Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

Danny nodded.

‘But what if there was some other kind of cover-up going on? Take Roswell. No one made much fuss about it at the time. Back then there were flying saucer stories in the papers every week. Believe me, it was a craze. No, Roswell became big only when a book was written about it in 1980. Close Encounters of the Third Kind had just made UFOs big again. And at a second glance, the Roswell incident did look a little strange. The air force issued a statement that a flying disc had been recovered and then later denied it. Then they say it’s a weather balloon.’

‘Uhn… yeah.’

‘It’s all a bit suspicious and confusing. Because maybe there was a cover-up at Roswell.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. But not in the way all these conspiracy theories play it. Okay, it’s 1947. The Soviets have just started running atomic bomb tests, ballistic missile launches. Everybody’s paranoid as hell. We’re sending up radar-tracking balloons over enemy airspace. If the Russians find out, there could be an international incident. Flying saucers, they’re perfect disinformation. You can use them to confuse a situation, then you can deny them. You can blame it all on the aliens. They become a convenient myth for all kinds of security issues. Maybe the Magenta Memorandum is just part of that.’

‘But, I see… uhn… things.’

‘Sure. We all see things. We wouldn’t have much of an imagination if we didn’t.’

‘There might be… uhn… something.’

‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe we see some things that we don’t understand. That’s why they are called unidentified flying objects. Because we just don’t know. Sometimes we don’t know what we see.’

‘Uhn… yes… I always… uhn… the stars.’

Danny gestured at the space above his head. He wished that he could explain to Larry Zagorski all the thoughts that he had been having. He grabbed at the pile of notes on the table and sorted through them. He found a page and put it in front of them. Larry looked down at the sheet of foolscap.

John Six explained the secret of the universe to Bella Berkeley telepathically, using an analogy that he knew she would understand. It came to her like a memory. She had grown up watching holovision, the three-dimensional images that were beamed into every household by the Corporation. As a child Bella had thought of this seemingly solid phantasmagoria as an independent entity, but now she knew them to be projected from another source. John’s wisdom came into her mind as a simple revelation: that the whole of the cosmos was one vast projection, a vision expanding from a surface of pure information.

Appollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, ‘That which is above is that which is below.’ By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.

According to t’Hooft the combination of quantum mechanics and gravity require the three-dimensional world to be an image of data that can be stored on a two-dimensional projection much like a holographic image. The two-dimensional description requires only one discrete degree of freedom per Plank area and yet it is rich enough to describe all three-dimensional phenomena.

‘Wow,’ Larry murmured. ‘Yeah, I saw something about this hologram theory. I thought it was some kind of gimmick.’

‘Uhn… volume of space encoded on its boundary… on an event horizon…’

‘Complex stuff. But, you know, a physicist once told me that you can’t really use these theories as a description of the world we live in.’

‘Uhn… or appear to…’

‘Sure, but—’

‘The entire universe… uhn… an information structure.’

‘Well, I never had enough of the maths to get to grips with this. I once tried to explain quantum theory on a date. I really blew it there.’

‘But you saw…’

Danny pointed at Larry’s quote on the page.

‘I was mostly stoned when I wrote that book. And I can’t remember coming up with that bit. Sometimes you get lucky with ideas. Phil Dick certainly did. He had a thing about precognition, of course.’

‘And… uhn… you?’

Larry sighed.

‘When you get to my age precognition isn’t so much of an issue.’

‘Uhn.’ Danny smiled and suddenly had a thought.

He went over to one of the bookshelves and crouched down in front of it. One section was a false front that clicked open as he pushed at it to reveal a small wall safe concealed behind it. He dialled the combination lock, opened the door and took out a padded envelope. He stood up and shook its contents out onto the table. There was a sheaf of yellowing sheets of A4 paper. A manuscript with a heading on the first page: The Hanged Man . With it were newspaper clippings, articles about Vita Lampada and Marius Trevelyan.

‘What’s all this?’ asked Larry.

‘I want you to have…’

‘Is this a story you’ve written?’

‘Uhn, no… Secrets, official secrets.’

‘Listen, I’m really not looking for material, you know.’

‘Please.’

Danny knew now that he had found a safe place. Where better to hide a pebble than on a beach? Larry would have stacks of papers and manuscripts. And he was a writer, so he might be able to do something with the story.

‘You, uhn.’ He looked imploringly at Larry. ‘You understand.’

‘Well, you know how to flatter a guy.’

‘Take it… uhn… please.’

Larry looked at Danny and then down at what was scattered across the table. Words, words, words, he thought. As if I need any more of them. Then he shrugged and scooped them all up. Danny smiled.

‘Uhn… thanks.’

Larry left at six. Danny then went to see Lorraine. He asked her to find him a new doctor and to order him some sushi, four types of nigiri and miso soup. At eight he watched an episode of The X-Files . In the show the FBI agents Mulder and Scully investigated a series of assaults in a community of carnival sideshow performers. The attacker turned out to be one of a pair of co-joined twins who had found a way of detaching himself from his brother but was then compelled to find another body to connect with.

After sundown Danny went up onto the terrace. He lit a Marlboro Light and looked out over the constellation of lights in the valley. A matrix: each bright dot a soul. An airliner crept across the horizon, a signal pulsing against the night. Somewhere, waiting in the sky . Danny felt that he had let go of some of the dangerous knowledge of the world. Maybe now he would get his voice back and he could take some studio time, sing again. Part of him wished that he could go to the Celebrity Center and get clear. If only he could really be brainwashed, his mind wiped clean of it all. But it hadn’t worked. He was still lost in space, in the free-fall of a slow decaying orbit. There’s a starman, over the rainbow . But he had never landed. Danny had watched the skies for years but they had never come. Alone. Set adrift on memory bliss. Sampled sighs and feedback distortion, his mind a tape-loop. He felt a great weariness, all his experience repeats and reruns. Perhaps this whole universe was just a remake, a cover version.

Hitler had always despised the moon.

‘You know, Rudi,’ he had told him when they had been in Landsberg prison, ‘it’s only the moon I hate. For it is something dead, and terrible, and inhuman. And human beings are afraid of it… It is as if in the moon a part of the terror still lives which the moon once sent down over the earth… I hate it! That pale and ghostly creature.’