Biblical (45 page)

Macbeth felt a surge of relief. He had been convinced that something huge, some massive event had been about to play out, but now the episode was over.

His relief faded. The realization dawned on him that what they had all just experienced wasn’t an event. It was a foreshock.

Something was going to happen. Something big. Something soon.

The incident on the train wasn’t the only reason Macbeth contacted Mora Ackerman and said he was willing to meet her friend. Things changed over the next two days.

The Dreamers returned.

For the last year Macbeth – plagued by ghostly figures and improbable events visible only to him – had been on the lookout for any hint in others of dislocated attention, of distance from the world. But every time he thought he had spotted one, it turned out just to be someone temporarily distracted in the normal way of the mind. He was almost relieved to see others afflicted once more.

It started as a cheerful day. Ignoring Danish convention, the sun shone on early-spring Copenhagen; Macbeth had a conference in the University’s city center campus and he decided to walk.

He knew as soon as he saw the first one that they were Dreamers. He witnessed a traffic accident when a young man, probably a student, stepped out in front of a car in Nørregade and was knocked down. Fortunately the car had been traveling slowly, the driver responded quickly, and the student hadn’t been injured, Macbeth guessed, other than with a few bruises. But the lack of expression, of reaction, on the student’s face disturbed him. Both before and after the collision, the youth had seemed oblivious to the event and the yelling of the car’s driver. He just picked himself up and walked on.

Two women at a bus stop didn’t board the bus that stopped for them, deaf to the driver’s remonstrations. A small gazing boy didn’t respond to his parents’ urgings. An old man stood weeping as he stared into nothing.

By lunchtime, the news was full of reports from around the world of the return of Boston Syndrome.

Macbeth’s anxieties about his own mental health were eased by the return of the Dreamers. Perhaps he had just been more sensitive to whatever caused the phenomenon. He was kidding himself and knew it, but it was an excuse not to deal with his deteriorating state of mind.

Another reason he agreed to meet with Mora and her friend was the feeling that had haunted him ever since Project One had become sentient. The news had excited him, for sure, but there had come with it the oddest sensation: some kind of growing dissonance, as if the music of the world was being played increasingly off-key. But the thing that had convinced him most had been his phone call to Owens, the British policeman overseeing the Oxford investigation.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Owens had said when Macbeth had put it to him that it had been Professor Blackwell who had planted or at the very least detonated the bomb. There had been no intonation that would have suggested for a moment that there was any possibility of the claim being true. But there was no intonation of any kind: no surprise, no suspicion, no interest. It had been the response of a trained professional expert at maintaining a one-way flow of information.

“I need to know,” Macbeth had insisted. “Is Professor Blackwell a suspect?”

“We are looking at all lines of inquiry at the moment,” Owens had said carefully. “You have to understand this is a very complex investigation with many leads to follow. I promise you that we will release information as soon as we are in a position to do so.”

When Macbeth had hung up, he was convinced that Mora had told him the truth about Blackwell. The question remained how she came by that information.

*

Feeling the need to clear his head, and because the weather was in broad agreement, Macbeth decided to take lunch at a pavement café that looked out over the square of Sankt Hans Torv, not far from the Institut. He visited this café often, enjoying the involved detachment of observing so many of his fellow human beings as they passed by, going about their daily business, without him having to engage or interact with them. It allowed him to indulge his sport of fictionalizing histories and futures for people he would never get to know.

He ordered a beer, a coffee and a sandwich and settled down to his observation. In any crowd, in any crossroads of human traffic, there were patterns. Macbeth knew these patterns were not always apparent to others, but he saw them without effort, wondered at them, became lost in their complexity. Then, like an angler hooking a fish, he would pick one individual and imagine where they were going, where they’d come from, what was going through their heads. But today was different. The patterns broke down, people bumped into each other, individuals would stop dead in their tracks and stare off into space as they became Dreamers. There was no relaxation in his observation today.

“Do you mind if I join you?” a voice asked in English.

Macbeth looked up to see a tall figure in a dark suit, his eyes shielded from the bright spring sun by sunglasses.

