Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“I changed the subject,” the Trampoline said. “It’s time to mention Evel Cent.”

“Did you say Evel Cent?” Sancho asked.

“I did.”

“That Evel Cent? The science billionaire?”

“I believe there’s only one.”

“Wow.”

The apartment was in darkness but nobody turned on a light. The three of them sat some distance from one another, wrapped in their separate obscurities. Then out of the darkness Quichotte spoke.

“I saw him,” he said.

“When?” the Trampoline asked, very surprised. “Where? How?”

“On TV,” Quichotte said simply. “He was saying that science was in the process of confirming what I already knew. He said he would provide the scientific evidence at the proper time.”

“You know the world is going to end?”

“He read something in a science fiction story,” Sancho explained, “and decided it explained his quest. When he attains the Beloved, the universe will have achieved its purpose, and will therefore conclude.”

“And he feels okay about that,” the Trampoline said.

“You know how he is,” said Sancho. “Who knows how he feels?”

“I MET THIS STRANGE beautiful boy, Evel,” the Trampoline said. “It was at a money people’s party at one of those clubs there were then, Lotus or Moomba or Bungalow or Sway, I don’t recall. I didn’t like those parties, men in red suspenders ordering Cristal and waving cash at women as if it was an irresistible sexual organ, but sometimes I had to go, because of what was then my new microcredit project. A friend told me I should meet this physicist on his way to becoming a billionaire and led me across the crowded room. I expected a cliché, some sort of small, skinny, dark-skinned, bespectacled, nerdy person, the classic Indian in America making it big in the new technologies, and was surprised to find a guy with movie-star good looks, slicked down and shiny faced in a bespoke suit, a geek in dude’s clothing. He had a booth all to himself, which was his way of saying he was somebody. He said, ‘I’d be glad if you sat down and had a drink with me.’ His name made an impression on me. Evil Scent. ‘You’ve got the right name for this world,’ I thought, but managed not to say. He probably heard variations on that theme all the time anyway. But he chose that name. Awwal Sant, his real Indian name, would have been just fine but he had rejected it. That was a clue that there was something off about him. I should have paid better attention.

“He was several years younger than me, and acted even younger than that, sulky, awkward, but cocky, sure of his genius. We had nothing in common except our attitude to the money, I thought. I had been on one side of the money and now I was switching to the other side: first I had made it and now I was giving it away. He was still very interested in making a lot of it but he had his eyes on something much bigger. Money was a tool, not a goal, we agreed on that.

“I liked the first thing he said after I sat down: ‘I’m sorry, but I have no small talk.’ It was a funny line, but he said it with absolute solemnity and a kind of piercing, sincere energy, which made it funnier, and made him interesting. He began to talk about himself, which was normal with money guys. But most of them talked about their assets, their planes, their boats, their blah blah blah, which to me was an instant turnoff. This Evel talked about his obsession with the nature of reality, its fragility and mutability, and that was interesting too. He was thinking about parallel universes even then. When he started in about his love for science fiction, naming obscure-to-me writers of the old school—I remember the names Simak and Blish and Kornbluth and Sprague de Camp — I glazed over and was about to excuse myself but then he did something actually unpleasant. He grabbed me by my wrist and glared at me with what looked like anger and said, ‘You can’t leave.’ I detached his hand. My secret anger was bigger than his, and I showed him just a flash of it. ‘You need to learn how to behave,’ I said. ‘Let me know if you ever do.’ Then I left. I looked back toward him from the doorway. He seemed lost in thought, wrapped up in himself. But he was watching. Afterwards he said to me, ‘If you hadn’t looked back I would never have spoken to you again. But you did look back. That was very important.’ It was, I thought, the remark of a very vain individual. But, again, it was interesting.

“I never believed any man would find me attractive after my mutilation, and I had reconciled myself to that. There was, yes, the secret anger. I had a lot of anger about what had happened to me. But I had also learned how to bury it so deep that it didn’t know how to get out unless I chose to let it escape. It worked for me now, I told myself. I told myself a lot of things: that I was doing the work I wanted to do, I had loyal friends, a full and comfortable life, and I had cheated death. There was nothing wrong with that picture, nothing that required the presence of a man to put right. These good thoughts prevented the rage from rising up out of its burial ground. But it was there if I needed it. It still is.

“This was the china shop in which I lived, into which Evel Cent charged, without a thought for the damage he might cause, talking about the end of the world. The morning after he grabbed my wrist he was standing on the sidewalk down there holding flowers, calling my cell number. I hadn’t given it to him, or told him my address, but there he was. Resourceful. Determined. Apologetic. Urgent. I told him to come up and what followed, followed. No, that isn’t correct. It was slow. The idea of undressing for a man was horrifying. The idea of being touched. He said, ‘I’m in no hurry. The end isn’t coming for a while yet.’ What? I said. What? Out came his pet theory, the one to which he would devote his billions. The cosmos disintegrating like an oil painting on a fraying canvas, like the ruins of Egypt. The appearance of holes in space-time, the coming victory of Nothing over Everything. And then his grand design. He was already working on it, had built the research corporation, and had hired the top-drawer scientists needed to solve the problems of the science, and he already had the name for it.

“This was how I first heard about NEXT. ‘Neighbor Earth Xchange Technology.’ He said: ‘Once I’ve built the transfer machines, we can escape to safety. I don’t even know what the machines will look like right now. People always think, spaceships, but maybe the gateways to the neighbor Earths will actually turn out to be like gates. Portals, to use the word they like in sci-fi. You step into something like a phone booth and step out somewhere else. I’m thinking of the wardrobe that opens up into Narnia. My guess is that the Xchange Tech will be of that kind. We all step through the wardrobe and there’s the lamppost and somewhere a benevolent lion waiting to welcome us. You, me, the human race. We can all go. We will be the NEXT people.’ Sometimes he sounded like a cult leader in Guyana or Pune. Sometimes he sounded insane. But he was always passionate, convinced, and the brilliance was not in doubt. And he had no small talk. When he finally turned to the subject of us, he was suddenly and unexpectedly direct.

“To make his pitch he took me, where else, to the planetarium, where he was a panelist in a debate called ‘Buying Space.’ Four white men in gray suits were on the panel with him. He was wearing a golden vest embroidered with images of all the planets in the solar system, a star in the house of the stars. The four white men were talking about the exploitation of aerospace by business. They would build vessels to satisfy NASA’s cargo requirements, they would send robots to asteroids to set up profitable mining operations, they would devise space vacations for rich tourists. They said without shame that they hoped to become the first trillionaires in history. When it was Evel’s turn to speak he told them that their focus on space had made them blind to the crisis in space-time. He spoke of the coming disintegration of the universe and the need to survive by escaping into one or more neighbor Earths. The only technological advances that mattered, he said fervently, were explorations into this kind of trans-dimensional travel. ‘Mars is so twentieth century,’ he said. ‘Neighbor Earths are the only destinations worth thinking about.’ The white men in the gray suits looked at the brown man in the golden vest with all the condescension of their tribe, and humored him. ‘How long have we got,’ one of them asked Evel, ‘and can you develop our escape routes in time?’ Evel replied with great seriousness, ‘I see that you don’t believe me, but signs of the Great Instability will change your minds pretty soon. We don’t have long, that’s a fact, but we probably have long enough. I’m working on this day and night, both on identifying the neighbor Earths and on the means of getting there. I’d say we aren’t too far from a breakthrough in the science.’