Ghostwritten (43 page)

‘I’m going to grow turnips in County Cork.’

‘Being facetious is not helping. Light Box has a right to know. We have the CERN facilities completely to ourselves in April. The Saragosa supercollider data is due in next week. These could be Quancog’s way out of the nonlocality straitjacket. Why now?’

I sighed. ‘It’s in the letter.’

‘Did you really believe that Light Box conducts experiments purely for fun?’

‘No. I really believed that Light Box conducts experiments purely for space agencies. That’s what we’ve been told quantum cognition is for. Then a war comes along, and I discover that my modest contribution to global enlightenment is being used in air-to-surface missiles to kill people who aren’t white enough.’

‘Must you be so melodramatic? The border where military and civilian applications of aerospace technology meet has always been subjective. Face it, Mo. It’s the way the world works.’

‘Somebody is fed bullshit for four years; they find out they’ve been fed bullshit for four years; they want out. Face it, Heinz. It’s the way the world works.’

The Texan shifted his weight and the sofa creaked. ‘Mr Formaggio, it’s plain that Dr Muntervary values precision.’ He spoke with the leisure of a never-interrupted man. ‘I can relate to that. As a friend of Quancog, I believe I can show a wider panorama. May I chew the fat alone with the lady?’

A rhetorical question.

The thin face in the window of Ancient O’Farrell’s store swam back into the murk as I climbed the lane. The shop had no opening hours and no closing hours, but Ancient’s wife never met anyone unless Ancient, or their son, Old O’Farrell, was with her. Even in my childhood she had always been suspicious of the mainland: of Britain and the world beyond, suspicious of its very existence. Baltimore, she would concede, was there. But beyond Baltimore was a land insubstantial as radio waves.

If both Ancient and Old were out you just went into the shop, helped yourself, and left the money in the shoebox. I took a breather on the gate to O’Driscoll’s meadow. This hill gets steeper every time I come back to the island, I swear. A couple of old ladies in black cloaks were beachcombing the strand, down where the dune grass ends. They walked like crows. They looked up at me in unison and waved. Moya and Roisin Tourmakeady! I waved back. We used to believe they were witches who caused whirlpools. Owls lived in their attic, and probably still do.

Coming back was dangerous, Mo. They’d be here soon. It was a minor miracle that you got this far. A miracle, and the splendid isolation of Aer Lingus’s computer systems.

Coming back was dangerous, but not coming back was impossible.

The sun was warm, moss was thick on the stone wall, ferns nodded.

With only three motorbikes on Clear Island, islanders can identify each by the engine. Red Kildare pulled up, his sidecar empty, and pushed up his goggles.

‘They let you back then, Mo? That’s quite a shiner you’re sporting.’

‘Red. You look like a defrocked wizard. Yes, my wicket-keeping days for the national team are drawing to a close.’

Red Kildare, like John, is a newcomer to Clear. He first came as a ‘Blow-In’ in the sixties, when an attempt to found a colony of freethinkers based on the philosophy of Timothy Leary went the same way as Timothy Leary, and dwindled down to Red, his pigs and goats and a few wild stories. He milks Feynman for John every day up at Aodhagan, and pays in goat cheese and by tidying up the vegetable garden. John says he still grows the best marijuana this side of Cuba. His Gaelic is better than mine, now.

‘I thought of you the other day, Mo.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah . . . A dead bat fell out of the sky and landed at my feet.’

‘I’m glad to know I’ve been gone but not forgotten, Red.’

The goggles were snapped back on. ‘Got to speak to a turkey about Daibhi O’Bruadair. Mind how you go.’

He twisted the throttle on his ancient Norton, waking up a piglet in the floor of the sidecar, who clambered onto the seat and fell down again as the motorbike roared off.

Heinz Formaggio showed his anger only by a muffled slam of the door.

The Texan and I looked at each other across the office. The gnome in the garden was still clipping. I almost said, ‘Draw,’ but I almost say things much more often than I say them. ‘You must be very important indeed if you can dismiss Heinz from his own office.’

‘I was afraid the good Director was going to start thundering at you.’

‘Being thundered at by Heinz is like being flogged by a lettuce.’

He reached into his shirt pocket. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke, Doctor?’

‘Light Box has a no-smoking policy.’

