The End of Mr. Y

Chapter Nineteen

So how long have I got? Not long enough. I get dressed and fold up the priory nightdress and leave it on the bed. Oh well, I knew I wouldn't be able to stay in that costume for long. Of course, I don't want to go anywhere. I want to stay here in my brown dressing gown and eat hot food cooked by religious people. I want to see Adam again. But they know I'm here. They'll send those KIDS here first of all. Can they go into religious places? I don't know. But if those guys got desperate enough ... I just don't understand the system well enough to know what they would or would not do. I just have to go somewhere they wouldn't think of looking for me. I have to go where Burlem is. Wherever it is, he's been hiding out there for over a year now.

Unless he's dead, like those poor kids. But I'll have to take the chance that he's not. And there's a problem. I don't know what to do with the book. Once I am ready to leave, I take it out of my bag and touch it, perhaps for the last time. I can't take it with me: There's too good a chance that they'll catch up with me. No. This place; this is where they can't go. So I'll leave it here, and maybe one day I'll come back for it.

Can I actually do this?

I run my pale hand over the cream cloth cover. I can't take it with me.

But what if someone finds it?

I look again at the small bookcase. There's even dust on the silver key. No one reads these books. They are there for show. I remember some English lit. joke someone told me once about why it's so easy to be a theology student specializing in any Old- or New-Testament faith. I don't remember the whole joke, but I remember the punch line: Because they have to read only one book. I'm not sure it's true, but it got a laugh from us all in the bar. So, do I take my chances and leave The End of Mr. Y here with the pope's poetry? I don't see what else I can do. I don't even know if I'm still going to be alive tomorrow. With my heart hammering like a heavy piece of machinery, I unlock the case and put the book inside. You really wouldn't notice it in there. I shut the glass front. Then I lock it. Shall I take the key with me? No, they'll find it when they strip me down, after I am dead. I'll leave the key here. But where? There's nowhere else in this room to hide anything. Knowing I have to go, I just slip it under the bookcase in the end. It's not ideal, but it'll do for now.

When I get outside, the black car has gone. The freezing air scrapes my face like a thousand knives. It's almost dawn and I want to be in bed, in the warm. What the hell am I going to do now? I'm going to drive far away before those fuckers realize I've gone. I'm going to go and find Burlem and work out how I can stop these KIDS from messing with my brain. And ... Am I now so lost in a fantasy that I don't understand what's going on anymore, or is it possible that I made the blond men leave? That's what I was trying to do. I just focused on Martin, and his horrible, clenched feeling, and I told him he had to leave and find a toilet. Is it that simple? So why can't they do that? Is it just the KIDS who are supposed to be able to do that? So why can I do it, too?

Apollo Smintheus. Why did you desert me?

There's a part of the A2, just around Medway, where it looks as if you're driving into the sky. Most roads in Britain seem to be designed on the principle that they should be enclosed by something: hedges; fields; houses. But this road sweeps through the landscape like the broad stroke of an eraser tool on a computer, as if the pixel size has been set too high and too much has been rubbed out. It's pale gray and four lanes wide. The sky is still black and everything that isn't road or sky is covered with snow that glows in all the artificial white lights. For the second time this week I feel as though I'm living in a black-and-white photocopy. It's six A.M., and, apart from two gritter trucks, I'm on my own out here, driving towards Burlem's daughter's school, not knowing what I'm going to do when I get there. I need to try to find Apollo Smintheus as well. I have so many questions.

The car heater is on full and I have finally started to warm up. But it's freezing outside and I don't know where I am going to sleep tonight. I don't even know how or even if what I've got planned is possible. How am I going to get into the Troposphere now? I don't have a sofa, or a bed. What am I going to do? I can't exactly pull over into a lay-by and hope for the best. I'd probably freeze to death before I starved. Or I'd wake up in prison—or an asylum. At least I now know that the blond guys are fakes. They can't do anything official. But I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I'm pretty sure they won't burn down the priory at least. When I was in Martin's mind I saw just how impossible it would be. But they've got a motel room and two KIDS to help them. And I know that they're willing to hurt me: that they want to hurt me. All I've got is my car and £9.50 in the whole world. I can't go back to the university. I can't go back to my flat.

It's when I think that: that I can't ever go back—that's when it actually feels real, and a liquid sort of fear starts to pump around my body along with (or instead of?) my blood. I feel cold again, despite the car heater. And then I seem to black out, just for a second—or maybe a bit more than a second. When I come back to myself I can see a sign that wasn't there before. I hate it when this happens on the motorway, I think, quite deliberately, as if what I'm feeling is normal.

The sign is telling me that if I keep going I'll end up in London. That's what I want. There's another sign pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven't lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me. Except ... One of them does mean something to me. It's the town where Patrick lives. Would he lend me some more money? Would he even be up at this time of day? My brain does some kind of quantum computation that's too fast for my conscious mind to keep up with. And then, right at the last second, I'm indicating and pulling off.

Five minutes later I'm parked outside a Little Chef off a run-down roundabout. There are half-dead trees everywhere, and bushes full of lager cans and old take-away cartons. This place has the feel of something that's been mis-designed on one of those city-sim computer games: a corner you'd forgotten to delete, or even arranged to have cleaned. It's half past six. Does Patrick get up this early? I can't piss him off, or alert his wife, so I send a text message: Will do anything for cash. I add the name of the town and three coquettish ellipses. This has to seem fun or he won't buy it.

The cold air stings my eyes as I get out of the car and walk over to the door to the Little Chef. It doesn't open until seven. I get back in the car and put the heater on full. Can you kill yourself sitting in a car with the heater on? Or do you actually have to turn on the engine and run a pipe into the window from the exhaust? Now I can't seem to warm up, even with the heater on. I close my eyes. Apollo Smintheus ...I think. And then I wonder how you pray to an entity you've actually met. Is that possible? Apollo Smintheus. Please be OK. Please help me, if you can. I'm doing something bad now, something I'll never tell anyone about. But I need to get back into the Troposphere and see you and for that I need a warm room. Is this even working? Is this how you should pray? I don't even know any classic prayers. I used to be able to meditate. Perhaps that's more appropriate. For the next ten minutes I sit there with the buzz of the heater in the background and my eyes shut repeating the words Apollo Smintheus ... Apollo Smintheus... like a mantra. I don't know if it has worked, but when I open my eyes the snow under the car park lights seems about a thousand shades lighter than it was before. Then the world goes dull again. The Little Chef is open. I need some coffee.

I'm about halfway through my second espresso when my phone buzzes.

It's Patrick. Ur an early bird.

I start typing back: I know. Then I hesitate, trying to think of some joke about catching a worm that won't insult him somehow. Nothing comes. In the end I simply write So...?

Where r u?

Little Chef. Off the A2.

OK. C u in 10.

Can I do this? I have to do this. There's no other way. I sip my coffee and wait.

When he walks in he's dressed for work in black jeans and a dark red shirt.

"Well," he says, sitting down. "This is unexpected."

"Do you want some coffee?" I say.

"I want something else," he says, raising an eyebrow.

"Oh, you'll get that."

"Where?"

"Ever done it in a seedy toilet?"

He smiles and shakes his head. "God, this is dirty."

I smile. "I know."

"I've never..."

"Never what?"

The waitress comes over. Patrick bites his lip. "Two more coffees," he says.

"Never what?" I say again as the waitress goes over to the counter, picks two white cups from a pile, and then places them, one after the other, under the spout of the coffee machine.

"Well..."

He doesn't have to say it. To him this is an affair with a downward spiral of logic—but it is logic. We start in hotels and end up in a service station café, drinking bad coffee and planning sex in the toilets. For him this is a story: Act 1—glamorous sex. Act 2—violent sex. Act 3—we're going to do it in a grubby toilet and he's going to pay me for it. I hope he realizes that this is it now. Act 3. Game over. There'll be climax and catharsis, sure. And then the story will end. Of course, in my world there is no such logic. For me this has been purely episodic and accidental, and this situation now means nothing at all. There is no game. I just need some money. But if something wants to be a story, it will be.

Ten minutes later we're in the disabled cubicle and it smells of pink dispenser soap and damp paper towels. Patrick's got hold of one of my nipples and he's pinching it through the material of my jumper. He's pressing me up against the wall.

"God," he says. "I can't believe I'm doing this. Take your top off."

"Wait," I say. "We have to do this properly."

"Properly?"

"Don't you want to know how much I charge?"

He nuzzles his head close to my face and bites my earlobe. "You dirty bitch. Go on then, how much?"

"A hundred."

"Your prices have gone up. What do I get for that?"

"You get to fuck me. As hard as you want."

"I got that for twenty quid last time."

"OK. So what's worth a hundred to you?"

"You know what I want."

Yeah. And he got it for free last time. "Money first," I say.

He takes out five twenties, cash-machine-clean, and gives them to me.

"Now take off your top and pull down your jeans," he says.

I do it.

"Now put your hands behind your back."

He takes something out of his pocket and ties my hands together. And I'm thinking that whatever he does next doesn't matter. It's only my body. I don't mind how fucked my body gets as long as my mind's OK. And my body is up for this, anyway. However scared I am; however much I want to be driving away from the blond men and the KIDS—my body recognizes this feeling and wants more of it. It wants the familiar pain that's coming.

"Bend over," says Patrick. He takes some of the pink soap from the dispenser and smears it on his cock.

It takes about a minute and a half for him to come.

I get to Hertfordshire at around eleven. I have a plan of sorts. I figure that the only possible chance I've got of getting to Burlem is through his daughter. He's her ancestor, after all, and Apollo Smintheus's instructions did say that you could reach people's ancestors via Pedesis. So I'm going to check in to a bed-and-breakfast near her school and then get into the Troposphere and see if I can find Apollo Smintheus and ask him exactly how I would go about this. If I'm near her school, then I'm near her. And if I'm near her, then it should be easy enough to find her in the Troposphere. That's my guess.

The school is in a tiny village a few miles outside Hitchin. I drive around for about five minutes after locating it. There don't seem to be any hotels or boardinghouses here. I drive around again. There's a large pub. I park outside it and go in. There's no one inside, just a thin, sleazy-looking guy drying glasses behind the bar.

"Hi," I say.

"Hello," he says back. "Not an escapee, are you?"

"What?"

"Not from the school?"

Surely I don't look that young? "No," I say. "Maybe about twenty years ago ... Have you got rooms here?"

"Bed-and-breakfast?"

"Yeah."

