Biblical (41 page)

There was an even greater clamor from the audience, questions shouted to the podium. Again Blackwell held up his hand.

“The reason for these events lies in the knowledge we now have, the technology we now create. We are becoming … We are become as the gods themselves, but it cannot be allowed. The gods will not accept it. You see, what I have discovered is
that everything I have been striving for, everything I have believed, that we all believed, is a lie … My life has been wasted in pursuit of a pretense. I have found the great knowledge …” The tears now streaked the scientist’s cheeks, his voice that of a trembling, frightened old man. “And now I have to share that great knowledge with you. And for that unforgivable sin, my friends, I am so sorry … so terribly sorry …”

*

Emma Boyd spent the free time she had sitting on the grass, enjoying the last of the evening sun, revising from the books she’d taken from the shoulder bag she had stuffed behind the trestle table in the marquee, where everything was now set up for the coffee to be served after the presentation.

There were a few physics students helping out at the event, dressed in white shirts and black trousers or skirts, and Emma wondered how many of them, like her, would be trying to eavesdrop on conversations between delegates and get some hint of what it was that was of such magnitude to attract the top brains in physics from around the world.

She was thinking of something else, too: the American she had met. Casey. Maybe he would share some secrets with her; she knew that there was something about him that made her want to share her secrets with him. But there was no future in it: he was Boston-based and she was anchored here, in Oxford. Why was she even thinking that far ahead? It was mad: they had only exchanged a handful of words. They were strangers. And, anyway, he was too old for her. She had worked out that he must be much older than he looked.

She sighed. Maybe they would be out soon. If he asked her, she would go on somewhere with him afterwards.

Sitting cross-legged on the grass was her favored posture for study, but the stupid skirt made it difficult, cutting the circulation to her legs and making her stiff, so Emma stood up and stamped the cramp out of her foot. She walked across the grass
towards the Martin Wood Complex. For a modern building – and it was very recently built – it was very attractive and light years better than the 1960s gray concrete monolith of the Denys Wilkinson Building, where Emma seemed to spend half her life attending Astrophysics lectures.

One thing about the symposium Emma found strange was the security. Two men who looked less like University Security and more like nightclub bouncers stood in front of the large glass doors of the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre. Why were they needed?

*

She saw it pulse.

The thing she would remember most, afterwards – in the hospital, during the months of recovery and rehabilitation, in the darkness of her life afterwards – was that she actually saw the plasticity of the glass. Emma would never be able to work out how her brain had been able to detect the pulse that swelled the glass for an immeasurably short time before the blast lifted her off her feet, tossing her fifteen feet backwards. Her eardrums shattered and the pain in her head immediate and monumental. She knew clothes had been ripped from her body but she felt no intense heat or burning. The blast was percussive, not thermal. She actually registered the thought as she lay there on the grass, blinded, deafened by the blast, choking on her own blood, as a million crystals of shattered glass rained down on her.

A bomb. Someone had put a bomb in the lecture theater. She could not speak, but her brain formed the name immediately before she lost consciousness.

Casey.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.

Albert Einstein

There was a new dream. It was now his only dream and always started the same way, with his sudden becoming. In the dream Macbeth came into existence from nothing, instantaneously and totally. He had no body but was a thing of energy with no substance. To start with he had few thoughts but his mind filled, connections flashing and sparking, each new thought and idea an exploding supernova in a universe that expanded faster than could be measured. And beyond his mind there was nothing. A void that was not even darkness, because to be darkness was to be something.

Then there was something: a context, an environment. Although he had no eyes with which to see, he knew he was in his father’s study. His father, Marjorie Glaiston and the Eyeless Man looked up at him with awe, and he wasn’t afraid of the Eyeless Man.

“We’ve built a mind,” his father said to the small boy at his side, whom Macbeth recognized as Casey. “We are becoming gods because we’ve built a mind.”