He lit up, tipped the contents of a bowl of pot pourri onto a Light Box folder, and used the bowl as an ashtray. ‘I overheard a joke at my expense the other day: No in-tray, no out-tray, just an ash-tray.’

‘Forgive me for not believing you.’

His smile told me that it wasn’t very important whether I believed him or not. ‘Dr Muntervary, I’m a Texan. Did you know that Texas was an independent republic before joining the union?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘We Texans are a proud tribe. We pride ourselves in being straight shooters. Let us do some. The Pentagon requires that Quantumcog see completion.’

‘Then go ahead and complete it.’

‘Only Light Box Research can do that. We both know why. That is, we both know who. Light Box Research has Mo Muntervary.’

‘As from yesterday nobody has Mo Muntervary.’

He blew out a plume of smoke, and watched it unfurl. ‘If it were that simple . . .’

‘It is that simple.’

‘Kings abdicate, cops turn in their badges, directors of Think Tanks can slam all the doors they like and storm off, and nobody gives a damn. But you, Doctor, can never leave the ball-park. This is a fact. Accept it.’

‘Is this plain talking? Because I don’t understand what I’m hearing.’

‘Then I’ll phrase it differently. Light Box is only one research institute in the marketplace. Syndicates in Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Israel and China are headhunting scientists like you. There’s a new confederation of Arab countries that really doesn’t like us. There are three freelance military consultancies who want quantum cognition, one of them, our British cousins. The marketplace is getting crowded and cut-throat. The Pentagon wishes to invite you to work with us. Our less democratic competitors will coerce you. Wherever and however you hide, you will be found, and your services employed, whether you like it or not. Am I talking plain enough for you now, Dr Muntervary?’

‘And how exactly can anyone “coerce” me?’

‘By kidnapping your boy and locking him in a concrete box until you produce the required results.’

‘That’s not remotely funny.’

He lifted a briefcase onto his lap. ‘Good.’ The briefcase clips thwacked open. ‘Here is a file, containing photographs and information on the techniques employed by headhunters. Verify them through your own channels: your Amnesty friends in Dublin will know the names. Look at it later,’ he passed me the file, ‘but not before you eat. One more thing.’ He threw me a little black cylinder, the size of a camera film case. ‘Carry this.’

I looked at it, lying on my lap, but didn’t pick it up. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a chicken switch, programmed with your right thumbprint. It flips open like a lighter. If you press the button then one of our people will be with you within four minutes.’

‘Why should I swallow this hogwash? And why me?’

‘The New World Order is Old Hat. War is making a major comeback – not that it had ever gone anywhere – and scientists like you win wars for generals like me. Because quantum cognition, if spliced with Artifical Intelligence and satellite technology in the way that you have proposed in your last five papers, would render existing nuclear technology as lethal as a shower of tennis balls.’

‘And how do these phantom headhunters know about my research at Light Box?’

‘The same way we all do. Old-fashioned industrial espionage.’

‘Nobody’s going to kidnap me. Look at me. I’m middle-aged. Only Einstein, Dirac and Feynman made major contributions in their forties.’

The Texan stubbed out his cigarette, and tipped the pot pourri back into the bowl. ‘A lot of people kiss your ass, Doctor, and if I thought it would do any good I’d kiss your ass too. But listen really good. I can’t make heads or tails of your matrix mechanics, your quantum chromodynamics, and your nothing turning into something by energy borrowed from nowhere. But I do know that no more than ten people alive can make Quancog a reality. We have six of them, now, in Saragosa, in west Texas. I’m offering you a job. Come this fall, we were going to relocate Light Box’s Quancog project there wholesale, and offer you a package of incentives the usual way. But your resignation letter has forced our hand.’

‘Why should I work for you? Your president’s a shallow crook.’

‘Doesn’t take an egg-head to see that. But of all the shallow crooks with fingers on buttons today, who would you rather own Quancog?’

‘Quancog as a military application? Nobody should own it.’

‘Come to Texas, Dr Muntervary. Of all the agencies who want you, only ours will respect your conscience, and the rights of your boy Liam and John Cullin. You see me as your enemy, Doctor. I can live with that. In my world enemies and friends are defined by context. Understand that I’m on your side before it’s too late.’

I looked out at Mercury.

‘I always liked that one,’ said the Texan, following my gaze. ‘Lived by his wits.’

