Филип Керр - The Second Angel

And so he could. Not just him, but Dallas too.

‘There,’ said Cavor, as if he had done nothing more remarkable than pick something off the ground.

The phantom limb seemed to materialize before their eyes, and to that extent, Dallas thought the phenomenon was well named. It looked like a spirit taking on a ghostly form in order to effect some purpose in the substantial world. Blue, like something cold, it blazed in the air, a fabulous firefly of twisting muscles and stretching fingers. The apparition — Dallas could think of no better way of describing what he could see — was quite naked, and as astonishment gave way to wonder, he realized he would not have been surprised to see the limb accompanied by the spirit of the whole Cavor, in some sort of out-of-body manifestation. Whatever was happening here was scientific only to the extent that the phenomenon could be observed without explanation.

Not that explanation counted for very much anymore. Empirical science was largely ossified. The majority of modern scientific inquiry was postempirical and speculative, in that it was very much concerned with answering riddles. How was the universe created? How did life begin? None of this could transcend the truth that already existed. If anything, science had merely reinforced the mystery of the universe. And this — the phenomenon of Cavor’s phantom limb — looked like another such mystery. Dallas might have discovered a way of unlocking its power, but neither he nor the scientists who had recently described the phantasmagoria had much of an idea how it worked, beyond the rudimentary explanation that had been given in some of the more esoteric science journals Dallas had studied and which he had reported to Cavor. For now, he was content with a partial explanation and his own capacity to be amazed. How little man really knew, he reflected. No matter how far science could go, man’s imagination would always go further.

‘It’s really there, isn’t it?’ he said, smiling as Cavor reached into his helmet and touched the end of Dallas’s nose. Cavor’s finger felt cold, but still recognizably human. ‘How do you decide to touch one thing, and penetrate another?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ admitted Cavor. ‘I’d say I’d need to live with it over a period of time.’

Dallas nodded. ‘Perhaps the structure of our minds constrains the questions we can ask of them and the answers that we can comprehend.’

Cavor removed the finger from Dallas’s helmet. He was quite sure that if he had pushed the finger all the way into the other man’s skull, into his brain, he could have read his mind. He readopted his former position by the vault door, slowly sliding the phantom limb into solid steel, encountering no more resistance than a swimmer’s arm in water. He recalled a time, many years ago, when he and his wife had honeymooned in Rome — the Moon had been too expensive for them — and saw some ancient monument, a head with an open mouth into which he had thrust his hand. The Mouth of Truth, was it? This felt more like the moment of truth.

It was a curious sensation, to move through solid matter and then to be able to grasp ahold of it, as if in real life. The only way he could describe the feeling to himself was to compare it with something as simple as sliding his hand across a flat surface before pressing down on a particular spot. And there was somehow the certainty that part of him had escaped the threedimensional world and was now somewhere four-dimensional. Perhaps it wasn’t just space-time that could be bent under the influence of gravity. Perhaps the very molecules of matter could be bent under the influence of life. He had no reason to think that. It was nothing more than intuition.

Locating the first gear, he found it cold and hard to the touch and oily, too. Dallas said that this was the lubricant that helped the gear turn smoothly, as indeed it did now, with not much more than a finger’s pressure. The withdrawal of the first locking bolt was the work of only a minute or two, and so simply done that Cavor marveled that the vault’s designers had not anticipated such effortless defilement. Indeed, what he was doing seemed so entirely natural that, several times, he had to remind himself he was up to his shoulder in solid metal. The second, third, and fourth bolts moved just as easily, and he grew more confident of the arm that was part of him and yet not part of him at all. In another time and place he thought he might have reached through a solid wall and written a message, in the manner of the hand at Belshazzar’s impious feast. And when all six bolts were finally withdrawn, he told Dallas that all matter was mind and asked him if he thought it was possible that there might exist some halfway state between reality and virtual reality. If so, said Cavor, that’s where his arm appeared and appeared not to be.

‘Sometimes,’ said Dallas, ‘it’s hard to know where reality ends and where it begins.’

‘I’m taking hold of the fixed locking bar, now,’ reported Cavor. ‘Only, which way do I pull it?’

Dallas consulted the diagram of the vault locking mechanism on the screen of Cavor’s computer. He pressed a button and watched a little animated sequence unfold, illustrating how the door opened.

‘Pull it toward you, and then to the right,’ he said. ‘And be prepared for the emergency siren. There will probably be quite a din as the door starts to open.’

‘That’ll be me cheering,’ said Cavor. ‘Okay, here goes.’

He pulled the locking bar in the prescribed manner and felt a cold escape of gas against his hand. As Dallas had predicted, a loud electronic siren, generating over a hundred decibels, accompanied the breaching of the vault. He let go of the bar and allowed Dallas to steer him back from the door. Then there was a loud hiss of escaping cryogenic gas as, in the manner of the main facility’s outer entrance, the curved vault door opened like an enormous solid portcullis, to reveal a brilliant white light.

‘Use your sun visor,’ Dallas told Cavor. ‘There’s an ultraviolet light inside the vault. It helps to keep the cryoprecipitate irradiated against lymphocytes. Those are cells that can be responsible for graft-versus-host disease.’ And so saying, Dallas advanced boldly into the vault.

Cavor followed more slowly, and was surprised to find the ground sloping away beneath his feet: The vault was in a great circular hollow, the center of which was occupied by a cylindrical glass wall kept in plumb by an enveloping hyperbolic net of high-tension cables. Beneath these were the giant-sized, slice-shaped refrigerators where the blood was stored — each of them monitored by an elaborate system of filaments and thermometers linked to the Descartes computer, itself located inside the cylindrical glass wall. It was to this that Dallas now headed.

‘Being as powerful as it is, the Altemann Übermaschine computer kicks out a lot of heat,’ he explained. ‘So it has to operate from within this glass envelope, in order to strictly maintain the low temperatures of the cryoprecipitate tanks. By the way, don’t touch them. They’re so cold that your gloved hand would probably stick to them, maybe even your phantom hand as well. Fortunately there are droids to load the blood for us. Now it’s merely a question of telling the computer what type and how much.’

Dallas opened a door in the glass wall and entered the computer room.

The Altemann Übermaschine was a commanding-looking structure, very different from the simple plastic boxes most people had in their homes. It was shaped like a giant kettledrum, with a flat screen surface about six feet in diameter, on which a number of patterns were continually being generated. Dallas knew that although the shapes being generated were analogous to the quantum probability pattern for electrons in a box, they meant nothing more than that the computer was in operation. Nevertheless the speed at which these shapes were changing was not something he had observed when programming the same model of computer back at the headquarters of Terotechnology on Earth. It was curious, he thought, although hardly indicative of anything other than the emergency caused by an unscheduled and uncoded breach of the vault’s overall integrity. And something else attracted his attention. This was the power of the computer, which appeared in a floor-standing tubular display located next to the operating footplate. Inside the tube, a small magnet floated over a superconducting dish: the higher the magnet in the tube, the greater the forces repelling it and the greater the electromagnetic power of the quantum mechanical effects operating inside the machine’s information processing system. Dallas had never seen a superconducting levitation that was as high as this one. Instead of floating a couple of inches over the bottom of the tube, this magnet was floating a couple of inches below the top.