Ghostwritten Read online

  ‘No worries, thanks. I grew up with five brothers, so I can handle two Swedes. We get to UB in thirty-six hours. Plus, there’s a hunky Danish guy in the bunk below me . . . You travelling alone too, Mo?’

  ‘Yes, all alone.’

  Sherry gave me that look.

  ‘Great heavens, no! I’ve got a husband and a teenage son waiting at home.’

  ‘You must be missing them. They must be missing you.’

  What a perfect pair of sentences. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve got a flask of Chinese powdered lemon tea. Join me? It’s the real McCoy.’

  It was nice to speak to a woman in my own language again. ‘I would love to.’

  We talked until we got to the Mongolian border, where the train’s wheels were changed to fit the old Soviet gauge, and I realised how lonely I had become.

  Maybe it was just the caffeine in Sherry’s tea, but when I next glanced at the black book I saw how utterly obvious the answer was: Trebevij’s constant broke the logjam. Mo, you’re a deadhead. I worked for what seemed a little while longer, and before I knew it the dining-car staff were starting the breakfast shift.

  The islands, cities, forests, all left behind. Dawn welled up over the open grasslands of central Asia. I was an extremely tired, middle-aged, morally troubled quantum physicist with a very uncertain future, but I had gone somewhere no one else had ever been. I wobbled back to my compartment and slept for over a day.

  Accepted wisdom accuses Dr Frankenstein of hubris.

  I don’t think he was playing God. I think he was just being a scientist.

  Can nuclear technology or genetically engineered parsnips or quantum cognition be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? The only words for technology is ‘here’, or ‘not here’. The question is, once here, what are we going to do with it?

  Dr Frankenstein did a runner, and that was his crime. He left his technology at the mercy of people who did what ignorant humans habitually do: throw stones and scream. If the good Doctor had shown his brainchild how to survive, adapt, and protect itself, all that gothic gore could have been saved, and transplant technology jumpstarted two centuries early.

  I see what you’re saying, Mo, but how can you teach an engine to recognise right and wrong? To arm itself against abuse?

  Look at the black book. If Quancog isn’t sentience, give me another name for it.

  The telephone rang as I cracked my egg. It was next to John, so he answered. ‘Billy?’

  John said nothing for a long time.

  Bad news.

  ‘Right-o.’ He put the receiver down.

  I knew it.

  ‘That was Billy, phoning from The Drum and Monkey in Baltimore. There are three Americans who look like The Blues Brothers coming over. The St Fachtna has developed some mysterious engine trouble, so won’t be coming back this morning, but he’s got to come back this evening. Danny Waite’s low on insulin, and there’s more rough weather for the rest of the week.’

  A sharp spade cut through the earth, roots, peat and pebbles.

  ‘Ma,’ Liam was gripping my forearm. ‘We’ve got to get you away!’

  Planck started barking. There was a bang on the door. Was it beginning now?

  Liam led me through into the back. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Brendan Mickledeen!’

  The door opened. What a feverish farce the morning was turning into. Brendan was out of breath. Air from outside, sweet and sharp. ‘Mo, Billy told me the Yanks have come. We can get you on Roisin’s boat to Schull. From there my sister-in-law can drive you to Ballydehob. After that—’

  I held up my hand. ‘How – how does everyone know about this?’

  It was a shock to hear Brendan raise his voice. ‘Clear Island looks after its own! McDermott’s boat is waiting! There’s not time to squabble about who told who what.’

  I imagined it, peering into that possible reality. I would start running now, a journey of peering through taxi windows, raised newspapers, lowered umbrellas, up to Belfast maybe. And then what? Overseas again, if I can get that far, to some cheap country, all the while carrying the only extant blueprint for New Earth’s computer.

  What path through the park brought you here, Mo?

  It had become very quiet.

  John cleared his throat. ‘It’s time to decide, love. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Brendan, thank you. But I cannot outrun the Pentagon using the Republic of Ireland’s public transport. I came back to face the music. That’s what I’m going to do.’

  Brendan took out his asthma ventilator, shook it and inhaled. ‘Gabriel, me and the boys are ready to show the Yanks what we’re made of.’

  I could pop with all the fear, irritation and love. ‘There’s going to be no fighting and no running.’