The pub sign of The Green Man squeaked as it swung. Maisie was leaning on the stone wall, looking out to sea through her telescope. Brendan was around the other side, pottering about in the vegetable patch. Maisie’s last grey hairs had turned white.

‘Afternoon, Maisie.’

She swung the telescope at me, and her mouth opened. ‘As I live and breathe! Mo Muntervary come back to haunt us! I saw a funny hat get off the
St Fachtna
,’ she lowered the eyepiece, ‘but I thought it was a birdwatcher come for the Thewicker’s Geese. Whatever happened to your eye?’

‘It got hit by a rogue electron in a lab experiment.’

‘Even when you were knee-high you were always bumping into things. Brendan! Come and see who it isn’t! Now Mo, why weren’t you back for the summer fayre?’

Brendan limped over. ‘Mo! You’ve brought some grand weather back with you this time! John was in sinking the Guinness last night, but he nary breathed a word of your homecoming. Holy Dooley, that’s a black-eye and a half ! Put a steak on it!’

‘I didn’t want a fuss. But aren’t the roses a picture! And how do you get honeysuckle to run riot at the end of October?’

‘Dung!’ answered Maisie. ‘Good and fresh from Bertie Crow’s cows, and the bees. Keep a hive, Mo, when you settle down. Care for the bees and the bees care for you. You should have seen the runner beans this year! Beauties, they were, eh Brendan?’

‘Aye, they turned out well enough, Maisie.’ He inspected the bowl of his dogwood pipe, the same one he’d smoked for half a century. ‘You see your ma in Skibbereen, Mo?’

‘I did.’

‘And how was she?’

‘Comfortable, but less lucid. At least she can’t do herself an injury where she is.’

‘That’s true enough.’ Maisie let a respectful silence go by. ‘You’ve lost too much weight, Mo. I thought you live on fondues and Toblerone chocolate in Switzerland.’

‘I’ve been on a trip, Maisie. That’s why I’m on the lean side.’

‘Lecture circuit, no doubt?’ Brendan’s eyes gleamed with pride.

‘You might call it that.’

‘If your da could see you today!’

Maisie was better at spotting half-answers. ‘Well, don’t stand over the garden wall. Come in and tell us about the wide world.’

Brendan shooshed with his antique hands. ‘Maisie Mickledeen, give our god-daughter a chance to catch her breath before plying her with liquor. Mo here’ll no doubt be wanting to get straight up to Aodhagan. The wide world can wait a few hours.’

‘Come by then later, Mo, or whenever, so. Eamonn O’Driscoll’s boy is back with his accordion, and Father Wally’s organising a lock-in.’

Lock-ins at The Green Man. I was home. ‘Maisie, don’t lock-ins need the odd night when you actually close at the legal time? And a lock to lock?’

‘Desist your logification right now, Mo! You’re back on Clear now. It’s only sheep, fish and the weather here. Leave your relativity back in Baltimore, if you please. And if John brings his harp I’ll crack open my last bottle of Kilmagoon. Mind how you go.’

‘Mowleen Muntervary, you are an eight-year-old aberration who will be lashed by devils with nettles in hell until your bottom is covered with little lumps that you will scratch until they bleed! Do you want that to happen?’

My memory of Miss Thorpe veers towards an eyebrow mite through an electron microscope. Shiny, spikey, many-eyed. Why are primary schoolteachers either Brontëesque angels or Dickensian witches? Do they teach black and white so much that they become black or white?

‘I asked you a question, and I did not hear an answer! Is it your wish to be damned as a liar?’

‘No, Miss Thorpe.’

‘Then tell me how you got your grubby mitts on the algebra test answers!’

‘I did them myself !’

‘If there is one thing in this world that I loathe more than little boys who fib, it is little girls who fib! I shall be forced to write to your father, telling him that his daughter is a fork-tongued viper! You’re going to be shamed in your own village!’

A toothless threat. No Clear Islander took a non-Gaelic-speaking teacher seriously.

There was a trail of these exposé letters, all the way to Cork Girls’ Grammar School. When my da came back at the weekend he used to read them out to Ma in a funny English accent that crippled us with laughter. ‘It is inconceivable that your daughter scored a hundred per cent in this examination honestly. Cheating is a serious transgression . . .’