Amitav Gosh - The Calcutta Chromosome

Mrs Aratounian tapped her cane on the floor, in annoyance. 'Didn't I warn you, Mr Morgan?' she snapped. 'And I'll wager you tuppence to a groat he'll go on absolutely for ever.'

Now Phulboni's eyes filled with tears: 'I have tried, as hard as ever a man has, to find my way to her, to throw myself before her, to join the secret circle that attends her, to take the dust of her heels to my head. By every means available, I have sought her, the ineluctable, ever-elusive mistress of the unspoken, wooed her, courted her, begged to join the circle of her initiates.'

Mrs Aratounian slammed her cane on the floor. 'Appalling,' she said. 'The man's making an utter exhibition of himself. Isn't anyone going to do anything?'

'As a tree spreads its branches,' the writer's voice continued, 'to court an invisible source of light, so every word I have ever penned has been written for her. I have sought her in words, I have sought her in deeds, most of all I have sought her in the unspoken keeping of her faith.'

Here, abruptly, the writer's face disappeared from the screen and a slide of a peaceful mountain scene appeared. But the writer's voice continued, eerily disembodied.

Mrs Aratounian gave a yelp of laughter. 'Look at that, Mr Morgan,' she said. 'They're so incompetent they can't even cut him off.'

The voice rasped on: 'If I stand before you now, in this most public of places, it is because I am on the point of desperation and know of no other way to reach her. I know that time is running out – my time and her time. I know that the crossing is nigh; I know it to be at hand… '

Even though the writer's face was no longer on the screen, it was evident that he was sobbing: '… as the hours run out, when perhaps no more than a few moments remain, knowing of no other means I make this last appeal: "Do not forget me: I have served you as best I could. Only once did I sin against the Silence, in a moment of weakness, seduced by the one I loved. Have I not been punished enough? What more remains? I beg you, I beg you, if you exist at all, and I have never for a moment doubted it – give me a sign of your presence, do not forget me, take me with you… '"

The screen flickered and the newsreader's face reappeared, sweating lightly. Forcing a smile he began: 'We apologize to our viewers… '

Mrs Aratounian struggled to her feet, went over to the television set and switched it off.

'This is the kind of nonsense you have to put up with if you don't have cable,' she said in disgust. 'Night after night. You tell me, Mr Morgan, would you ever hear rubbish like that on BBC?'

ANTAR STOPPED the answering machine and rose to his feet. It was no use regretting the loss of the document that Murugan had posted to his mailbox: if he hadn't deleted it then he would have done so soon afterwards. But possibly, just possibly, it wasn't irretrievably lost. Perhaps Ava could find a trace of it and reconstitute the document: it wasn't inconceivable. Ava knew some pretty good tricks.

Antar started for the bedroom door: there was only one way to find out.

Just as he was about to leave the bedroom, he heard a sound – a muffled sound, like a soft footfall. He spun around to face the wall. Tara 's living room lay on the far side, separated only by a couple of inches of plaster and a bricked-in door. It was uncanny how sound carried through that wall.

Perhaps Tara had come home: Antar was sure he'd heard someone. He went to the wall and knocked: ' Tara, are you back?' There was no answer.

He hurried over to his kitchen window and glanced at Tara 's apartment, across the air-shaft. The lights were still off: she didn't seem to be home. He shrugged: it must have been a damp floorboard: there was no telling, in a building as old and creaky as this one. He leaned over the sink, splashed water over his face and reached for a kitchen towel.

He went into his living room and seated himself at the keyboard. With a tap of a key he sent Ava shooting off to rummage through the accumulated memories of all his old, superseded hard disks. It was not unlikely that a binary 'ghost' of Murugan's lost E-mail message had remained somewhere within the system. Even the faintest trace would be enough: Ava would do the rest.

Moments later a hand appeared on Ava's screen, gesturing morosely, fingers half open. Ava had recently begun to learn body-language – in Egyptian dialect of course – and this was her new way of indicating a negative.

Then the gesture changed: the fingers came together, pointing upwards, in a little dipping motion. That meant wait; there's more. Her screen went blank and her voice mechanism clicked on.

The message might still be found, Ava told him. It would just take a while. It had been typed on one of those oldfashioned, contact-based alphabetical keyboards. The electronic signals emitted by the keys were probably still traceable. It was simply a question of matching the electronic 'fingerprint' of Murugan's E-mail message to every electronic signal that was still alive in the ionosphere.

Antar keyed in a query asking how long the whole procedure would take.

Ava took a moment to answer. It would mean sifting through about six thousand eight hundred and ninety-two trillion cufiabytes, came the response, in other words, roughly eighty-five billion times the estimated sum of every dactylographic act ever performed by a human being. It was certain to take at least fifteen minutes.

Antar keyed in two names, Cunningham and Farley, and cut Ava loose.

Suddenly Antar was very tired. He looked down and noticed that there was a mild tremor in his hand. His heart sank as he touched his forehead and cheek. They were hot and clammy: it felt like the start of one of his bouts of fever. Evidently he would have to forgo his walk to Penn Station today.

In a way Antar was almost relieved. He decided to lie down while Ava searched the skies.

Antar had almost drifted off to sleep when Ava began to chirrup a summons twenty minutes later. Heaving off his bedclothes, he rose shakily to his feet and wrapped himself in a dressing gown. Then he made his way down the corridor to his living room.

A message was waiting for him on Ava's screen: the search had yielded a few traces of Murugan's lost E-mail message. But the signals were faint and possibly distorted. Ava had reconstructed a semblance of a narrative by running the retrieved fragments through a Storyline algorithm. But she was unable to vouch for the authenticity of the restored text.

Antar typed in a query asking if Ava could generate an image-simulacrum of the text with her Simultaneous Visualization program. That way all he'd have to do to review the text was to lock himself into his Sim Vis visor. He could just lie back and watch: Ava would do the rest. His hands felt very unsteady now: he knew he wasn't up to the task of reading through a long document.

A hand appeared on Ava's screen, sketching a gesture of regret. The answer was negative: the text was too corrupt to do a continuous image conversion. The best she could do was provide a verbal rendition.

Antar winced: he hated listening to Ava read, in her flat, uninflected voice. But on the other hand he was in no position to do it himself in his current state.

Reaching for his headphones, Antar snapped them into place.

IT WAS PAST ELEVEN when Urmila got home. The flat was in darkness and everybody was in bed.

She let herself in, as quietly as she could, and stood by the front door while her eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness. Her younger brother was snoring in the sitting room. He had played in a Second Division football match that afternoon: one of the stringers for the sports page had come over to the reporting desk to tell her that he'd almost scored. She tiptoed into the sitting room and found him lying on the sofa, with the light on. He was barebodied, dressed only in his team's blue sweatpants, with one foot on the floor and one arm thrown over the back of the sofa. His head was on the armrest with his tongue lolling out of his open mouth, trailing a ribbon of drool.