"Hang on. I'll get the book."

I haven't seen another human being since I drove into the village. I can't believe that this place is going to be full up, but I wait while he flicks to the right page and then runs his fingernail down it.

"Yeah. We can do tonight," he says. "Just you, is it?"

"Yes."

"It'll be seventy-five pounds."

Jesus. For a room in a pub? "Have you got anything cheaper?"

"No, love. I've got one more apart from this one but that's eighty-five. It's up to you."

I sigh. "Is there anywhere else around here that might be cheaper?"

"You can go back into Hitchin," he says. "You might get something there."

Hitchin was about ten miles away. I have to be close to the school.

"Thanks. I'll take it," I say. "Oh—can I smoke in there?"

"Do what you want in there, love," he says. "Do you want to settle up now?"

He doesn't trust me.

"OK," I say. I give him the cash.

The room's better than I expected. The bed is soft and plump, with a red eiderdown. There are two bedside tables, each with an antique lamp. There's an en suite bathroom with soft but worn white towels. I need to have a bath, but I don't have much time. Can I get to the Troposphere from the bath? Would I drown? I need to make the best use of the time I've got here. What are my priorities? Food, then Troposphere. Maybe I'll ring down for something and have a bath while I'm waiting for it to arrive. A quick bath, just to warm up. Can I even order food here? Yes, there's a menu by the bed. Room service seems to consist mostly of dead stuff and chips. I need something substantial to eat. They do soup; I doubt it's homemade. I call down and find out that it's pea soup today and that it is homemade. I order a bowl of that and two portions of chips. Then I have a bath. After my bath I put on a clean pair of knickers, a clean pair of jeans, a thick black thermal top, and a jumper. It's warm in here, warmer than the priory. I dip chips in my soup and reread the document I wrote out last night. I still have so many questions for Apollo Smintheus.

I miss having the book. I miss The End of Mr. Y.

When I search my bag for the vial of fluid, it isn't there. Even when I dump the whole contents onto the bed: nothing. All I've got is the black dot on the piece of card. How am I going to go into the Troposphere? Shall I cry this time? Or maybe I'll just lie back on the bed and look at the dot and focus on the feeling of the jellyfish lights and the tunnel. Do I even need the fluid? Maybe there's some in my system already, because the tunnel is suddenly real, and...

The Troposphere looks roughly the same as the first time I entered it. I'm on another thin city street and it's still nighttime. Is there no sun here? I look around at the neon signs and the broken shop fronts. Is this what the inside of my mind looks like? Why would that be? I walk past a sex shop with big purple dildoes in the window. Another sex shop? Then I realize that this is how I see sleazy men. This place must represent the man downstairs, the one who gave me the room. So is it my mind that makes these images? It seems like it. Next door to the sex shop there's a pet beautician's with a blue door. Where's my mind got that from? Then there's a greengrocer's with plastic-looking fruit in baskets outside.

Console?

It appears. You now have thirty choices, it tells me.

OK. That's not big enough for a school population. I'm obviously not that close.

Can I play the Apollo Smintheus card?

The Apollo Smintheus card has expired.

Apollo Smintheus?

Nothing.

I keep going. Obviously I am going to have to do this on my own. So how would I best get to the school? In the physical world it's about a hundred yards down the road. But in this world-of-minds? I keep going. I wonder for a second how direction works here. Do I have to go the "same way" to find something here as I would in the physical world? It's very confusing. For a moment I think back to Lumas's story "The Blue Room." Would it be possible to go somewhere in my mind that doesn't work in four-dimensional space-time? Could I get trapped in here?

This road doesn't make any sense. The jumble of small shops has now turned into a boulevard of exclusive-looking department stores and jewellers. The window displays repulse me. In one fluorescently bright space, mannequins in glittery evening dresses stand around ignoring one another. In the next, a mannequin takes a metallic dog for a walk. Another window has two male mannequins fucking one thin, fragile-looking female mannequin. I prefer that: At least it was unexpected. I walk on, past a mirrored building on my right and an office block on my left. The road narrows again and now there are houses everywhere. But these aren't normal houses: They're life-sized doll's houses, all with the fronts taken off and placed to one side, each with a hinge dangling just below the roof. They are all painted in pastel colors: lilac, powder blue, lemon, rose. This represents the girls' school. It must do.

Console?

You now have four hundred and fifty-one choices.

OK. I'm not sure quite how this is going to work, but I approach one of the closest doll's houses and walk inside, straight from the street into the sitting room.

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm fifteen and I've been smoking for two months and I think I'm addicted already. I'm addicted to Coke as well, and those rolls from the village shop. My biggest dream is to be so addicted to everything that people have to whisper about me. I want my stupid fringe to grow out and I want to sit on Hampstead Heath with Heather and Jo and the Highgate lot and talk about how out of control we all are but I'm not sure about this because they all smoke weed and I don't want to. I'm going to have sex at the next ball. I have to do it now or all my credibility is going to be, like, out of the window. I've lied about it so far, but now people want details. Jules asked me to draw a picture of a penis in maths the other day!

I take another drag off my cigarette.

"Do you feel addicted yet?" I ask Nikki.

"Yeah," she says. "Totally. And it's fucked my voice."

Nikki's in the choir. But really she wants to be a singer in an indie band. You need to fuck your voice to do that. It's why she started smoking up here with me and the others. Where are the others? Soph's doing drama, but what about Hannah and Jules? I haven't seen Jules since this morning when she gave me a dirty look over breakfast. I don't know what I've done. Oh, please, Jules, don't stop liking me.

Think about something else.

"Do you think Jim'll manage not to, like, tell everyone in the whole village that we used the fag machine?" I say.

"Soph's working on Jim. Don't stress, babes. She's got him in hand"

"She didn't, though...? Like, not actually..."

"You'll have to ask her. But..." She giggles. "Oh God. I'm not supposed to say."

"Basically yes, though, right?"

"Yeah. Totally."

"Oh, yuck."

Soph really is out of control.

The name Molly comes into my head from nowhere. Ugh. Why would I want to think about Molly Davies now? OK. That girl is way out of control. Soph might have messed around with Jim a little bit for cigarettes but Molly's reputation is, like, legendary. I can't go anywhere near her; she freaks me out. It's not just that she isn't a virgin. I mean, well, no one here is a virgin (well, apart from me—but we're keeping that one quiet) but Molly is about the least virginal person you could ever meet. Last year, when they had our common room and we had the lame one in the basement, she actually SUCKED OFF a VB on the sofa. VB = Village Boy. They're all chavs. The idea that there's chavvy spunk on the sofa ... None of us can bear to think about it.

"Hey, you've gone quiet. You all right, babes?"

"Yeah. I was thinking about Molly and that lot."

"Don't get stressed thinking about the lower sixth. They're not worth it."

"Yeah, I guess."

"You got that deo?"

"Yeah."

We spray ourselves with deo and, eating sugar-free mints, walk back towards the school buildings. Soph won't have these; she says they give you cancer. One day Jules was like, "They give cancer to rats, idiot." Jules is hilarious, like all the time.

There's Helene, the slutty French girl, on her way up to their dorms. Don't look at her; don't look. Oh piss. Why am I looking ... She'll think I'm a lesbian, which won't be good as everyone says she actually is a lesbian, when she's not being a slut.

A large doll's-house frontage flickers over Helene. But I don't try to jump. I remember what has happened before, when I've ended up right back in the Troposphere. I need to do this a different way.

Console!

The thing comes up. The screen swims with images. I can't make them all out. I can see a little image of a desk; another of what appears to be a gym. I can see a white cracked ceiling in another.... But there are about ten altogether and I can't pick one out. The French girl has gone. I continue down the corridor with Tabitha Young, aka Tabs, the girl who wants to be addicted to everything. As she walks along next to Nikki, her brain doesn't stop chattering about people walking past, her socks (which are too short), her skirt (which is too long), her breath (which may or may not smell of fags), and a constant undercurrent of fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. At the same time as this she's able to say "Mmm," and "I so agree" every time Nikki says anything to her.

I leave the console on. I wonder if these images relate to what Tabs's ancestors are seeing. Again I notice that there's not much actual ancestry here. There's nothing showing on the screen that I don't recognize. No cavemen; no Roman graffiti. But I thought Mr. Y used Pedesis to travel through time. Or maybe I just misread that part of the book. I wish I understood this. I picked up some information just from being in Martin's mind, but it isn't enough.

Another girl walks past, and Tabs recognizes her as a lower-sixth girl called Maxine and tries to think of something cool and witty to say in case the girl says anything to her. This time, when the door opens over the image of the girl, a new display appears on the console screen as well. I recognize this by now: It's an image of me/Tabs and it means—or it must mean—that I can jump from here to there, just like I did with the mouse and the cat. OK. I'm going to try this. Cross my fingers: Go, go. Come on. And—yes—I'm blurring, but hopefully not back into the Troposphere....

You now have one choice.

You ... I smell. I smell so bad. Those year eleven girls must have smelled me as I walked past just now. I can feel the dampness under my arms and between my thighs—my large, oversized, supermassive, chunky thunder-thighs. Wearing tights means that my legs don't rub together so bad, and my skin doesn't go red, but they make me hot and when I'm hot I sweat like an animal. But at least animals are meant to smell. No one minds if animals smell. No one else will ever understand this. I don't know how I can go on through life with this problem. If I died, would anyone notice? No one is going to want to go to bed with me, ever. I even revolt myself when I get undressed, and I know that Claire, Molly, and Esther notice but don't say anything. Well, they don't say anything to me, but I think they talk about it when I'm not there. I so hope they're not planning one of those stupid "interventions." They did it last term with Nicky Martin. They all swooped on her just after she'd got into bed and told her that her breath stank. Obviously they were supernice about it. Everyone's supernice about everything here. "We just thought you'd want to know..." Smile, smile, privileged teeth. "We'd want you to tell us if, like, we had any problems." If they tried an intervention on me I'd kill myself. I don't know how yet. I don't like blood and I can't tie a noose. Oh damn. There's Esther. I have to go and change but I can't if Esther's on her way to the dorm. Great.

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm so much thinner than Maxine now. That diet is fantastic.

"Hey, Maxine."

I like saying "Hey" rather than "Hi." It's kind of American.

"Oh, hi, Esther."