  Liam frowned. ‘Then what are you going to do, Ma?’

  I hoped I sounded braver than I felt. ‘Pack.’

  Quantum Physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty. You can know the position of an electron but you cannot know where it’s going, or where it is by the time you register the reading. John went blind. Or you can know its direction, but you cannot know its position. Heinz Formaggio at Light Box read my Belfast papers and offered me a job. The particles in the atoms of the brain of that young man who pulled me out of the path of the taxi in London were configured so that he was there, and able to, and willing to. Even the most complete knowledge of a radioactive atom will not tell you when it will decay. I don’t know when the Texan will be here. Nowhere does the microscopic world stop and the macroscopic world begin.

  Liam had to stoop under the roof beams of John’s bedroom. Our bedroom. I remembered the first day he managed to get up the stairs on his own, arse-first, step by step, his face like Edmund Hillary’s.

  ‘Liam?’

  ‘Your wart’s gone, Ma.’

  ‘Well, so it has. Isn’t that something?’

  ‘Ma! You can’t just go without a fight.’

  ‘That is why I have to go. To stop fighting.’

  ‘But you said that Quancog will accelerate warfare by fifty years.’

  ‘That was half a year ago, at Light Box. I think I underestimated.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  The black book lay on the dresser. ‘What if Quancog were powerful – ethical – enough to ensure that technology could no longer be abused? What if Quancog could act as a kind of . . . zookeeper?’

  ‘I don’t understand. Where would that take it?’

  The men were arguing in the kitchen below.

  ‘In five hundred years we are going to be either extinct, or . . . something better. Technology has outstripped our capacity to look after it. But, suppose I – suppose Quancog could ensure that technology looked after itself, and—’ Christ, what was this sounding like? ‘Liam, is your ma a complete madwoman?’

  Between here and the strand a flock of sheep were all bleating at once. Liam’s face hung still as a portrait’s. The beginning of a smile went as soon as it came. ‘What’s to stop them taking the black book and elbowing you out of the picture?’ Liam is a bright kid.

  ‘Ah yes. The black book.’

  Red Kildare’s Norton thundered down the drive and skidded to a halt in the yard. Heisenberg squawked and flew up to his perch on the telegraph pole.

  ‘It’s Red,’ said John. ‘He’ll have come to milk Feynman.’

  Red Kildare walked into the kitchen. ‘They found you then, Mo! Any chance of a cuppa?’

  ‘Does every last soul on Clear know about my contretemps with the Americans?’

  ‘Island secrets are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders,’ quoted Red, offering us all a sherbet bomb. ‘Shouldn’t worry. All Yanks think they can buy anything. They probably just want to raise their offer.’

  John sighed. ‘I may be blind as a stone, Red, but if you think that these people want only to chat about job perks then compared to you, I am the Hubble Telescope.’

  Red shrugged, and
popped in a sherbet bomb. ‘In that case, it’s hailing pigshit on Mo. And when it’s hailing pigshit, there’s but one thing to do.’

  ‘What?’ asked Liam.

  ‘Go to The Green Man and have a drink’

  ‘That’s the best idea I’ve heard all morning,’ I said.

  ‘I can hear Father Wally’s tricycle,’ said John.

  Father Wally came in and sat down, panting. ‘Mo,’ he said, trying to understand a world too muddled for his vision. ‘This is tantamount to kidnap! You’ve committed no crime! How did all of this come about?’

  Take any two electrons – or, in Dr Bell and my case, photons – that originate from a common source, measure and combine their spins, and you will get zero. However far away they are: between John and me, between Okinawa and Clear Island, or between the Milky Way and Andromeda: if one of the particles is spinning down, then you know that that other is spinning up. You know it now! You don’t have to wait for a light-speed signal to tell you. Phenomena are interconnected regardless of distance, in a holistic ocean more voodoo than Newton. The future is reset by the tilt of a pair of polarised sunglasses. ‘The simultaneity of the ocean, Father Wally.’

  ‘I don’t believe I’m altogether following you, Mo.’

  ‘Father, Red, Brendan . . . could I have a couple of moments with John and Liam alone?’