Every morning when he woke from this new dream, it took Macbeth a full forty to fifty panicked and amnesiac seconds to remember who he was, where he was and why he was there. Always it was Boston that came to mind first, then he remembered that he was back in Denmark; that he had been there for a year.

A year.

It was an expensive piece of real estate in an expensive city. Even more than with his choice of hotels, Macbeth needed his permanent living environment to be just right. The address was in Tolbodgade, but the building in which Macbeth had his apartment actually faced out over the cobbled wharf of Larsens Plads and the harbor beyond. It was a massive building, literally: its original function as a quayside store being to contain as much bulk as possible. The converted red-brick warehouse with its blue pantiled roof was one of three that stood on Larsens Plads, like stocky doormen guarding the city. It might have looked stark and functional to some, but something about the building’s solidity and robust geometry had appealed to Macbeth. Added to which, his fourth-floor apartment offered great views over Copenhagen on one side, the harbor on the other.

Macbeth stood at his window and watched the rain. Denmark was, for him, a place of constancy: nothing much seemed to change there, other than in measured, discrete stages. The same was true of the weather that, unlike the markedly four-season Massachusetts climate he’d grown up with, seemed to ease gradually and indistinctly from one season to another. It was now late spring, and he was hoping for a good summer. He needed a good summer.

It had been a year.

A year since Casey had been murdered in Oxford. A year since Macbeth had taken over as Project Director of the Copenhagen Project. A year since the hallucination epidemic had stopped.

There were still occasional instances of hallucinations. Oddly enough, most of these lingering cases had been close to Macbeth, in Denmark and northern Germany; but even these had been isolated and involved individuals or small groups of no more than two or three. Despite Casey’s and Newcombe’s theories of some other element at work, it was beginning to
look like the hallucinations really had been the result of some kind of psychoactive viral outbreak now diminishing into localized, tail-end clusters.

Yet Macbeth remained unconvinced.

The problem was that others also remained unconvinced: the Religious Right, Islamic Fundamentalists and Anarchoprimitivists all pointed to the destruction of the Prometheus Answer and the simultaneous wiping out of the world’s greatest physicists as the reason order had been restored to the world. God’s, Allah’s or Gaia’s will was triumphant over the false gods of science. Man’s arrogance had been checked and punished.

The truth was that while the religious fumed righteous indignation, no one rational liked to admit that the coincidence of the two events really was striking. In the meantime, stem cell research centers continued to burn, particle physics labs continued to be bombed, individual scientists were attacked.

Blind Faith declared the New Inquisition.

Even more than the increased terrorism, the most concern around the world was caused by the increasingly bizarre pronouncements of US President Elizabeth Yates. As Senator Yates, she had courted controversy during her campaign with her strong religious beliefs and apparent hostility to secularism and any faith other than her own Southern Baptist Christianity; as President Yates, she had caused unease with ambiguous statements on homosexuality, multi-faithism and moral standards, and her key appointments had been conspicuously traditionalist. There was talk of evangelical prayer meetings in the White House.

And since the hallucination outbreak, Yates’s rhetoric had become more pulpit than politic. The phrases ‘God’s Hand’ and ‘God’s Will’ had crept increasingly from her political oratory and into actual statements of policy. Her condemnation of Blind Faith was seen as grudging; and she created a diplomatic rift between the US and the newly unified European Union by
declaring ‘God’s Hand’ had been behind the breakdown of the Levant Accession to the EU, echoing the statements of the soldiers responsible for the massacre during their trial in Tel Aviv.

It had been a worrying time for all, not just the bereaved Macbeth.

He had always viewed the world as if from outside: he knew his emotional responses were not the same as other people’s, yet had always understood the power of emotion. During his time as a clinical psychiatrist, he’d seen real passions at work: titanic, elemental forces tearing at the minds of his patients. That he could understand, but as an abstract; and he viewed the emotional incontinence of popular culture, the on-tap tears of reality stars and talk-show guests, with confusion and bemusement.