But she doesn't stop and talk; she practically runs in the other direction. What did I ever do to her? Stuck-up bitch. Anyway, so what am I going to do if Miss Goodbody ("Call me Isobel") does make a move on me? I've had this crush for so long that it never occurred to me that she might feel the same way about me. But she was the one who suggested extra drama lessons, and she was the one who walked in while I was getting changed for the dress rehearsal the other day, and she was the one who commented on my tits. Seriously. I am certain I didn't imagine it. There was the "Whoops" after she pulled back the wrong curtain. Then the too-long pause. Then the little smile. Then—and I am ninety-nine percent sure this really happened—then she said, "Nice tits" before walking away. So that must mean something. She's not just trying to be cool and young, etc. She must be trying to tell me something. But it was so much under her breath that I can't be sure she said it at all.

Just because I want her, that doesn't make me a lesbian. Does it?

I am not a lesbian.

I am not a lesbian.

But I do want her to kiss me.

I turn a corner and start walking up the lower-sixth staircase. Usually I take these stairs two at a time, but my breathing feels tight today. What did I do with my inhaler? Shit. I think it's in my gym bag down in the changing rooms. I can't be bothered to go down there now. I'll be all right. I haven't had a real attack for over a year now. If only I knew what to do with this feeling I get when I think about Isobel Goodbody. It's as though ... It's as though my stomach is a fish tank with thousands and thousands of fish in it, but the water's been drained out and now they're all flopping around like on that horrible documentary we watched in Biology. How do I switch this feeling off? I think kissing her might do it, but when am I going to get to do that? And is it worth getting expelled for? What if everyone finds out and thinks I'm a lesbian? I hope no one's in the dorm. Oh shit. Someone is in here. It's Molly, and she looks weird. What is going on with all that eyeliner? Has she even got a free period now? I thought she was supposed to be in philosophy.

The console stays the same as the frame of the doll's house hovers around Molly. Come on, come on. I'm potentially two steps away from Burlem now. Well, if this works I am. Why isn't this happening? Why am I not getting the image in the console that tells me I can switch over to Molly?

I think of Apollo Smintheus's document, the bit I didn't remember at first:

You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds).

Vulnerable in what way? I don't understand. I stay with Esther, but with the console in my vision, too. If there's even a flicker I'm jumping over to Molly.

"Hey," I say to Molly.

"Hey," she says back.

"No philosophy?"

"Couldn't be bothered."

I go over to my bed and sit on it. So much for thinking about Isobel in privacy. Now I've got bloody Molly sitting here simmering. She's putting on makeup. I watch as she applies pink blusher and black mascara. Now she's back onto the eyeliner, smearing more of it on as though she's about to join a troupe of mime artists who worship the devil in their spare time.

"Are you going somewhere?" I ask her.

"Yeah."

"Where?"

"Out."

"Molly."

"What? It's Friday night and I'm not staying in this shit hole."

"But..."

"Just cover for me, Esther, yeah?"

"Yeah." I shrug. "Of course."

In fact, the sooner she goes, the sooner I'll be alone. Unless Maxine comes up as well. I don't know where she was going. She went off in the direction of the changing rooms—but she never does sport. I should have asked her to get my inhaler. I sigh. You can get a good education here but no bloody privacy. At least next year I'll have my own room. I was supposed to have my own room this year, or at least be sharing with only one other person. But there's a "space crisis" and mice in the old sixth-form wing. So here we are and it's like year eleven all over again.

"Hey, Moll?" I say to her now.

"Yeah?"

"Who are you going with?"

Maybe she's going out with Maxine. Although Maxine's being weird with everyone lately. But I can still hope that the whole dorm's going out without me tonight. Imagine being here on my own and having Miss Goodbody walk in and ... I couldn't call her Miss Goodbody if I was about to kiss her. Oh, Isobel... That sounds downright stupid.

"No one. I'm gonna hook up with Hugh when I get into town."

And that's when it happens: the flicker in the console. I jump. I'm in....

You now have one choice.

You ... I ache for Hugh. Someone said he was the most dangerous guy in Hitchin the other day. Fine. Maybe I'm the most dangerous girl. He doesn't see that, of course. He sees, what? A private schoolgirl with all the privileges he never had? A teenager; just an immature kid? But he must see something in me, otherwise why did he spend the whole night with me last Saturday?

But he hasn't answered his phone since then. He hasn't texted me. So I'm faced with another night of wandering from pub to bar to club on my own, pretending to be doing something other than looking for him. But what? I look over at Esther. She's like a skeleton lately. That's one good reason not to ask her to come with me. Maybe she'd be more his type with her natural blond hair, and the way she's got those ginormous tits on that tiny body. Bitch. No, I won't take her. I just need to be with Hugh again. I don't care about his stupid housemates, or his mattress on the floor, or that he likes to drink vodka from the bottle while he's screwing me. I don't care that while I was whispering "Hugh, Hugh" in his ear he only grunted back some name that didn't sound like mine, and that when I said to him, "Fuck me hard" (like on that Internet porn story Claire printed out last term), he grinned and called me a little slut. I don't even want to change him. Maybe I just need to change me.

Or have I already changed too much? What's it called when butterflies come out of their cocoons? Whatever it is that's not what's happened to me. I'd be a horrible butterfly. Whatever I was before I've hatched, that's what it is: I've hatched into something else now. And it's not as though I'm a typical stuck-up rich girl, anyway. Everyone knows about the "blow job on the sofa" incident—even the teachers; not that they can prove anything. OK, so nothing happened really. I saw the guy's dick but I didn't suck it. I mean—yuck! But I like the reputation it's given me, even though most of the form still aren't speaking to me because of it. I could tell Hugh I'm going to be expelled because I have so much sex. That should impress him. After all, last time I saw him he did try to make out that we shouldn't see each other anymore because he's so much more experienced than me. "I've seen and done things that would really shock you, babe." That's what he said. So what, Hugh. I've had a lot of sex, too. We're both damaged. We're both sad, lonely people, which is why we should be together. Like in that Tom Waits song you played me.

Also, I know that he's had a tragic past and everything, but so have I. What about the fact that my dad died when I was nine, and then I found out that my real dad was someone else—some colleague of Mum's? Or does that sound hopelessly middle-class? It's not exactly a case for social services, is it? I haven't seen my dad—my "real" dad—for over a year now. No one's seen him for over a year. More eyeliner. But my school fees are still mysteriously being paid. So I can't even say he's dead. Maybe I will, though. I could say I've had two dads who have died, and that I think I must be cursed. It's still not as exciting as alcoholism or drug dealing. I could say my mother beats me up, but that would be a lie. She hit me only once, when I said I was glad Dad had died.

The console's been there all along and I've been watching the images float around. There are five, but I don't know which one I want. I keep looking at them while Molly keeps thinking about Hugh. This is probably the first time I've been in someone's mind and felt a connection greater than simply I'm here and I understand you because of that. I understand Molly on a much more fundamental level. But I can't stick with Molly; I have to work out where to jump next.

Here are my choices:

–A view of a desk in an office;

–A first-person view of driving a car along a narrow lane;

–A view of an old woman chewing something;

–An old man reading the paper;

–Another old woman, but this one has pink streaks in her hair.

I know that if I jump into one of these I could end up anywhere. I have to end up with Saul Burlem, because I just don't know how I'll get back to this point if I get lost first. I look through the images again. The desk has a fluffy toy on it. The hands on the steering wheel of the car are female, with fluorescent pink nail polish. These people aren't male. Now I'm left with three elderly people. Are these all the POVs of grandparents: images of other grandparents or grandparents' acquaintances? Where's Saul Burlem? Where's his POV? I glance over the images again. I can't choose. None of them seems right. Maybe he is dead. But my mind seems to want to rest on the woman with pink hair. In fact, I'm just looking at it and thinking that it's unusual when my mind, clearly translating this into "interesting," starts to jump me into this consciousness, anyway. Oh hell. I'm blurring.... I'm leaving Molly. Just as I go I try to leave a thought in her mind: Forget Hugh. Forget him...

Chapter Twenty

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm coming down the hill in the dark, the lights from the town below sparkling like reflections on water. The dog, Planck, won't go any farther up: It's as if he senses a presence there that I'm not aware of. He doesn't seem to like this space for exactly the reason I do like it. He can't stand the ... The what? The history? The ghosts? Nothing surprises me anymore. So we're walking down. Away from the old, shadowy gateposts; away from the crumbling gray stone wall. When I'm up here I imagine people walking or travelling on horseback in a time when there were no cars; and I sense that there wouldn't have been that buzz you get now: the buzz of electricity being generated and used, and car engines, and pop music. But I'll go where the dog wants to go; it's easier that way. And I'm pleased with myself, pleased that I can give up control like this. But being pleased with myself won't do. I should be nothing with myself. I want the void. Idiot: I can't want the void. I have to let it come to me. I have to let it slowly envelop me when I'm not thinking anything.

Now I know what thoughts look like, thinking is more difficult, anyway.

The dog really does want to get out of here. We're almost running now on the icy, hard mud. Frost. No good for plants; that's what my mother used to say. And Christmas is coming, of course. As we reach the bottom of the hill I see the lights in close-up: hundreds of white, tasteful stars hanging over the road, all within reach. The tree by the roundabout is strung with lights as well. What does Christmas mean now? Not really more or less than it did before. Lura's a vegetarian, but she will force us both to celebrate. She likes rituals. Our tree is up but we haven't decorated it yet. Lura doesn't want stars and tinsel: She wants to decorate the tree with black holes, wormholes, and quarks. She wants to drape it in the fabric of space-time. I laughed when she told me this. I said I'd see what I could find in the shops. At least I go to the shops now. I go to the shops and I walk the dog. And nothing awful has happened yet. It's better than being locked in the house all the time.

Console?

It comes up. There's only one milky image in the middle of the screen: a blurred view of lots of green leaves. I ask it to close the image down and it does.

Who am I?

I am Saul Burlem.

Thank God. Where am I?

Walking along Fore Street. I'm walking along Fore Street but Planck wants to turn left, past the cheese shop, and then right, towards home. He can't want to go home already. No, he doesn't. He trots right past our front door and onwards, his muzzle like an arrow pointing down towards the space where the walls meet the pavement. Ah, now here's my second-favorite place in town.

Where am I?