  ‘Aye, Mo, of course. We’ll wait for you at the end of the drive.’

  ‘I’m going to be so lonely without you two.’

  Liam was determined to be brave. John was being John. My two men hugged me.

  ‘I’m going to feed Feynman,’ I said eventually.

  ‘Feynman can feed herself.’

  ‘I can’t finish my breakfast. I’ve got a few juicy scraps she’d appreciate.’

  The chrome on Red Kildare’s Norton gleamed. Its engine purred at walking pace. Father Wally’s tricycle squeaked. Leaves ran down the track, a cloud of minnows. ‘This puts me in mind of the Palm Sunday parade,’ said Father Wally.

  Was it really only three days since I walked up from the harbour alone? Had so much time passed? Had so little? ‘What day is it today?’

  ‘Thursday?’ said Liam.

  ‘Monday,’ said Red.

  ‘Wednesday,’ said Brendan.

  The stream clattered across the road.

  ‘I hear music.’

  Brendan grinned. ‘You must be imagining things again, Mo Muntervary.’

  ‘No! I can hear “The Rocky Road to Dublin”!’

  Planck picked up his feet as we descended the crook of the hill, sensing an occasion to show off. As we rounded the crook of the hill at Ancient O’Farrell’s, I saw a crowd of islanders spilling out of The Green Man into the garden. I squeezed John’s hand. ‘Did you know about this?’ There was a banner draped over the door: ‘Clear Island’s Finest’.

  ‘I’m only a blind harper,’ answered my husband.

  ‘Just a limited affair,’ said Liam, ‘confined to friends and family.’

  ‘I thought I was going to be smuggled out in secret.’

  ‘Not without a quick bevvy first, you weren’t.’

  ‘We knew you were decided, Mo,’ said Father Wally.

  ‘But we wanted to give you the chance to change your mind,’ finished Red.

  ‘Yoohoo! Liam!’ said Bernadette Sheehy, sitting on the wall, crossing her legs.

  ‘Hello, Bernadette!’ sang John and I.

  In the bar of The Green Man it was standing room only. Eamonn’s boy was playing his accordion. Even the birdwatchers in their anoraks were there, bemused but happy. I looked for the New Zealander, but she wasn’t there.

  A birdwatcher in a leather jacket was leaning on the bar. He turned around as I entered. ‘Good afternoon, Dr Muntervary. I thought Ireland was all bombs, rain and homosexual giants of literature.’ He took off his wide brown sunglasses. ‘This is quite a shindig. It’s a shame we can’t stay longer.’

  The floor of The Green Man swelled. And then, so strangely, I’m relieved it’s all over. At least I can stop running.

  ‘Ma,’ Liam knew before anyone else. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

  The jig carried on, spiralling around with a life of its own.

  What happens to all the seconds tipped into the bin of the past?

  And what happens to the other universes where electrons follow other paths, where thoughts and mutations and actions differ? Where I was captured in Huw’s apartment? Where my father is still alive and my mother bright as the button she always was, where John never went blind, where my precocity and ambition were those of a small farmer’s wife, where nuclear weapons were invented by 1914, where Homo Erectus went the same fossilised way as Australopithecines, where DNA never zipped itself up, where stars were never born to die in a shroud of carbon and heavier elements, where the big bang crunched back under the weight of its own mass a few jiffies after it banged?

  Or are all these universes hung out, side by side, to drip dry?

  ‘Yes, Liam,’ said the Texan, after the jig had stopped. ‘It’s him.’

  ‘Mo,’ said Mayo Davitt in Gaelic, ‘do you want us to shove him into the harbour?’

  ‘Talk,’ commanded the Texan, ‘in English.’

  ‘Fuck,’ responded Mayo Davitt in Gaelic, ‘a donkey.’

  The Texan sized Mayo Davitt up, like a soldier would.

  ‘There isn’t to be any fighting,’ I said, wishing my voice hadn’t sounded so frail.

  Red Kildare stood in front of me. ‘Clear Islanders take exception when outsiders come along and take our scientists.’

  ‘And the Government of the United States takes exception when a foreign scientist makes free use of the world’s most sophisticated supercolliders and AI research paid for by NATO – hell, by America – and then uses these experiments to formulate theories which could change what technology is, and then bolts, for all we know into the arms of the highest bidder.’