“Agent Bundy? What are you doing here?”

“May I?” Bundy held a hand towards the chair opposite and Macbeth nodded.

“I have some loose ends to tie up,” said Bundy as he sat.

“Loose ends? In Copenhagen? I would have thought this was quite some way out of your jurisdiction and, anyway, the only
common denominator I can think of is me. Am I your loose end?”

Bundy smiled and removed his sunglasses. His pupils contracted in the bright daylight, emphasizing the contrasting colors in the irises. “I’m afraid you’re not that important,” he said. “I’m here because of someone else – another American citizen who has …
relocated
 … here recently. Someone I believe may have been involved with events back home in San Francisco and Boston.”

“I see. So nothing to do with me.”

“I didn’t exactly say that, Dr Macbeth. I think you may have a friend in common. Mora Ackerman.”

“Dr Ackerman? I don’t really know her at all.”

“But you met with her?” “I don’t see—” Macbeth started to protest. Bundy held up a hand.

“I just wanted you to know that Mora Ackerman is a known contact of someone I would very much like to speak to. I just thought she may have mentioned him to you.”

“What FBI office do you work out of?” asked Macbeth.

“I have what you could call a
roving brief
. Which is why I’m here. Has Mora Ackerman mentioned an American friend here in Copenhagen.”

“No,” said Macbeth, aware of Bundy’s strange eyes studying his face, his expression, intently. “Like I said, we have only met once and that was brief.”

“And why did you two meet? How did she get in touch with you?”

“It was a blind date,” Macbeth lied. “Set up by friends.”

“I see.” Bundy smiled and replaced his sunglasses. “Well, if Dr Ackerman does mention or introduce you to any stray Americans, I would appreciate a call.” He pushed a card across the table to Macbeth, who pointedly let it lie there.

“Listen, Dr Macbeth, as a psychiatrist, I don’t need to tell you
that people aren’t always who or what they seem. Dr Ackerman, for example.”

“Oh … and what about you, Agent Bundy?”

“Me?”

“Sergeant Ramirez of the California Highway Patrol has never heard of you, despite your supposed common interest in the Golden Gate suicide investigation. And according to the regional office he contacted, there is no Agent Bundy in the FBI.”

“As I said, I have a roving brief. Much of my work falls into the ‘need to know’ classification. Sergeant Ramirez doesn’t qualify as someone who needs to know. But maybe I’m a case in point, after all. You have noticed my eye color?”

“Your central heterochromia? Yes, I have.”

“I have two eye colors because I am two people.”

“You’re a tetragametic chimera?”

Bundy nodded. “I wasn’t diagnosed till I was an adult. It was quite a shock, and it took quite a bit of explaining to me. I was told that two sperm had fertilized two separate ova and two fetuses formed – non-identical twins – then one twin
overwhelmed
the other, absorbing his DNA. The result is me – parts of me have one set of DNA, other parts the other set. And my eyes have the color of both twins. When I found out, it changed the way I view other people. You see, everybody – Mora Ackerman, me, even you, Dr Macbeth – can be more than the one person at the same time.” He stood up. “Well, thanks for your time. Enjoy your lunch. And if Mora Ackerman should get in touch again …”

Macbeth watched Bundy merge into the crowd of Copenhagen shoppers and office workers. He tried to imagine a past and a future for him, but found he couldn’t.

Two days later, the world and all in it became heavier.

It happened to everyone and it happened everywhere. During the day and night before it happened, there had been a surprising calm around the world. Every man and woman, every child, everywhere on the planet, shared the sensation. For the first time in recorded history, Mankind was united by a uniform, common experience.

It came simultaneously in two forms: a profound lethargy caused by a feeling of inexplicably increased gravity, and a complete detachment from the world. To begin with, each individual thought it was just he or she who was experiencing the feeling of enervated dullness, of being at one remove from their environments, from each other. But then, as people began to talk, to share their experience, the scale of the problem became clear.