I'm standing here while the dog sniffs some weeds growing out of the pavement. Yes, here's the space I like. It really is a space, an absence, enclosed with four walls. Various signs have gone up lately explaining that this is a building site belonging to blah blah, and telling you the various bad things that will happen if you trespass in it. It spoils the effect somewhat. It was better before the signs went up. An empty space, enclosed by walls: a house with no rooms and no roof and a carpet of pinkish Devon earth. I like that. It reminds me of my favorite place in town: the castle. The castle is the same kind of thing—walls enclosing nothingness. I have a postcard of the castle above my desk. It's an aerial view, probably taken from one of the helicopters that are always throbbing in the air on clear days. You look down on it and it's like a gray stone ring left discarded on a hillside, ripped, perhaps, from a giant's finger. And you can go to visit it as well: You can pay money to go into a circle of empty space with some walls around it. I love it. You look at this empty space, fenced off, made special, and you think: What am I supposed to be looking at here? Are the walls there to keep the nothingness in, or the town out?

And now, bizarrely, I know exactly how stone is constructed. But I still don't know who made the spaces. Who invented absence? Who chooses to celebrate it here? Of course, people don't know they're celebrating absence (although they should; they really should). They think they're visiting something, something tangible—but it just isn't there anymore. They think that by visiting an empty space enclosed by walls they can travel through time. And I know about that, too.

Why won't Burlem think of the name of the town he's in?

Where am I?

Now I've crossed the road and I'm standing outside the church, the church we go to every evening, just in case. We don't pray, but what we do is perhaps a sort of prayer. We walk in and then out again, just in case. I've never known exactly what sort of church it is, even though I'm inside it every night. I assumed it must be C of E or Catholic, but it doesn't actually have a name: It's not Saint Anything's. But every Thursday evening happy people come here in homemade clothes and do something cheerful inside. Well, they always seem cheerful when they come out. I think they go door to door in the evenings they're not here, selling something invisible like hope or salvation. Lura obtained the keys and no one minds that we go in there every night. Do I believe in what they do in there? Yes. I have to, now. But I wonder if they'd still believe if they knew what I know.

Where do I live?

St. Augustine's Road.

But I know where that is: It's his boarded-up house. Why doesn't he think of his address here?

Where am I now?

Walking up the hill where the road sweeps around like a question mark and you can get run over if you're not careful. There's a sign at the top: Torquay, and an arrow pointing right.

So he's near Torquay; but I don't even know where that is. It's not enough.

What happened to make me leave my house?

Oh. Where to begin this story. Why am I thinking about this now? The dog snuffles onwards, up through the market square, but I'm not seeing that anymore. I'm seeing ... What? How far back does my mind want to go? I see scenes on fast-forward: The first one is, predictably, that paper I gave in Greenwich on the curse of Mr. Y. Lura was there. The Project Starlight men were there, too. Of course I had no idea who any of them were then. The only truly innocent member of the audience was Ariel Manto, and she was the one I kept looking at: the girl with the tight gray jumper and the red hair. I remember Lura walking away afterwards, going back to join the Lahiri group without saying anything. Then I see myself drinking too much with Ariel, fantasizing about making love to her, and then—the horror, the horror—realizing she probably would go to bed with me. I left, of course, before I had the chance to actually go through with it.

Then a couple of weeks later, or maybe a bit more: an e-mail from Lura. She is/was a scientist. She was at the same university as Lahiri. But she'd seen the title of my paper and been intrigued. She enjoyed it. She wanted to meet me.

And I was thinking: Two chances of sex in a month?

And then realizing that as usual one of them is (potentially) a student and the other is too old.

Or: I'm too old. That's the main thing. And I know that they can't really want me; not now. Although Dani did. Bland Dani wanted me. That was the last time: me, shirtless, with my gray chest hair shining awkwardly under the fluorescent office lights, and Bland Dani, the weakest of all the MA students, saying, "I want to see you," with her dull eyes pointing at my trousers. Of course, when she said "you" she meant my cock. Why is it that women do that? I want you inside me. No. You just want my cock, and you may as well ignore the large lump of flesh attached to it, the man who has a brain that will never be "inside you," and that you'll never understand. It was supposed to be a tutorial. I suggested blindfolding her, not because it turns me on but because I didn't want her to see me. It ended badly, of course. What's wrong with not seeing? Then it's all in the mind, and perhaps not even against the university regulations. But she threatened to report me anyway when I (literally) stopped seeing her. I didn't even desire her: She looked like a slab of melting butter.

I arranged to meet Lura at a café in a gallery in London. What she said almost floored me. She owned a copy of The End of Mr. Y; perhaps the only known copy: the one in Germany. That's actually why she'd come to hear my paper. The book had been her father's. He had been one of the first scientists involved in the theory of quantum mechanics, she explained. She clearly didn't want to talk about him very much, but she outlined the basics: that he had been a contemporary of Erwin Schrödinger and Nils Bohr, but had refused to follow many European Jewish physicists to America to work on the atom bomb and other, similarly diabolical projects. Instead he stayed in his university and continued constructing his earth-shattering theory—details of which are now lost. The week before he was sent to the concentration camp he had written a note in his diary about The End of Mr Y. He was very excited to have ordered it from London and believed it to be one of very few remaining copies. One of his last diary entries talked about the possible "Curse of Mr. Y." Lura had been shocked, she said—but also intrigued—to see the title of my paper. She said she hadn't ever come across that phrase before except in her father's diary.

She explained all this to me without changing her facial expression once. But she kept running her hand through her hair, and pausing for a long time between parts of the story. Then, when our coffees arrived, she gave up on the hair and started on the handle of the cup, moving it back and forth and pushing her thin finger through the hole.

"So that's it," she said. "I thought you'd like to know some of the history of the book; or, at least, that particular copy."

"I'm very grateful," I said. "Thank you so much for taking the time to come and meet me."

Her eyes looked as though she was going to smile but she didn't.

"The book was important to my father," she said.

I didn't know what to say to that, so I simply asked, "Have you read it?"

"No." She shook her head. "But I know it's important—after all, people keep trying to buy it from me."

"But you won't sell?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She sighed. "Much as I hate that book, I can't sell it. I haven't sold any of my father's books. Plus I don't particularly like the people who are trying to buy it. They've become a little threatening lately. But they can't do anything about a book in a bank vault. Perhaps they're planning a heist?" Now she did smile. "Well, I shouldn't think they'll have much luck."

"Who are they?"

She shrugged, and sipped from her café crème. "Americans." There was a long pause. "Well," she said. "I expect you'd like to see it, wouldn't you?"

"Really?" I must have sounded like a little boy excited over someone else's collection of rare comics. But I couldn't stop myself. "I mean..."

"Of course. It will be of some intellectual value to you. I can see that. My father would have approved, and I think that's a good enough reason."

"Has anyone else seen it?"

"No. I've looked at it briefly, but I couldn't touch it..."

"Why not?"

She looked at the table. There was a minute speck of demerara sugar by her saucer and she squashed it with her finger. Then she looked up at me again and laughed weakly.

"Family superstition?" Her laugh shrank into a sigh. "I'm a scientist and of course I know that Hitler killed my father, not some cursed book. But even so ... It was the day after he received it that they got him. The last thing he did as a free man was to put that book in a bank vault."

We talked a little more, and she explained that she was going out to Germany the following month and invited me for a long weekend. Of course I wanted to go: to see the book, to touch the book. But I made some polite objections—would she want all those memories brought up again? Would she want some stranger intruding on her family business, etc., etc.—and she politely rebuffed them all as I'd known she would. So I went. It was the first week of term and I welcomed getting away from all the admin and e-mails and meetings for a few days. I tend to work when I'm at home, and I am terrible at taking holidays. We spent the Thursday evening watching an absurd play, and then we went to the bank vault on the Friday. It was supposed to be summer, but the air was gray and damp, and everything around me seemed as though it was being slowly smothered by everything else. When I had the book in my hands she looked at the floor and almost immediately said, "I want you to take it. Take it away from here."

"You're selling it?" I said.

"No," she said. "Just take it away."

We had a sad kind of sex on the last night I spent with her. There was a mundane inevitability about it, like flu in winter. I didn't think I'd ever see her again. She hated the book and she'd given it to me. I wasn't even sure whether or not she wanted it back. I didn't really understand anything about what was happening, but I didn't question any of it. I needed that book: I wanted it more than I've ever wanted anything.

Then came the strange events that I wrote off at the time as a kind of self-undermining parapraxis. First I forgot to pack the book; then I forgot to collect my bag from the carousel in the airport. Somehow I did get home without misplacing it. That afternoon I had to attend a university event at the cathedral—but it passed in no time. I sat next to my research student, Ariel Manto, and I think I even managed to flirt with her a little (harmless, harmless). Then I made my excuses and rushed home. I sat there in my ancient conservatory, and, as the sun set and then rose again outside, I finished the book. Afterwards I couldn't sleep, so I drank a vintage bottle of wine and wept several times, just because of the utter beauty of the experience: of holding the book, of being able to read it at last. No one bothered me and all I could hear was birdsong.

And I immediately resolved to make up the mixture from the book and try going to the Troposphere myself. I did some fast, blurred research, and found out that I could buy some Carbo-Veg in the right potency from a shop in Brighton. I drove there and back that afternoon and, after taking some holy water from St. Thomas's, had my first experience in the Troposphere that night. Most of what I can remember of my first few experiences is a blur. I remember travelling through the tunnel, so familiar to me now, and arriving in what appeared to me to be a nostalgic-postcard version of nineteenth-century London, full of dark slums and fog and abandoned hansom cabs. And I explored, of course, and started understanding some of the rules of this place. I tried Pedesis on the milkman. I attempted—and failed—to enter the mind of the university's vice chancellor.

I got the first e-mail on the Saturday evening. It seemed to be from a university student at Yale, despite the Yahoo e-mail address, asking me if I would be willing to enter into e-mail correspondence about The End of Mr. Y. I politely declined. The e-mail was poorly written and my own students take up enough of my time. I thought it was a coincidence that this person had got in touch just as I had obtained the book, but at the time I thought it was genuine. The second e-mail came on the Sunday, at roughly the same time of day.

Please forgive this intrusion. I am the director of Project Starlight, a significant interdisciplinary study into the activities and potentials of the Human mind. We have been recently studying a method outline in the book The End of Mr. Y. Or, I should say my predecessor was doing this? Since I have taken over this study I am interested in pursuing this study but unfortunately all our systems have gone down and I have lost everything.....including the instructions for making the formula. This also explains why I am using a Hotmail account right now! Our systems will not be running again for another week but I do need that formula ASAP. Since you own a copy of the book I hope you will not mind sparing a few minutes to write it up for us.

I called Lura on Monday.

