Paul Cornell
THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS
It was because of a row. The row was about nothing. So it all came from nothing. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say it came from the interaction between two people. I remember how Ben’s voice suddenly became gentle and he said, as if decanting the whole unconscious reason for the row:
‘Why don’t we try for a baby?’
This was mid-March. My memory of that moment is of hearing birds outside. I always loved that time of year, that sense of nature becoming stronger all around. But I always owned the decisions I made, I didn’t blame them on what was around me, or on my hormones. I am what’s around me, I am my hormones, that’s what I always said to myself. I don’t know if Ben ever felt the same way. That’s how I think of him now: always excusing himself. I don’t know how that squares with how the world is now. Perhaps it suits him down to the ground. I’m sure I spent years looking out for him excusing himself. I’m sure me doing that was why, in the end, he did.
I listened to the birds. ‘Yes,’ I said.
We got lucky almost immediately. I called my mother and told her the news.
‘Oh no,’ she said.
When the first trimester had passed, and everything was still fine, I told my boss and then my colleagues at the Project, and arranged for maternity leave. ‘I know you lot are going to go over the threshold the day after I leave,’ I told my team. ‘You’re going to call me up at home and you’ll be all, “Oh, hey, Lindsey is currently inhabiting her own brain at age three! She’s about to try to warn the authorities about some terrorist outrage or other. But pregnancy must be such a joy”.’
‘Again with this,’ said Alfred. ‘We have no reason to believe the subjects would be able to do anything other than listen in to what’s going on in the heads of their younger selves—’
‘Except,’ said Lindsey, stepping back into this old argument like I hadn’t even mentioned hello, baby, ‘the maths rules out even the possibility—’
‘Free will—’
‘No. It’s becoming clearer with every advance we make back into what was: what’s written is written.’
Our due date was Christmas Day.
People who were shown around the Project were always surprised at how small the communication unit was. It had to be; most of the time it was attached to the skull of a sedated rhesus monkey. ‘It’s just a string of lights,’ someone once said. And we all looked appalled, to the point where Ramsay quickly led the guest away.
They were like Christmas lights, each link changing colour to show how a different area of the monkey’s brain was responding to the data coming back from the other mind, probably its own mind, that it was connected to, somewhen in the past. Or, we thought only in our wildest imaginings then, in the future.
Christmas lights. Coincidence and association thread through this, so much, when such things can only be illusions. Or artifice. Cartoons in the margin.
How can one have coincidence, when everything is written?
I always thought my father was too old to be a dad. It often seemed to me that Mum was somehow too old to have me too, but that wasn’t the case, biologically. It was just that she came from another time, a different world, of austerity, of shying away from rock and roll. She got even older after Dad died. Ironically, I became pregnant at the same age she had been.
We went to see her: me, Ben, and the bump. She didn’t refer to it. For the first hour. She kept talking about her new porch. Ben started looking between us, as if waiting to see who would crack first. Until he had to say it, over tea. ‘So, the baby! You must be looking forward to being a grandmother!’
Mum looked wryly at him. ‘Not at my age.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s all right. You two can do what you want. I’ll be gone soon.’
We stayed for an hour or two more, talking about other things, about that bloody porch, and then we waved goodbye and drove off and I parked the car as soon as we were out of sight of the house. ‘Let’s kill her,’ I said.
‘Absolutely.’
‘I shouldn’t say that. I so shouldn’t say that. She will be gone soon. It’s selfish of me to want to talk about the baby—’
‘When we could be talking about that really very lovely porch. You could have led with how your potentially Nobel Prize–winning discovery of time travel is going.’
‘She didn’t mention that either.’
‘She is proud of you, I’m sure. Did something—? I mean, did anything ever… happen, between you, back then?’
I shook my head. There was not one particular moment. I was not an abused child. This isn’t a story about abuse.
I closed my eyes. I listened to the endless rhythm of the cars going past.
The Project was created to investigate something that I’d found in the case histories of schizophrenics. Sufferers often describe a tremendous sensation of now, the terrifying hugeness of the current moment. They often find voices talking to them, other people inside their own heads seemingly communicating with them. I started using the new brain-mapping technology to look into the relationship between the schizoid mind and time. Theory often follows technology, and in this case it was a detailed image of particle trails within the mind of David, a schizophrenic, that handed the whole theory to me in a single moment. It was written that I saw that image and made those decisions. Now when I look back to that moment, it’s almost like I didn’t do anything. Except that what happened in my head in that moment has meant so much to me.
I saw many knotted trails in that image, characteristic of asymmetric entanglement. I saw that, unlike in the healthy minds we’d seen, where there are only a couple of those trails at any given moment (and who knows what those are, even today?), this mind was connected, utterly, to… other things that were very similar to itself. I realised instantly what I was looking at: What could those other things that were influencing all those particle trails be but other minds? And where were those other minds very like this one—?
And then I had a vision of the trails in my own mind, like Christmas lights, and that led me to the next moment when I knew consciously what I had actually understood an instant before, as if I had divined it from the interaction of all things—
The trails led to other versions of this person’s own mind, elsewhen in time.
I remember that David was eager to cooperate. He wanted to understand his condition. He’d been a journalist before admitting himself to the psychiatric hospital.
‘I need to tear, hair, fear, ear, see… yes, see, what’s in here!’ he shouted, tapping the front of his head with his middle fingers. ‘Hah, funny, the rhymes, crimes, alibis, keep trying to break out of those, and it works, that works, works. Hello!’ He sat suddenly and firmly down and took a very steady-handed sip from his plastic cup of water. ‘You asked me to stay off the drugs,’ he said, ‘so it’s difficult. And I would like to go back on them. I would very much like to. After.’
I had started, ironically, to see him as a slice across a lot of different versions of himself, separated by time. I saw him as all his minds, in different phases, interfering with each other. Turn that polarised view the other way, and you’d have a series of healthy people. That’s what I thought. And I wrote that down offhandedly somewhere, in some report. His other selves weren’t the ‘voices in his head’. That’s a common fallacy about the history of our work. Those voices were the protective action that distances a schizophrenic from those other selves. They were characters formed around the incursion, a little bit of interior fiction. We’re now told that a ‘schizophrenic’ is someone who has to deal with such random interference for long stretches of time.