructions. Was that why George had defected, in the end?
He wondered what would happen if he went back to Rachel White and confessed everything. He instantly recoiled from the thought. Being a triple agent was as close to Hell as Peter could imagine, and the system of Tickets and Summerland was something he had rejected long ago. Unschlicht would have admonished him for muddy thinking.