"Project Starlight?" she repeated, after I had explained.

"Yes."

"They're the people who offered to buy the book from me."

"Do you know anything about them?"

She paused. "Well, I did check them out."

"And?"

"Project Starlight closed almost a year ago. There is no Project Starlight anymore."

"What is—or was—it?"

Now she sighed. "It was a highly classified American project. I found out about it through a friend of a friend—a physicist at MIT. He had only heard rumors about the project—that it had started as a simple telepathy study and then mutated into something else. He mentioned a highly secretive desert facility, remote viewing, staring at goats, and the quest for the 'ultimate weapon.' He said he'd heard that something catastrophic had caused the study to close down, and warned me not to get involved in asking any questions about it. It certainly sounded sinister."

"So if the project is closed, why are people going around saying they're a part of it?"

"I don't know. I think I already said that they soon became threatening."

"And how do they know I have the book?" I didn't ask if she'd told them.

"I don't know," she said.

I paused. "Do you think they are actually dangerous?"

"I really have no idea. Do you know why they want the book? I assume you've read it by now?"

"Yes. I've read it."

"And...?"

"I have no idea why they'd want it."

Why was I lying? Of course I knew they wanted the formula, and I also knew why: because it worked. All I could conjecture was that these people were some kind of breakaway group who had been given the formula but never knew what it contained. And I was already familiar with the sensation of needing to go back into the Troposphere. Imagine needing it and not being able to go there? I imagined something of what a drug addict might feel.

"Well," she said.

"Lura, I really think..."

"What?"

"I think I should return the book to you now. I think it should go back in the bank vault where they can't get it."

"But if there's nothing in it that they'd find useful...?"

"I think it should go back," I said.

After our conversation finished, I walked into the conservatory and looked at my own reflection in the glass. It was dark outside and I could only see a couple of stars, hanging in the sky like a halfhearted attempt at decoration. An American classified study. Goat staring. The ultimate weapon. That sounded military to me. I walked back into the house and picked up the book. Of course I would send it back to Lura; I'd do it tomorrow. But I also knew that the men from Project Starlight—or people like them—would get it in the end. And then what would happen? My mind filled with unpleasant thoughts of world domination and thought-control. If a repressive regime—or any regime—got hold of this mixture then ... What? I found I could imagine exactly what such an "ultimate weapon" would look like. I sent back an e-mail to the Hotmail address given my the last correspondent saying that although I had seen the book, it was already on its way back to its owner in Germany. I apologized and assured him that he must be mistaken: There was no recipe in the book. And I put it on the table, ready to go.

But I didn't really want to post it. What if it got lost? Damaged? On the other hand, I had no time to go to London to meet Lura to hand it over in person until the weekend. And would she even want to see it? Perhaps she'd suggest sending it straight to the bank and asking them to put it in the vault. There were too many possibilities and I'd had no more e-mails. I did nothing. I spent the Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings, including Max Truman's annual Health and Safety presentation—compulsory; although Ariel Manto simply didn't go. I've always quite enjoyed Max's eccentric annual presentations. This one was entitled "When Things Go Wrong." It was a tongue-in-cheek history of the old railway tunnel under campus, ending with a dramatic account of its collapse in 1974. Max had obtained lots of PowerPoint slides of gruesome images of the Newton Building crumbling and people running around looking confused. He made various connections between the collapse of the university and the collapse of student-staff relations in the mid-'70s. While the tunnel was collapsing, he said, some demonstrating students had stormed the Registry and were busy drinking the vice chancellor's port. We learned that our own building had been constructed in 1975—right over the newly reinforced tunnel. Max told us that there was still a maintenance route into the tunnel from our building. We needed to know this, he said, so we could take the necessary precautions. At this point Mary asked what the necessary precautions would be.

"Just don't fall into it," said Max.

"How would we fall into it?" she said.

"Well, you can't," he said. "But new Health and Safety advice says I have to warn you about it, anyway."

"But it's been there for almost thirty years," said someone else. "And no one's fallen into it yet..."

"Where is it?" asked Mary.

"Photocopying room," said Max. "Next to the machine."

"You mean that sort of hatch thing that we all stand on every time we do any photocopying?" said Lisa Hobbes.

"Yep."

"So we could actually fall into it?"

"No, don't be daft. This isn't Alice in bloody Wonderland. It's well secured."

"What's it like in the tunnel?" asked Laura, the creative writing tutor.

"Don't even think about it, Laura," said Mary.

"What?" she said. "I think we should go down there and investigate."

Everyone groaned.

"OK, OK. I'm only joking."

Laura had been in trouble the previous year for sending all her students on some kind of psychogeographical project in which they'd had to use maps of Berlin in order to walk around the city center. Three of them had ended up walking along the motorway and were arrested.

While the questions and answers continued, I simply sat there thinking about the Troposphere. I thought I already had a fairly good idea of how it worked. In fact, I hadn't got too much sleep in the preceding few days because of it, and while the others kept on talking about the railway tunnel and whether or not Laura was going to lead a search party down the hatch, my eyes started to close. I dreamed of a world in which everyone had access to everyone else's minds, until some government recruited men in deep blue uniforms to go around and brainwash everyone so they didn't know how to do it anymore. When I woke up, everyone had gone. It was a good thing: I'd been sweating in my sleep and my shirt was almost wet through. Even though I was on my own, I had a profound sense of being watched. I knew I had to give the book back to Lura, so I went straight home to ring her to arrange it for the weekend. As I drove through the heavy rush-hour traffic I wondered if it might be better to burn the book altogether, or at least destroy the page with the recipe on it.

But I am a professor of English literature. I couldn't destroy a book if my life depended on it. At least, that's what I thought then.

I got the last parking space on my street and walked the last twenty yards to my house. Then I went inside and considered what I had to do. I had it all planned out by then. My idea was that I'd remove the page with the instructions on it—but I certainly wasn't going to destroy it. I planned to keep it or hide it....I wasn't sure quite what I was going to do with it. Perhaps it was clear to me that I would have to destroy it at some point, but for then I thought removing it would be enough. I'd remove the page, give the book back to Lura, and then feign ignorance if she ever asked me about it.

It was at exactly the moment that I had opened the book to the correct page that I saw the car headlights sweep up outside. Then I heard the steady throb of a diesel engine, and I simply assumed someone had called a taxi. But I was jumpy and noticing everything, so I went to the window to look, still holding the book in my hands. And then I saw them: the two blond men I'd last seen when I gave my paper in Greenwich. They were trying to find somewhere to park in my street.

They wanted the book. It was them.

And worse: One of them was driving—looking for somewhere to park—but the other one? Well, he seemed to be asleep.

I couldn't think quickly enough. If one of them was in the Troposphere, then he was one or two jumps away from my mind and everything I knew about The End of Mr. Y. I looked at the book and quickly ripped the page from it. My thoughts almost collapsed then, but what I did next took on the clarity and focus of a bullet-point list. I had to leave the book behind but I'd take the page with me. By the time I'd decided that, I'd already folded up the page and put it in my shoe. By the time I'd done that I realized I had to get away before the men either came in here and beat me up or—worse—jumped into my mind and took my knowledge, anyway. They were still trying to park. I hid the book behind the piano; then I grabbed my coat, wallet, and keys and left via the back door. Over the neighbors' fence, through their garden, down their driveway, and into my car. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The conscious man didn't even look over when the car door slammed. I imagined a car chase, but no one looked at me as I drove past. And I drove—faster than I've ever driven—to the university. My thoughts were racing ahead of me at a speed I've never experienced before. And in the jumble of strategy, fear, and conjecture, one thought stood out. I realized that I would be the target of those men for as long as I had my memories. It wouldn't matter if I destroyed The End of Mr. Y. It wouldn't matter if I shredded the page concealed in my shoe. If they could get into my mind, they could get the instructions for making the mixture, just as Mr. Y had learnt the secrets of Will Hardy's Ghost Show. It would be as simple as that. They couldn't get it from Lura, who hadn't read the book. But as long as I remained alive and sane, they could get it from me.

As I parked in the Russell car park I felt much as though I had just been given a life sentence. When I'd been a teenager I'd fantasized about the life of a tragic hero. I'd thought there would be some sort of glamour in being Hamlet, or Lear. But now I could see death at the end; I could see it with more certainty than I could see tomorrow. I remembered a dissertation that I'd marked a couple of years before. In it, the student argued that American eighties and nineties gangster films are postmodern tragedies. He spent a lot of time on one detail: that no one in these gangster films ever escapes. In our society—connected up with bits and bytes—you can never become entirely anonymous. At that moment I realized that the Project Starlight men would track me down, wherever I went, and take what I knew. They were going to rape my mind, and there was nothing I could do about it. I also realized that I had one slim chance of preventing this. I could disappear now. But I didn't have much time. They'd come here next: I knew that.

It was too dangerous to wait for empirical evidence of what they were going to do. I had to work from a priori assumptions, namely:

–The men wanted my knowledge of the ingredients for the mixture.

–The men could get my knowledge in three different ways:

–Torture

–Pedesis

–Taking the sheet of paper from me by force

I reasoned that I could eat the paper, or not give in to torture, but I could do nothing about Pedesis. What I knew of the logic of the Troposphere suggested that in order to get into my mind the man in the Troposphere would only have to jump into the mind of someone near me, or likely to see me, and then, at the moment this other person saw me, make the final jump into my mind and all my knowledge and memories. In theory, the sleeping man could simply get into the mind of his colleague and send him to see me.

So I couldn't let anyone see me. Once in my office I closed the blinds and the curtains and locked the door. I hadn't smoked for twenty years, but when I saw that Ariel had left a box of cigarettes on her desk I took one out and lit it. I pleaded with myself to find some way out of this situation. Where could I go where no one would see me? My mind filled with images of roads and shopping centers and supermarkets. On a usual day, how many people would see me? Hundreds? Thousands? Everywhere I cast my mind I saw these blobs of flesh-and-consciousness; the detail that is always left off any map. Even if I got back in my car and drove, I would travel past people. I wondered why I had even come to the university; why I had chosen as my hiding place a room with my name on the door, a room whose details can be found on the university Web site, which also contains handy maps: how to get to the English and American Studies Building from anywhere on campus; how to get to the campus by road, rail, air, Eurostar, and ferry. I smoked and paced. I felt safe at the university. That was it: that was why I had gone there. But only because there are always so many people there. You never feel alone at the university, and, usually, in dangerous situations you want to be around people. Not this time.

