It was a prayer he’d whispered many times before—his own four-year-old niece had been frozen in a tube of liquid nitrogen, dead of terminal cancer, the summer before.
Pip wept into his helmet tenderly, from sheer compassion. His torchbeam danced over the frozen brain aquarium.
Sole carried Vidya through the frozen fields by the same route as he’d come. Though it was the longer way round to his house, it was less public. He was less likely to meet anyone. As he walked, the cold air began to penetrate Vidya’s sleep. The boy had never felt such cold before. His lips tasted it and twitched. His cheeks blushed with it. His skin crawled.
Sole crossed the road where he’d parted from Pierre and set his eyes on the blue car parked by his house. The Volkswagen spelt mobility. Escape.
He held the boy tight, loving him and hating all else, as the child’s lips began to mumble sounds.
Vidya’s eyes opened, and he stared blankly at the great blue vault of sky and towering skeletons of trees.
Eileen and Pierre came out to meet him, Pierre catching hold of her arm to stop her when he saw the boy.
“Chris—what sort of game is this?”
She stared at Vidya and the boy stared back, locking on her eyes disconcertingly.
“You’ve brought an Indian boy back from Brazil?”
“Chris brought nothing but himself and me. That’s one of their experiments from the Unit. They usually keep them under lock and key—Chris must have flipped his lid bringing him here—”
Inside the house, a telephone bell began to jangle.
Pierre took his hand off Eileen’s arm, belatedly.
“Shall I answer? I can guess what it is. You mightn’t realize it, Eileen, but your Chris has just torn his precious career up and thrown the pieces in the air.”
She stared at the Frenchman in bewilderment.
“What—?”
“Chris has just committed a huge breach of security. Though God knows why. It doesn’t look like he does—”
Chris hugged the boy, and gazed down at him.
“Fortunately he’s healthy,” he said, as much to himself as to Eileen or Pierre. “There’s nothing physically wrong with him. He’s bright. Look at him taking it all in, cunning little bugger—”
Pierre gestured questioningly at the house, where the telephone kept on ringing. But Eileen wasn’t paying attention. She stared from her husband to the child in its ill-fitting clothes. Pierre shrugged and went indoors to take the call.
“Do you mean this kid is yours, Chris?”
“Why yes! Who’s else?”
“But… when? How? Is this what you dragged Pierre here to witness—this shabby domestic intrigue? This petty tit for tat. After you’ve been away such a time you can only produce this gesture—you petty hateful nobody!”
Vidya stared at her face twisted by anger. His fists balled up inside his gloves. His body arched against the restraint of clothes. He writhed about like a snake in Sole’s embrace as the cold air stung his face.
Sole stared at his wife. Her outburst puzzled him. It seemed so paranoid and irrelevant. He hadn’t even been away ‘such a time’—it was less than two weeks.
“I didn’t screw some bitch foreign nurse if that’s what you think! Vidya is the child of my—my mind.”
“So Peter isn’t a product of your precious mind? A cruel trick, Chris, bringing Pierre here to rub it in.”
“That’s an accident, Pierre being here. Honestly. My God, why should it be a trick?”
“Can I see into your heart any better than you can yourself? Do I know why your subconscious needs a set-piece like this?”
“Setpiece? What the hell are you talking about!”
“Pierre arriving. Then your dramatic entry with your ’real’ child in your arms. That’s a child of the mind is it? I can’t compete with that. What on earth is a child of the mind!”
The boy’s eyes flashed from Sole to his wife and back again. The electricity of words flowed between them, and he fed on it greedily. Sole had to hold him tighter as his limbs flexed and he twisted about in his arms. It was all emotional nonsense Eileen was talking. It didn’t make sense. The idea of bringing Pierre here hadn’t been that at all. It had been—generosity. An attempt to give her something, not take something away, or humiliate her.
“I don’t suppose I can stay here anyhow. Have you got the car keys? I’ll have to take him somewhere else.”
“This is beyond me. You just… simply… amaze me.”
Sole began to feel a curious light-headedness.
Eileen was receding into the background. The house, the car, the landscape were all changing subtly. Still there, but—different.
He was still seeing familiar things; but seeing them as though this was the first time he had set eyes on them. The familiar things were at the same time infinitely strange and fresh. They had taken on an unsettling double life. Their colours were faded and at the same time bright. Their shapes fitted in neatly to his customary picture of things—and simultaneously were oddly distorted and foreshortened as though the rules of perspective were being interfered with.
The house, as well as being a house, was now a giant red box of plastic bricks. The car was a Volkswagen saloon—and also a great plastic and glass spheroid of no very obvious function.
Eileen stood before him—a flat figure posturing on a screen suspended in mid-air.
Beyond, a barren plateau stretched out into infinite distance, unable to terminate itself with any solid boundary. Panic mounted in him as he searched for the boundaries that ought to be there, and were not. The most he could locate was a circular zone of confused light, very far away. Or was it very far away? Or very near? He couldn’t tell—and when he tried to concentrate on the problem, the world flashed in and out at him, frighteningly, growing alternately very large and very small. In that confused zone far off, lines of sight broke down and vanishing points stubbornly refused to vanish. He tried to fashion a wall out of that medley of lights and darks far off—but the wall, half-completed, flowed in at him and out again, flexing and contracting about him, as though he had been swallowed by a soft glass stomach he could see through—and the stomach walls pulsed in and out while its acids nibbled at his bare skin, licking it with a harsh invisible tongue.
From this unbounded, menacing plateau sprung at intervals stiff towering giants, balanced upon great solitary legs, waving their hundreds of arms and thousands of fingers slackly overhead.
Above their reach was more of the great opaque stomach—its foggy depths were coloured blue, up there. They fled away and raced towards him, compressing him to a tiny spot, then inflating him till it seemed his head would burst with thinking of it.
Then he did an impossible thing.
He twisted about, in fright, in his own grasp; for an instant, saw both himself holding, and himself being held—saw the Self that held him, and saw the Self he held; the two sights superimposed on one another. Almost as soon as it formed, this double vision fell apart, and the two states began to alternate separately before his horrified eyes.
Rapidly, the two versions of Himself speeded up their substitutions of one another—quickening pace till they were flashing before his gaze like a film and producing a sickening illusion of continuity—but continuity in being two separate places at once.
Soon the visions fused again—and he was holding on to himself, and struggling against himself, not knowing which was the true state.
As before, the double vision shattered. He was Sole the Man staring in fear and nausea into the Boy’s eyes. But these eyes swelled into deep pools. Mirrors. Saucers of glass. He could see himself reflected in them, at the same time as he saw himself through them.