A Spy in Time Read online

  The steam and hot water gave way to a shivering minute under an ice-cold bucket. Shanumi turned here and there in the spray, sending water everywhere, before ducking out to dry herself. She didn’t look away while I washed myself.

  When I got out she was in a friendlier frame of mind, ready to talk.

  “I watched Gone with the Wind last night. It must be the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen it. Do you happen to know it?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Shanumi passed the electric discharger over her body. She parked it on the table for me.

  “You should see it, Eleven. I should have made you see it as a condition of your education. Scarlett O’Hara is a spectacular woman. I watched Lawrence of Arabia as well. The twentieth century had actors and actresses. They didn’t rely on acting algorithms or fantasize about digital actors. For all its cruelty, I find the old world sympathetic for that reason alone. You know that I work from intuition first of all. It’s the mood, the feeling that gets into you from what is on the screen. You need that before you arrive in person.”

  “Getting into character.”

  “If you want to call it that. The past is a foreign country and it is a country of the imagination. A case officer, in a foreign country, lives in her head first of all. Most of what happens, on an assignment, happens in her head.”

  Shanumi examined herself in the mirror, holding her breath for a minute. She went on: “In the field people will look at you. I guarantee it. Maybe they haven’t seen a black man who holds himself in a certain way. Maybe they haven’t seen a black woman like me. Maybe they want to provoke you. Maybe it’s nothing. The best policy is to tell yourself that you’re imagining it and go about the assignment as you have seen it unfold. That’s how the black child was raised.”

  Shanumi Six finished changing while I used the discharger on myself, wondering what I could do with this piece of advice. I never had to worry about standing out in Johannesburg. I ran the discharger over my arms, my chest, along my feet, and up to my belly. The tingle started just below the skin. It crackled in the nerves in my teeth and left the taste of ozone in my mouth.

  The velvet line of the sterilizer ran the breadth of the room, completing the cycle. In conjunction with the universal serum, the sterilizing process suppressed the myriad germs, bugs, fleas and flies, microscopic fungi and algae which we carried on our persons.

  It wasn’t unpleasant. After the shampoo and discharger, you were left smelling delicately of chamomile. I sensed it on myself as I changed into the outfit provided by the costume department—dungarees and a short-sleeved shirt. I smoothed the locket away beneath the collar of the shirt, picked up the satchel which had been prepared. After many years of training, I was looking forward to being in the field.

  Above our heads, the city of Johannesburg, the first and last city of our century, ticked with radiation. The catacomb city. Its reef, honeycombed with a hundred thousand miles of mining tunnels, had been our salvation in the days of the supernova.

  The way to the arch was closely guarded by the computer consultants, placed in rows in the rooms adjacent to the corridor, nervous pairs of blue-and-red sparks in their faces. They were the stalwarts of the Agency. They managed the schedules of case officers and residents, calculated changes in causality and the energy budget, and deposited their findings in the immortal archives. They wrote the books of the consultants, which were as close to prophecy as a sentient being could come. But they weren’t the prophets that some people hoped for. The books they produced were of no use to any individual person. Composed in possibility and probability script, they were notoriously difficult to decipher.

  The security check lasted a few minutes. Shanumi went on while we waited for the door to open.

  “If something happens to you, Eleven, if somehow you and your reflection part company in the field, I will be vilified backwards and forwards in time. I will be portrayed as the one who brought the whole contraption down. In other words, I have my reputation to consider.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m glad to have your understanding on this issue.” She took out a pair of glasses and polished them with a corner of her handkerchief before she replaced them in her pocket. “Today will be more important than you can imagine: to establish a proper view of Keswyn Muller’s activities in the region and report back to the consultants in short order. It’s good that we are of one mind.”

  I couldn’t tell if Shanumi was pulling my leg about the importance of our assignment. Why would a first-time case officer like myself be deployed on a vital mission? What did I have to contribute? I worried about it and my own worthiness for two minutes. Then I gave up trying to understand before the barrier opened to admit us into the transfer complex. Canisters of super-cooled hydrogen were piled up at the entrance. An automatic bulldozer was ferrying them two by two deeper into the center.

  To my surprise, there were no human beings at the archway—only more consultants following the preparations, their bronze heads and hands studying the consoles. The gantry vanished into the ceiling. The hum of the solar plant rose to a furious pitch and then subsided, having filled the battery.

  We stood in front of a whirlpool turning at a merry clip in the air. I swallowed. Shanumi looked at me without a hint of approval.

  “Do you have the pills?”

  I put a hand to my neck to remember the locket. The silver was warm on my skin. “I have both of them.”

  “So do I.”

  The clocks flashed on the wall. Through fluorescent tubes, a large quantity of plasma poured into the machine, keeping the whirlpool in motion before our eyes. Shanumi took her position on the grate and looked back at me. The consultants seemed to raise their heads in unison. The arch appeared around the whirlpool, its horseshoe form as unmistakeable as a letter.