Three or four minutes passed. I heard laughter moving down the corridor: Max and the others, no doubt, coming back from the bar. It didn't matter that I'd locked the external doors; now they were bound to be unlocked. I looked at the heavy paperweight on my desk. Perhaps I could stop them with force? No. You can't use force against remote telepathy. I urged myself to think faster. Should I destroy the page from my shoe? I couldn't. I couldn't do it. Why had I not driven away to somewhere random when I had the chance? My thoughts pushed and shoved each other like desperate Christmas shoppers, and I reminded myself that I had only two decisions to make: what I should do with the page; and where to go next. Before I knew what I was doing I had reached up to the very top shelf for the fourth volume of Zoonomia. I used to hide money in books a long time ago when I was a research student and my front door was almost as flimsy as a curtain and anyone could open it with a credit card. I reasoned that thieves aren't interested in books, and anyway, books are bulky. If you were a petty thief you wouldn't be able to transport a thousand or so books. So you'd ignore them: You wouldn't select, say, ten to steal. You'd ignore them all and focus on the VCR and the microwave. For that reason I've always hidden things in random books. I've hidden love letters, pornography, credit cards.... Would this work now? These Project Starlight men did clearly know the value of books. Ah, I thought, but this is where the university will help me. I can hide the page and lock the door and no stranger is going to be able to come and look through my things. And even if someone did manage to do that, the book they want wouldn't seem to be here.

And then I thought, How long am I going to be away?

I had no idea.

But at least I would be carrying only one copy of the information I had: the copy in my mind. And, although I knew I'd be too much of a coward, I could always kill myself if the men got too close. That was my theoretical last resort. I got a chair to stand on to relieve myself of the second copy of the information I held: the page in my shoe.

Perhaps it was stupid of me; perhaps I hadn't thought it through—but I could not imagine anyone going through all the books on my shelf and shaking them until a mysterious page fell out. I thought that by doing this I was preserving an important page of an important book. Why Zoonomia? I wasn't sure exactly, but something in my mind told me this was the right book. Ariel Manto wouldn't be using it: I'd told her not to. And who else would be interested in Zoonomia? I inserted the page somewhere in the middle of Volume IV and replaced it on the shelf.

I knew I shouldn't have done it, but I did it anyway rather than destroy the page. Was this my fatal flaw? And perhaps I thought that anyone who knew Zoonomia—an academic, definitely—and who also had the wherewithal to make the connection between the page and the book ... Well, good luck to them. Perhaps that's how I justified it to myself. Knowing what I know now, I would never have left the page behind. But I can't get it now. All I can hope is that it's been destroyed.

So the next thing I had to do was disappear. But how to disappear in a building full of people in a university campus full of people in a world full of people? Where could I go? Where could I go that no one else would go? Where could I be unseen?

The railway tunnel.

In two minutes I was out of my office and in the photocopying room, with the door locked behind me. It was surprisingly easy to lift the hatch, now I knew it was there. I had no torch; just a small key ring light. But it was enough for me to see a thin metallic ladder. Had I lost my mind? I wasn't at all sure. But, as I lowered myself into the gloom below, and carefully replaced the hatch above my head, I heard the sound of furious banging, and a male, American voice shouting, "Professor Burlem!" They were at my office door across the corridor. But I was gone. No one had seen me go into the photocopying room. I felt as though I'd broken some loop; some chain of seeing and cause and effect. If I didn't emerge, no one would ever know where I was. If no one could see me, did I even exist?

The tunnel was dark and cold, with a persistent drip, drip, drip noise. It was much bigger than I had imagined—but then, of course, a railway tunnel is big: big enough for two trains to go through. It was too dark to see any detail, but I got the impression of size from the way sound travelled through the space. I walked in a direction I believed to be south, towards the underneath of the Newton Building. My feet crunched on something that felt like gravel, but I couldn't see beneath my feet. I used the wall to guide myself, and hoped that I was moving far enough away from the Project Starlight men that the sleeping one wouldn't simply chance on me in the Troposphere. I imagined something like a dawn raid: If the men knew I was at the university, could the sleeping one just burst into all the dwellings in the Troposphere until he found mine? This was the thought that bothered me as I walked farther into the tunnel. I already knew that so much about telemancy and Pedesis had to do with proximity. But then again, there'd be so many consciousnesses here on campus, and the men couldn't even be sure I was anywhere near here. I didn't know what to do next. As if some vengeful god had decided to play a trick on me, the next thing that happened was that I came to a halt before what felt like a pile of bricks and rubble. I knew I would have to clear a path to get through to the exit. Did I want to get to the exit? I sank to the floor and began to think about what I would do next.

Ah. Enough reminiscing. There's the church. I'll tie Planck up outside.

I'm...

Oh fuck. That's it. I'm out in the Troposphere: bounced out by Burlem going into the church. So Adam was right about that, then.

Chapter Twenty-one

I'm standing on a long, metal bridge over a vast river that rushes below me. It's still nighttime here, but everything is death-kissed with a silvery glow that seems like moonlight (although I can see no moon), and every structure, including this bridge, seems to be strung with lights that are reflected in, and then slashed up by, the violent black water below. In the real world I'd feel vertigo immediately, but here in the Troposphere it's just that syrupy nothingness. You have to get a lot more emotional than this for anything to register in the Troposphere (or, as it seems to have been termed in Project Starlight—MindSpace). Yet I can feel some things. I'm disappointed about being bounced out here when I was surely about to discover exactly where Burlem went after he emerged from the tunnel. But that's it: mild disappointment. Outside I'd feel a lot more.

Outside. How do I get out, exactly? Presumably I have to find my way back to the place I started: the end of the street with the doll's houses and the crazy mannequins: the Tropospherical (is that a word? It is now.) representation of the Hertfordshire village where my physical body is now still lying, crashed out in the pub.

How long have I been in here?

Console?

It appears. Where am I?

Your major coordinates are 14, 12, 5, –2, 9 and 400,340.

For fuck's sake. What does that mean? What's a major coordinate?

Coordinates tell you where you are in the Troposphere.

Yes, but ... What do they relate to?

All points in the Troposphere are calculated relative to the position of your living consciousness in the physical world. I can provide the coordinates in binary notation instead if you require.

No thanks. OK. So I'm not far from where I should be? Or am I?

Distance is time, as you know.

I have a feeling this thing only tells me what I already know. Go on, I tell it, anyway.

You have travelled a great distance, relative to your previous journeys.

So how do I get back?

You return to coordinates 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, and 1.

How do I do that?

You travel across the Troposphere.

Is there any other information you can give me?

You now have three hundred choices.

Great. Can you give me any actual directions?

The screen flickers. I see something that looks like a ring doughnut made into a giant spiral, with lines and cubes hanging off it. But in less than a second this has gone and I am instead presented with something like an ordnance survey map with a blue dot and the legend You Are Here. I ask the console to show me where my target location is and a red dot appears, miles and miles away.

But I'm not even sure you measure distance in miles here.

And another thing. When I left Hertfordshire it was January. But in Burlem's mind it wasn't even Christmas yet. Did I actually travel back in time to get to Burlem? But why? How on earth would that work? I start walking across the bridge, a humid, gray wind blowing my hair around my face. Oh, no; not more weather. I can do without weather. I think it's a bad sign in here.

Apollo Smintheus?

Nothing.

It takes me about ten minutes (or whatever the equivalent is in here) to get to the end of the bridge. I look behind me and see something like a fan of bridges behind me, gleaming in the silver light. When I look, it quickly collapses back into one bridge. Ten minutes, I think. Ten minutes multiplied by 1.6 is sixteen minutes. Is that right? So in crossing that bridge I've just spent another sixteen minutes in the Troposphere? I have to get out of here. My body is just lying there in the hotel room. Come on, Ariel. Faster.

But something tells me that faster may not even make any difference.

I'm now standing on a wide road that reminds me, in some way, of the Embankment in London, except that it seems to go on forever in either direction. The other strange thing is that the road does not have big, grand houses and hotels. Instead there are little cottages everywhere, arranged in a haphazard way: some on top of the other, some with three-dimensional edges. What? Don't be silly, Ariel: Three-dimensional edges don't exist. Except in four spatial dimensions, my mind reminds me. Oh God. I turn left and keep walking. I notice smoke coming out of some of the chimneys, but the smoke doesn't curl upwards, like smoke should do. As well as expanding into three-dimensional space, the smoke also seems to be curling in on itself, out of itself, and moving in some other directions I don't have the names for. As I walk, the large Embankment turns, improbably, into a dust track, with caravans scattered around and cardboard chickens everywhere. Hang on. Cardboard chickens? What's happening to me? There's a flash in the sky, like lightning, and then dawn starts to break, but much faster than it would normally. I feel so tired. I could just crawl into one of those caravans and sleep for a while maybe. No. Don't be so silly, Ariel: If you go inside one of those things there'll just be another mind with more thoughts and more memories. For the first time, this knowledge makes me feel exhausted. Now the sun is up, and I'm walking in a bright yellow desert, with giant sand castles popping up everywhere and then disappearing again. What the hell is this the equivalent of? All this is a metaphor, right? Well, what—or where—is the fucking reality that goes with this?

The desert seems to last for hours, but I have no real sense of time in here. The ten minutes I sensed on the bridge could have been three, or one, or twenty. All I know is that each footstep may as well be the ticking second hand of some cosmic clock and the closer I get to myself the farther away I get from any chance of surviving this. I emerge from the desert and onto another dust track, which contains various diners in blue and pink neon. Is the neon a good sign? Should I be pleased that it's back? The sun is going down again, too fast, like the evening of the end of the world. There's a dusty petrol station on one side of the street. If only I could fuel myself there. The air is still humid, and nothing's happened as a result of the lightning: no rain, no thunder. And I'm walking in what must be my own mind, lost inside my ideas and assumptions about what and who everyone else is. I don't know where "I" am. And the red dot in the console isn't getting perceptibly closer.

Apollo Smintheus?

Nothing.

Apollo Smintheus? I'll do anything.... Please come and help me.

Another soundless crack in the sky. Now I think I know what praying is. I walk on another two or three steps, but I seem to be fading. I don't think I can go any farther. There's a rumble in the distance. Thunder? I fall to my knees.

Apollo Smintheus?

And then I see him, like a mirage. A mirage on ... a red scooter?

"Well," he says as he pulls up next to me.

There's a cloud of pale brown dust, and then it settles.