Ironically, the depersonalization that accompanied the feeling bore with it a dividend: peace. All passions were dulled and in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, guns fell silent, ideological and ethnic conflict suddenly irrelevant. Even the heat of religious fervor, previously fueled by the hallucinations, cooled. As the day dawned across time zones, the rush was taken out of rush hours around the globe: no one bustled their way onto the Tokyo subway, crammed into Manhattan elevators; Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Mumbai, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London all watched the sun rise with leaden indifference.

The world took a day off.

In Paris, as she went through the daily rituals of observance she had followed sedulously since her vision of St Joan’s immolation at the hands of callous heretics, Marie Thoulouze felt an extra burden in every step and movement, at the same time feeling detached from all that happened around her, as if she were looking at the world through glass. In San Francisco, Walt Ramirez felt it too as he sat listlessly in his cruiser watching the unusually sparse traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Fabian Bartelma felt it as he walked home from a learningless, companionless day at school. Mary Dechaud put the feeling down to her age as she stood at her kitchen window, looking out at the road that ribboned between tree-bristled humps of Vermont landscape, trying to remember who it was she was expecting, and planning what she would cook Joe for dinner. Deborah Canning was disinterestedly, vaguely aware of it as she sat at the window of her hospital room, her pale hand resting unusually heavily on the book of
trompe l’œil
on the table. In New York, Jack Hudson felt it as he ran through another documentary pitch – this time to a new fresh and shiny face. In Liquan, Zhang Xushou felt the brush weigh heavy in her hand as she swept back her red-gold hair with tired pride. In Boston, Karen Robertson felt it as she sat at a table in a near-deserted café, watching impassively as a small spider made its way across the aluminum tabletop towards her hand. In Stuttgart, bent over his history books, Markus Schwab paused from his studies to rub the weariness away from the nape of his neck. He felt leaden, dull and strangely dislocated, but pressed on with his Holocaust project, now more than an academic exercise for him. In Military Police Corps Confinement Base 394 in Tzrifin, Ari Livnat also felt the heaviness and sense of unreality as he lay languidly on the bunk of the cell he shared with Gershon Shalev.

And in Oxford, Emma Boyd felt it as she sat in the darkness
of her apartment, unaware that she had forgotten to pull the window shades. She too felt a strange sense of unreality, but she had become used to the unreal. She had been assured that the visual hallucinations she had endured since the explosion that rendered her totally and suddenly blind were not uncommon. Charles Bonnet Syndrome was not, her doctors had explained, a psychiatric issue but merely the brain simulating visual input because actual stimulus had been lost. The miniature people and animals, often with grotesque faces, were a commonly reported feature of the Syndrome. But this was different. She felt at one remove from every sensation and sound around her and the feeling of being weighed down had stopped her from venturing out that day.

Even Macbeth felt it. Feelings of detachment had been a regular feature of his life, but today he knew something was very wrong with him, with the world, with the people around him.

Not that there were many. He had spent the morning at the university, but less than half of the team had made it in. Throughout the morning, Macbeth had felt enervated and weak. Everything seemed to weigh more: his lightweight suit feeling like sodden, heavy wool on his shoulders; his limbs seeming filled with sand and his movements slow and clumsy. But there was more than the physical sensation. He had had the same feeling of unreality since the day he met Mora Ackerman, the day Project One had become self-aware; but now it was intensified. And the déjà vu was no longer a sudden feeling, but a lingering sense of everything repeating itself, of an eternal Hofstadter-strange-loop of simultaneous prescience and remembrance.

It was just before lunchtime when, exhausted by the effort of dragging his flesh through the morning, Macbeth got home to his apartment and showered in an attempt to wash the lead out of his body, but even the jets of water from the showerhead
seemed to bite with more force, rippling and dimpling his skin. He was tired, so tired.

He was getting dressed when Mora Ackerman called. “This thing today … the gravity thing … You feel it too?” he asked.

“Everyone does,” she said. “All around the world, according to the news. We’re experiencing causality. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s your project that’s causing it – just like the Prometheus Project caused what happened last year.”