  I stood and counted but couldn’t breathe properly. I feared being engulfed by people who, for the most part, had disappeared centuries ago from the face of the planet. The men and women at the Agency who were in charge of my training had never entirely understood from my psychological chart that I suffered from a tendency to faint under pressure. I kept my head down and hoped that my Six couldn’t tell how frightened I was.

  Fortunately for me, there was a space to recover my wits—an old custom before traveling. Just as the old Russians did before a journey, we observe a minute of silence before stepping under the sign of the arch. We steal a glance at photographs of our dear ones which we’re allowed to carry. We close our eyes and remember the name of the founder, S Natanson, along with the stories of the case officers, coming before and after us in the centuries, who made or will make the greatest sacrifice and whose thoughts and atoms are scattered in the manifold of space and time. We may even remember to curse the idea of a multiverse for the abomination that it is.

  Then we put the past and the future behind us to concentrate on the here and now. We pass into the whirlpool, see spirals of gold and green extending from behind our eyelids to infinity, hear music which can never be played on earthly synthesizers, feel the cosmic wind in our face like a whoosh, and emerge into another sunshine…

  I dropped eight feet and landed hard on my back. But I didn’t have time to think about the surprise. I turned, hitting the side of my head on cement, lay there for a minute, blood in my mouth too winded to speak.

  When I got up, I found myself on an extensive rooftop partitioned by washing lines. My Six was in the far corner, no worse for wear except for the dust on her clothes.

  “What do you see, Eleven?”

  The sky was long and high, blue as a robin’s egg. The mountains stood in a semicircle around the town. Stretches of parched land alternated with irrigated squares. I didn’t remember the view from the recording. According to the itinerary, we should never have been up here.

  My attention was drawn to the rail yards. A train was arriving underneath
a plume of oily brown smoke, sweeping men and animals from the track as it went into the station. Tents were pegged in front of the station. A string of camels rested on a piece of open ground.

  I counted the points of interest out loud so that my Six would know I was paying attention. “Moving train. Trucks. One light plane, but it is too high to be a spotter in my opinion. No outward sign of trouble. I’ll go down, Shanumi, and see what it’s like at ground level.”

  The top of a ladder extended onto the roof, its rusty iron claws set in the cement. I went over and climbed down the building.

  Five floors of yellow brick passed with no facing windows until I found myself alone in an alleyway. At the far end was the bright corner of a street, as clear as a window opened into daylight. From it came the sounds of men and animals, then the rattle of a. I was so relieved to be there, on the loose in the lost city of Marrakesh, that I forgot I had hit my head.

  Shanumi came down the ladder and showed me her calculations.

  “We are seven hundred yards out of position, compared to the recording. Unbelievable. It’s the budget cuts. How are we supposed to do our jobs? They save small change, scrimp on equipment, and put the lives of innocent case officers in jeopardy.”

  “I didn’t know the consultants could make mistakes.”

  “What is the doctrine? When things fail, come back to the doctrine. Every mistake, when you trace it back, is a human mistake. That is the doctrine. We have never empowered the consultants to make mistakes on our behalf. See if anyone is watching us.”

  I walked to the mouth of the alley. Men passed on the opposite side without paying attention to me. They were as white as sheets. I went back, chilled. I knew that they were only Middle Easterners and North Africans, but some reactions are instinctive.

  There was worse to come. The main square lay between us and our destination, the Grand Marrakesh Hotel. The streets were narrow and lined with booths open to examination. In back rooms, sheep carcasses turned on spits, running with roast fat.

  On one road there was a line of tailors, old men sewing buttons or measuring their customers’ arms and legs. On the next we found jewelry shops and watch repairers, silk shops, and religious schools. My panic rose as the streets became busier. I had to get used to being in such proximity to ghostly men and women. To my relief none of them paid any undue attention to us.

  There were a few other black men, digging on the side of the road, but I tried not to make any sign of recognition. Shanumi walked through the crowds without a sign of fear. She had tied a scarf around her head but she was still, without a doubt, the roughest- and toughest-looking woman for a hundred years in either direction.

  The Grand Marrakesh Hotel lived up to its name. It was a six-story pale-stone building between two private houses. I remembered it from the recording. You went through a marble archway and past a carp pond attended by benches, whiskered bronze fish nosing through the greenish-black water. The foyer behind the garden was lined with rows of rattan chairs.

  On the right-hand side, a dealer in precious stones was announced by a sign in five languages. He sat at a high wooden desk, a pair of scales and a loupe at his elbow. He wore brown sunglasses and never moved his head as we went past.

  The desk clerk was more solicitous. He wore a double-breasted suit and cuff links. I recognized him also.

  “You are not from here, I can see. How can I help, monsieur and madame?”

  “We need two rooms. One for the young monsieur and the larger one for myself.”

  The clerk opened his book and let us see the long-ruled pages with lists of names.

  “Our visitors will usually have sent a telegram ahead, or booked a trunk call with the manager. Given the time of year, many of our rooms have been reserved for over a month.”