"I thought you weren't coming back," I say.

"I wasn't."

"But you are back. You are here. I'm not just seeing things?"

Apollo Smintheus smiles. "Of course you're just seeing things. But that doesn't mean I'm not here." He looks at his watch. "You're in trouble. Let's have a coffee."

He leaves his scooter in the middle of the dust track and walks towards one of the neon diners. I follow him, but every step feels soggy, as though I'm moving underwater in all my clothes. As we get closer to the diner I realize that it's called Mus Musculus, and instead of a door it has the same arch as Apollo Smintheus's house. The inside is like an amalgamation of every American road movie I've ever seen: red leatherette booths, laminated menus, big glass containers of sugar with silver spouts that deliver one spoonful when you tip them up. The tables are white Formica. In one corner is the same nest I saw back at the place next to the pool hall somewhere, I imagine, on the other side of the Troposphere.

"Well," Apollo Smintheus says again.

I look over at the counter. There aren't any staff here. Above the left-hand edge of the counter there's a TV screen attached with a bracket. It's switched off. There's a big white digital clock on the wall just behind it to the right, but whatever time it's telling isn't familiar to me. First it reads 82.5; then 90.1; then 85.5; then 89.7. It pulses irregularly, which is why I assume it can't be a clock. When I look back to the table, there's a white cup filled with brown liquid. Oh well, if I'm going to die I may as well drink some Troposphere coffee first. And I don't have the energy for much more than drinking coffee, anyway. I want to delay this trip across the Troposphere as long as possible. I can't believe I've been this stupid. I can't believe I'm lost in my own mind. Is this what madness feels like? Probably best not to think too much about that.

"Thanks," I say to Apollo Smintheus. "I mean, for..."

What am I thanking him for? The coffee? Being here? Potentially rescuing me?

"Hmm," says Apollo Smintheus.

"Are you here because I prayed?"

He sips his coffee. His gray paw looks like a key ring I saw once, made of a lucky rabbit's foot: hard and gray and dead. But the rest of him seems so alive it's crazy. After all, eight-foot-tall mouse gods don't actually exist. But he breathes like a person, and his long gray nose looks as though it would feel hard and warm if I were to touch it. Not that I would ever touch it. Another odd thing about Apollo Smintheus is that when I sit opposite him I feel as though I'm sitting opposite a very distinguished professor.

"Not exactly," he says.

"Why are you here?"

"Because you're going to do something for me. Or—perhaps it's easier to say that you have already done something for me. But you don't know what it is yet."

"I'm confused."

"I know."

"Look. Can I just ask you some questions, really quickly? I think I'm in trouble and I've got to get halfway across the Troposphere before I..."

"You are in trouble."

My shoulders sag. "I know. I think I might not be able to get back to myself in time. In fact, I think I already know that I'm not going to make it."

"I agree."

"And I think there's a chance I might die."

"Yes, well..."

"Well, what?"

"Being in the Troposphere, as you call it. If you're here, you're already dead."

Something in my body tries to release adrenaline, but it doesn't work like that in here. The scene in front of me blurs and then comes back.

"Oh fuck. Oh fuck." I grip the table in front of me. "So I'm too late?"

"Too late for what?"

"To go back. To find Burlem."

"You can go back."

"But ... You said ... Being here." I close my eyes and then open them again. "Am I dead?"

"This world, the world-of-minds. It leads to death. You know that."

"Do I?"

"If you gave it any thought you'd realize." He laughs, and it's like watching a CGI animation, except that I can feel the warm, humid air around me change when he breathes into it. "I'm sorry. You didn't call me back here for riddles. Why don't you just ask your questions."

"OK."

"But you'd better be quick, because we've still got to discuss this little commission you're going to take on for me—and we've also got to work out how to get you out of here, which isn't actually going to be that easy."

"OK. Well I'll keep it quick then. Am I ... Am I safe for a moment?"

Apollo Smintheus gestures to the TV screen. It flickers into life. In grainy black and white I can see the interior of a hospital. The camera is focused on a bed where a girl lies unconscious. There's a drip attached to her arm.

"Is that me?" I say. But I already know it is.

"The pub landlord was alerted when you didn't come down for breakfast and then failed to check out. He went into your room and found you unconscious. When he couldn't wake you he called an ambulance. You're in a coma, officially."

"Oh God."

"You've travelled a great distance here. That takes a long time."

"Apollo Smintheus?" I'm still looking at the screen.

"Yes."

"Am I mad?"

"No. Not in the way you understand the word."

"This isn't some coma fantasy ... Like a dream?"

"Well, this is a little like dreaming, but obviously it's the reverse. Why don't you ask your questions."

I stop looking at the TV screen and look at him instead.

"Every time you say something I have more questions," I say.

"Like?"

"Well, how is this dreaming in reverse?"

"Dreaming takes you into your unconscious. This is not your unconscious."

Suddenly, things start click-clicking in my mind. I haven't really yet had the chance to think deeply about Apollo Smintheus's document, but I've obviously absorbed it, because now I start making the connections.

"This is ... consciousness itself," I say.

"Indeed."

"Everyone's thoughts, everyone's consciousness. But made into an elaborate metaphor that I can navigate. But this space doesn't really look like this—like you said before. There's no coffee, no table, no TV. But presumably I wouldn't be able to see whatever it is made of ... And ... And I can jump into other people's minds because they're all connected. They're all made out of the same thing."

"Very good. What are they made out of?"

"Do I know?"

"Yes. You should do."

I think about everything I know about consciousness. I start with Samuel Butler and his idea that consciousness is something that evolves, and that there's no reason machines—or bits of plastic, or whatever—can't become conscious, as long as they inherit the consciousness from us. We evolved from plants, I remember him arguing, and plants aren't conscious. So consciousness can evolve from nothing at all, just as life must also have done, once. We can merge with machines and become cyborgs and eventually the machine part of us might become conscious. But how would that happen? And how did it happen with the animals that first became conscious; who made consciousness for us? There must have been a moment when the first flicker of consciousness happened. What caused that sudden leap into consciousness? I've always liked these questions best of all Butler's writings, but they're not going to help me here, I don't think. What else do I know about consciousness? I know I don't like the idea of the collective unconscious. I don't like the idea of primordial symbols that exist outside the more arbitrary system of signifiers and signifieds. I prefer Derrida's idea of a gaping absence being the thing that creates reality and presence—not a weird B-movie interface full of snakes and witches and creepy jesters.

I think about Heidegger again, and realize there's so much I don't know. From what I can remember, Heidegger's special word for consciousness (or, at least, the kind of consciousness that most humans seem to have) is Dasein: literally a kind of being that is able to ask questions about its own being. For Heidegger, being cannot be considered without the idea of time: You can only be present in the present, and you can therefore only exist in the sense that you exist in time. Dasein can recognize and theorize its own being. It can wonder, "Why am I here? Why do I exist? And what is existence, anyway?" And Dasein is therefore constructed out of language: logos; that which signifies.

Lacan made the psychoanalytic argument that consciousness is connected with language—that our jump from being unconscious, gurgling babies into being part of the "symbolic order" (i.e., having a conscious world) happens at exactly the same moment that we acquire language. This is the same moment that we realize that we are separate beings in the world. We are not our mothers (thank Christ). We become something called a self, that can exist only because others do.

But the world is made from language (or, at least, my world is made from language), and we know how unreliable that is. It's a simulacrum: a closed system just like mathematics, where everything only makes sense because it isn't something else. The numeral 2 only means something because it is not 1 or 3. House only exists because it isn't a boat or a street. I am only me because I am not someone else. This is a system of existence with no signifieds; only signifiers. The whole system of existence is a closed system floating on nothing, like a locked hovercraft.

Think, Ariel. This isn't a fucking essay.

No. I'm lost inside consciousness and trying to work out what the hell it is.

Which kind of reminds me of something....

"We haven't got too much more time," Apollo Smintheus warns me.

I look up at the screen. I'm still lying there, just as unconscious as I was before.

"This whole place is made of language," I say. "That's why I come here down a tunnel made of language—all language from the beginning of time. People's thoughts get stored here somehow..."

"Very good."

"And you're made out of a special language: prayer."

"Yes."

"But I don't understand. Why can't I see the true Troposphere? Surely it's just numbers and letters? I mean, if it's language, it's made to be understandable."

"Language written on what?"

I shrug. "I don't know." For some reason I'm imagining a big tablet in the sky, like a cosmic version of the Rosetta stone. Every time someone thinks or says or does something, it gets recorded there. But if that's all it was I would be able to see it. I mean—we'd all be able to see a giant stone tablet floating in the sky. Maybe this really is all just imaginary.

"You're going to have to give this some more thought," Apollo Smintheus says.

"Yes...," I start to say.

"But not now. Now we've got to get you out of here."

"I...," I begin.

Apollo Smintheus looks at his watch. "What?"

"Why do you care?"

"Oh, because you're going to do something for me."

"And what is that?"

"I'll tell you on the way."

We're walking out of the desert and into a suburban space, with little white houses with blue doors. It's nighttime again, but the silvery light is back. Each house has a window box outside with blue flowers, and a neat front garden. Each garden is dewed with moisture and covered with shiny little cobwebs. Apollo Smintheus has been explaining to me what he wants me to do for him, and it's completely nuts.

"You want me to go back to 1900?"

"Yes. And there's no point in arguing because in a sense you've already done it. That's why I'm here helping you now."

I ignore as much of that as I can. "You want me to go back to 1900 and mess with the head of a retired schoolteacher who bred 'fancy mice'?"

"Yes, that's right. Miss Abbie Lathrop. As I just explained to you, she virtually invented the laboratory mouse. Go to any lab and you'll find mice there bred from her original stock. I'll give you an example. The C56/BL6/Bkl. This is a strain of mouse that you can buy from any distributor. They are all black, all inbred, and all originated from Miss Abbie Lathrop's stock—the mating of male 52 and female 57, to be precise."

"Why?" I say, as my brain tries—and fails—to process any of this. "Why do you want me to do this?"

"The boys in Illinois tend to pray to me to do something about the plight of the laboratory mouse. Well, I can't think of anything better than wiping out the woman who invented them, can you?"

"But I can't wipe anyone out!"

"Oh really? You're saying you haven't changed people's minds since you've been in here? Got people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily have done? Isn't that how you escaped from the men in the car?"

"But..." This is frustrating me. "That was happening in real time. You can't change the past. What about paradoxes?"