  ‘I bolted first,’ I corrected, ‘and then formulated the theory.’

  ‘How can Mo steal a theory when it’s the fruit of her own God-given intelligence?’ asked Father Wally.

  ‘I’d love to discuss the theosophy of our situation all day, Father. Truly I would. But we have a helicopter on standby, so let me cut to the legal position. Under Requisition Clause 13b of the NATO Official Secrets Act, the Light Box Research owns whatever comes out of Dr Muntervary’s head. We own Light Box Research. A preacher of your intelligence can reach your own conclusion.’

  ‘Get on your helicopter and sod off then.’ Maisie advanced. ‘You’re not welcome in The Green Man, and you’re not welcome on Clear Island.’

  ‘Dr Muntervary? Your godmother thinks it’s time for us to leave.’

  Freddy Doig got up, and Bertie Crow too. ‘Mo’s going nowhere!’

  The Texan shook his head in fake disbelief, jerked his thumb at the window, and we all looked. Brendan whistled softly. ‘Holy Dooley, Mo, you have been doing well for yourself.’

  A line of marines in combat gear stared back. Some islanders stood in awed huddles, some were hurrying away.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ said Freddy Doig. ‘What film did they get those guns from?’

  ‘Somebody tell me what’s happening,’ commanded John.

  ‘Soldiers,’ said Liam. ‘Ten of them. To apprehend my supercriminal ma.’

  ‘If I could see you,’ said John to the Texan, ‘I would use every muscle in my body to try to stop you. I want you to know that.’

  ‘Mr Cullin,’ said the Texan. ‘These are the cards your wife has drawn. I guarantee that her treatment as a guest of the Pentagon will be in accordance with her stature. But her wildcat days have to end. She must come with us. I have my orders.’

  ‘Take your pigging orders,’ said Bertie Crow, ‘and ram ’em right up your Yank—’

  A helicopter drowned him out, chopping the water and jostling the fishing boats.

  The Texan glanced back at the marines and reached into his jacket for his cigarettes. We
all saw his holster. He lit up, taking all the time in the world. ‘How do you want to play this, Doctor? The outcome will be the same. You know that.’

  All eyes were on me. ‘Everyone. Thank you. But I’ve got to go with them.’

  The Texan allowed himself a smile.

  ‘After we have negotiated terms. Term one: in matters pertaining to Quancog, I am accountable to nobody.’

  The Texan feigned surprise. ‘What is this about “Terms”, Dr Muntervary? “Terms” might have been on the table six months ago. But you forfeited your right to “terms” when you became a fugitive. You are ours, Doctor, and so is your black book.’

  ‘A black book, is it? Would a black book be worth something to you now?’

  Impatience narrowed his eyes. ‘Lady, you don’t seem to realise. Your work is American Defense Department property. You had the black book when you visited your mother in Skibbereen. You have it now – somewhere – and if you’ve hidden it, we’ll find it. Get your working relationship with the Pentagon off to a good start, and give it to me. Now.’

  ‘You’d better ask Feynman, then.’

  The Texan’s voice grew tauter. ‘There’s nobody of that name. We’ve been following you since Petersburg, lady. Allowing you to continue your work in peace, and making everything good and smooth for you. There has been no “Feynman”.’

  ‘It’s not my problem if you don’t believe me. Feynman has the black book.’

  Father Wally laughed. ‘Feynman the goat?’

  The Texan did not laugh. ‘You just said “goat”?’

  ‘I’ll gladly say it again for you,’ said Father Wally. ‘“Goat.”’

  The Texan glared at me. ‘You mind telling me what a goat wants with quantum cognition?’

  I swallowed. ‘Goats aren’t fussy when they’re hungry.’

  ‘Mo,’ said John in Gaelic. ‘Are you bluffing?’

  ‘No, John. I’m too scared to bluff.’

  The Texan’s fists and jaw clenched. He put on his sunglasses. ‘Nobody leaves this room.’ The islanders fell back as he marched out to the marines. He yelled a few words at the saluting one. Through the open window we heard the words ‘purple fuckin’ blazes’. He pulled out a cell phone from a holster, scowling as his spoke.