  Shanumi produced a set of traveller’s checks. She placed them on the desk, rubbed their gilt corners, and took out her fountain pen.

  “Money is not an object. Therefore, my dear sir, let us have the best available.”

  Our adjoining rooms occupied a corner of the fourth floor. I went to the window to contemplate the scene. Two women in slacks were playing on the tennis courts, their strokes audible four floors up. Behind them lay the conch of a swimming pool, slopping with emerald water. High walls separated the grounds from the bustle of the town.

  Shanumi Six had selected the hotel, a sign of the latitude given to her by the consultants on the planning commission. Case officers were usually placed in boarding houses or motels where nobody kept records or made much of an effort to remember a face. When I had been inducted into the Agency, the lady in charge on the first day had explained our tradition of restraint in the time-honored way. She set out a game of pick-up sticks on the floor in front of us, distributing the pieces as S Natanson had once done with his recruits. The point was to take the one or two things you needed each turn, as neatly as you could, and leave everything else in place.

  Shanumi, from what I had seen, didn’t believe in playing the same game. Maybe once you got to a certain level, the rules didn’t apply.

  In any case, I knocked on her door and she emerged in a slip and pair of sandals, glancing suspiciously up and down the corridor. I was afraid to look at her bare shoulders. She didn’t notice my discomfort and had me sit in a tasseled chair, returning to the bed where she had disassembled the beacon.

  “All good?” I said.

  “In a word, no. It’s unprecedented to have an error like this occur and have no word from the Agency. They should have picked it up even before it happened and should have sent somebody to fix it. Compare what we’re seeing with how we saw the mission unfold on the record. Therefore, I conclude that everything back home has descended into a state of high entropy, bordering on the catastrophic. And you will never know me to exaggerate.”

  Indeed, I had not known my Six to exaggerate. Despite her independence she was a good case officer, and a good case officer liked to have everything happen in the precise order foretold by the recordings. Each stick picked in the right sequence. Otherwise, the world was going to end. Worse: the multiverse was going to take hold and a hundred thousand worlds would end, an untold multiplication of suffering.

  In unfriendly corners of the government, it was believed that the Agency itself was given to exaggeration to justify its budget. Politicians noted that despite the talk of a main enemy, lurking in the corridors of time, a true rival to the Agency had never yet appeared. What remained constant was its mandate as given by S Natanson: to preserve the past in its perfection and imperfection; to protect the narrow route that led humanity as a species through the blinding dark of the supernova; to prevent the splitting of the unity of time into endless contradictory strands.

  After a few minutes, I knelt beside the bed and tried to help Shanumi put the beacon back together. I couldn’t be much use because I had to avoid the connections which were labelled with possibility characters, unwilling to remind her of my illiteracy. As the beacon took shape, my Six relaxed. She fixed the crystal on the inside, the clasp of her hair iron doubling as a soldering iron. It hissed like a snake, producing an unearthly blue spark with which you could melt any metal in the universe. I studied my reflection in the long mirror affixed to the door, trying to spot if there had been any change.

  When the beacon was properly repaired and locked in the safe, Shanumi adjusted her hair in the same mirror, putting every peppercorn in place.

  She talked without turning her head from her reflection. “We should be on guard, in other words something is in motion that has yet to be explained.”

  “I’ll be on the lookout.”

  “My plan is to stick to the itinerary and call in afterwards. If we call in now, they will simply take us out of the mission. If it goes wrong, the consultants will know where to find our bodies.”

  I carefully carried the equipment to the stairs. I knew Shanumi wasn’t
exaggerating. Operational security was paramount. If anybody inspected our belongings, he would find nothing more suspicious than a telephoto lens, an abacus, and what looked like a radio direction finder. I had packed a set of blank postcards which would reproduce in holographic precision any scene I wanted to capture. They would be no more than mesh until activated by a lab five hundred years distant from old Morocco.

  The lookout point was an active warehouse, a ten-minute taxi ride from the hotel. From the recording, I remembered the warehouse right down to the layout of the electric bulbs on the ceiling. The loading bay was open to the street. Men were squatting around it, arguing with one another or smoking cigarettes.

  The floor was covered in sheep pelts, more of which were being unloaded from a van. There was an animal stench in the atmosphere, so piercing it seemed to come out of my dream.

  The overseer approached us, his face nearly white. I repeated, under my breath, what I knew he was going to say. I had a feeling of terrible power. I also had a terrible fear of him which made no sense.

  “What do you two want?”

  I said, “We’re here to see Cassim.”

  His eyes narrowed. He spat on the side. “What does a black fellow want to see Cassim for?” He turned to Shanumi, a look of incomprehension on his face. “As for you, my lady, aren’t you in the wrong part of town?”

  She pointed to the backpack. “We have a delivery.”

  “You can leave it with me.”

  “He has to sign and send a letter back.”

  The man looked Shanumi up and down. He couldn’t have seen anyone like her in his life and I could tell that it set him back. He didn’t know whether to hate her or fear her, whether to throw himself at her feet.