That was perhaps why he had not been equipped for the grief. It had been as if the bomb that killed Casey had exploded inside Macbeth. Yet, like all emotional responses, it had loitered somewhere hidden before revealing itself. In the meantime, he had been able to go through the formalities of bereavement with an almost dispassionate objectivity.

While in Oxford, he’d made a formal identification of Casey’s body. It had taken less than thirty seconds. Thirty seconds that filled a space in his mind bigger than any other memory. The image of his brother’s broken body had barged into his brain, pushing out other gentler recollections of Casey. Macbeth, whose memory had always been his most fallible asset, knew that the image of Casey’s face, perfect on one side, eyeless and crushed on the other, would remain indelible in his recall until the day he died.

When the red tape-bound English police finally released Casey’s body, Macbeth had flown back to Boston with it. Macbeth arranged a Humanist ceremony, knowing it would have been Casey’s wish, before the interment at Mount Hope.
At the far end of the massive cemetery, Casey’s grave was close to the path that looped around it. Beyond the path a rank of oak trees, a strip of grass and a wrought-iron fence marked the cemetery’s boundary; beyond that a narrow, barely used road lay edged with the blank faces of industrial units, their corrugated flanks spray-painted with graffiti. For some reason, it irked Macbeth that his brother’s remains would be in such a dull spot. He didn’t know why: it wasn’t going to matter to Casey.

There was no Casey any more.

*

Macbeth hadn’t been back to Boston since.

It had been during the weeks after he returned to Copenhagen that it had hit him: intolerable grief so strong he felt it physically. Days were spent in his apartment, at the window, trying to focus on the world outside but torn apart by feelings inside. He had known few close, sustainable relationships in his life and the bond he had felt with his brother had been a fixing point for him. And now he was adrift. He took two weeks’ leave and sank into a dark, empty place. The strangest thing had been the duality of his grieving: Melissa’s death, even their long-past breakup, suddenly became real and tangible things, as if Casey had led her out from the same hidden corner of Macbeth’s consciousness.

But it was more than his grief that haunted him. Returning to the Project, he’d made an effort to re-find his chosen groove of life. The epidemic of hallucinations was over; he kept telling himself that, reminded himself of it every day.

He had to. Because every day since Casey’s death, John Macbeth had seen things that could not possibly have been there.

*

The first thing Macbeth did each day was to check if there were any reports of Boston Syndrome-type hallucinations anywhere
in the world. When there were none, and when he failed to see any Dreamers in the streets, he felt oddly disappointed.

The first vision had been on the S-train.

It had been the smallest of things and could so easily have been missed. In fact, had it been the only hallucination he experienced, he might have put it down to a simple misremembering. The woman opposite him had sat engrossed in a glossy-covered biography of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, only raising her eyes from the book as she realized the train was approaching her destination. Macbeth remembered feeling vaguely sorry for the female passenger: around thirty, plain in feature and styleless in dress. There seemed to be something sad about someone so homely vicariously living the life of the glamorous. First inserting a bright yellow bookmark, she closed the book, placed it in her shoulder bag, stood up from her seat and left Macbeth in his preferred solitude.

When the S-train resumed its journey, Macbeth watched Copenhagen slide by beyond the glass. He never worked or studied notes while in transit: the time between events, between places, was for him time to reflect. The problem was that these treasured moments had become dominated by reflections and rememberings of Casey. For some reason, Macbeth had been thinking about their childhood games on the beach out at the Cape when the bright red flash and thunder-rumble of an S-train passing from the opposite direction startled him back to the here and now. He could see they were pulling into Østerport station, which surprised him because he was sure they had already made that stop. He turned to see the plain female passenger opposite look up once more from her immersion in someone else’s, infinitely more glamorous life. Again, she inserted the bright yellow bookmark, this time several chapters further on, before carefully placing the book in her shoulder bag, standing up and preparing to disembark at her stop.