"Everything that happens in the Troposphere happens in the past, in your sense."

"And paradoxes?"

"Oh, at the moment everything's a bit of a paradox. It wouldn't matter."

I see images in my mind of men in white coats bending over tanks of mice. One minute they're examining some creature with an ear growing on its back, or a tumor; the next minute there's nothing in the tank. But if the woman who bred the mice had been stopped from doing it way back in 1900, then the mice would never have been there. The men would therefore not be there. The whole world would change. I try to explain this to Apollo Smintheus.

"Oh, no," he says mildly. "No. That wouldn't be a problem. The mice would all just dissolve into the air, I think. The world wouldn't change. No one would notice."

"But..."

"You've already done it, so there's no point arguing."

"If I've already done it, then why are there still mice in cages in laboratories?" I ask.

"Are there?" he says. "I can't see any."

"And what about you? If there were no lab mice, then maybe the cult in Illinois wouldn't ever have formed, and you would never exist..."

"Oh, I've been around since the Greeks. Anyway, part of being a god is doing things to destroy yourself. It's like being a human. We're all trapped in the same economy."

There are so many paradoxes here that I'm developing a headache. At least I have a little more energy now. That must be from the drip attached to my physical body in the hospital.

"She's called Miss Abbie Lathrop," he says again, "and she lives on a farm in Massachusetts. You'll need to get to her towards the end of 1899. I'll leave you a message with the full details when you come back."

At least he doesn't want me to do this right now.

"But..."

"What?"

"I do have one more rather important question," I say.

"Which is?"

"Won't it kill me? I mean, going back less than a month would have finished me off if you hadn't come to help me. And—no offense—I still don't know if I'm going to get out of here alive."

"I don't know why you're so fond of this 'life.'" Apollo Smintheus sighs. "But don't worry. I'm going to show you something I think you'll find useful."

"What is it?"

"The underground system. I think that's an OK translation."

"The underground system? What, like trains?"

"Yes. That is how your mind would see this. Yes, I think it will be trains."

The suburbs are getting more dense. We're walking down a steep hill and I can see a main road glowing at the bottom of it. There's still no traffic, of course. No traffic, no rubbish, no people. We turn right once we get to the road and walk along a row of brightly lit department stores that are interspersed every so often with large gray office blocks. We walk on a little more and I begin to experience the sensation of there being more edges than there should be on all the things around me. I can see large off-white tenement buildings that have multidimensional launderettes and jazz bars as their outsides. There is way too much stuff here, and I can almost feel the density of the landscape physically pressing on me. Just when I think I can't stand it anymore, Apollo Smintheus points to some concrete steps up ahead that seem to burrow down underneath the street. As we get closer I realize that this looks just like the entrance to a London tube station.

"Here we are," he says. "It's not the easiest way to navigate the Troposphere, but it's the easiest way to get back to yourself."

I start walking down the steps; then I realize he's not following me and I stop.

"Aren't you coming?" I say.

"Oh, I can't go down there."

"So what do I do?"

"You should have a timetable with you, on that thing ... The interface..."

"What, my console?"

"If that's what you call it, yes."

"But where am I trying to get to?"

"Yourself. I would suggest alighting at yourself before coming into the Troposphere this time. Then you can avoid the unpleasantness of the hospital visit, and those men catching up with you and so on."

"What, you mean there's going to be a station marked Ariel Manto, pub in Hertfordshire, five minutes before embarking on the journey by which she discovered the way to get back here in the first place? I mean, the paradoxes..."

"When will you stop talking about paradoxes? Your whole world is a paradox. Officially it has no beginning and no end. Nothing about it makes any sense, but it's what you seem to have created."

But I'm not really listening. I'm thinking, So the men do catch up with me, then, in the hospital scenario. I have to get out of here. Is this going to work? I don't know. But I am totally lost here in this too-dense, dark place: a city at night that I've somehow created, that somehow relates to the minds of all the people "outside." We've walked for about, what, ten Troposphere minutes to get here? It's hard to tell.

Then I hear it: the squeak of wheels. Apollo Smintheus hears it, too. His gray face crimples into a frown, and his ears twitch.

"You'd better go," he says.

"What is it?" I say.

But then it's clear what it is. The two blond KIDS are coming down the hill: one on a skateboard and the other on a rusty bike. They're still quite far off, maybe only a quarter of the way down.

"Go," says Apollo Smintheus. "I'll do something about them."

"What if they follow me?"

"They can't go underground. Just go, now. Don't let them see you're here."

"But presumably they already know I'm here. I mean..."

"They're not following you. You're still lost. They've been following me. But I can deal with them. Just go, before they see you."

He walks off, towards the KIDS. I wonder what he's going to do to them.

"Apollo Smintheus?"

"I'll see you when you get back," he calls over his bony shoulder.

The sky is still dark, and there's another brief flash like lightning as I run down the steps. Am I safe now? I must be. But that was pretty close. I can't hear my footsteps; all I can hear is an echoey sound of dripping. The visibility down here isn't very good; every so often there's a dim orange light fixed to the concrete ceiling, but nothing other than that. As my run turns into a walk, I try to look behind me, but I can't see anything. There are more shadows than light down here. But I created this space, I think. Why didn't I just give it more lights? I try to think more light into the space, but nothing happens. It's as if this is what an underground station is, for me; and there's no way I can change my ideas about it. I keep half walking and half running through the tunnel, going deeper and deeper underground. But I can't hear anything behind me and, after several minutes of this, I conclude I am safe—for now. Now I am worried that long concrete tunnel will never end, or change. Then, suddenly, there are signs everywhere, and some dim, black-and-white computer screens presumably showing departures and arrivals. I notice that there are now stairs leading down on either side of the tunnel. The sign on the left says PLATFORM 365; the one on the right says PLATFORM 17. Where is the sense here? And how on earth am I going to work out how to get back to myself in this system?

Console?

It comes up.

What do I do now? I ask it.

Read the Departures Board, it tells me.

So much for the timetable existing on my console.

All the screens seem to be showing departures. Are there no arrivals here? I stop in front of one of them and read the information on it. And then I don't know what to think. There don't seem to be any times on the board; there are just lots and lots of platform numbers. And the train lines are called Fear, Love, Anger, Frustration, Disgust, Pain, Ecstasy, Hope, Comfort.... Every abstract emotion you can think of is there. And, oddly, there's room for them all on a screen the size of a portable television.

How do I use this system? I ask the console.

You find a platform and board a train.

But which platform?

Where are you trying to get to ?

Myself. Oh—do I use the coordinates?

No. The coordinates only relate to your position on the Troposphere. I believe you are trying to get out of the Troposphere.

So ... What do I do, then?

You join with a train of thought relating to the state of mind of the person you want to rejoin: in this case, yourself. And you alight when you get there.

The console is mildly annoying me, so I close it down. Trains of thought. It's obvious and frustrating at the same time. Who invented this weird system? And then I think, I did. I invented everything here. Except ... I didn't invent Apollo Smintheus, and I didn't invent those KIDS. I sigh and look at the board again. If I am going to get back to myself, it looks as though I'm going to have to identify an emotion I know I was experiencing at the time I want to get back to.

And I'm thinking: Time travel, to the past, using emotions? Einstein wouldn't have approved of this. I'm not sure I approve of this. And I don't know how you really distinguish between emotions, anyway. I have enough trouble (intellectually) distinguishing between things. But emotions are not even things. They don't really exist outside the mind. But I'm going to have to do this, anyway. OK. When I was in the hotel room, what was I feeling? Hope? Sort of. I hoped that I'd find Burlem through Molly. But it wasn't a strong feeling. Does it have to be a strong feeling?

The console opens up in my mind, even though I didn't ask it to.

You have one new message, it tells me, and then it closes itself again. I open it back up.

Where is the message? I ask it.

There's a glow on the screen and I follow it over to a news kiosk just beyond the Departures Board. There is one newspaper in a small rack outside and I pick it up. It's not a newspaper.

A Guide to the Underground, it says on the front. By Apollo Smintheus.

I open it up.

You now have no new messages, says the console.

In my previous work I alluded to a vulnerability that a mind may have to the world of all minds. I feel that this now needs greater explanation. As you are aware, consciousness itself is a sprawling landscape with many open doors from one mind to another. The landscape and the doors are metaphors. The openings may just as well be tunnels through a coral reef, or wormholes in space. In most cases, information in the Troposphere is stored where it is created: in the "mind space" of that individual. However, there are several cases of information, which is more dynamic and, you may say, "global" (not that the Troposphere is a globe, of course). What you call "emotions" are types of information that are shared among minds in the Troposphere. The human experience of emotion can be said to be like a wind blowing across an infinite, curved desert, or a planet orbiting its sun. (And it is only ever "like"; it never "is." Emotion is a whole world of metaphor itself, a type of being that shows itself only in not showing itself—as the symptom and never the thing.) You choose to "see" it as an underground train travelling along an infinite, looping track. Minds are not passengers on these trains: They are the stations themselves—sometimes open; sometimes closed. When the station is open, the train of emotion can roar through. When the station is open, it is also open to other things: other open minds or, perhaps, people attempting to achieve Pedesis.

Emotion could simply be termed "motion." Indeed, I remember that this word used to simply mean movement, or a transference from one thing to another. In this world-made-of-language, meaning never really becomes obsolete. In this case, the motion is of something that has no mass (motion itself) and so the meaning it carries can travel at incomprehensible speeds: speeds fast enough to take you backwards. All you have to do is get on a train and find the right station.

I look at the Departures Board again. I think myself back into that hotel room. I'd just had a bath, I remember: I was trying to wash Patrick's horrible desire away. I was trying to forget that I'd just had sex for money. I was ... What? I was afraid, of course—although I think I knew I'd lost the Project Starlight men for the time being. What else? I was sad, because I knew I'd never see Adam again. But I'm so used to sadness and disappointment that they don't even register.

Which train do I get on?

The platform for "sadness" is number 1225. The platform for "disgust" is number 69. I'm not sure I want to board a train of sadness, or a train of disgust. What about pain? But I wasn't actually in pain.

I think back to the moments I have been able to enter other people's minds. With Molly it was that moment—that pang—when she thought about Hugh, and the pain of having to go all over town looking for him. With Maxine it was easy: She was worrying the whole time about being fat and smelly. And now I think I understand this "vulnerability to the world-of-minds." You have a strong emotion and something in your mind opens, slightly, and at the moment of emotion your mind connects with all the others that are feeling the same thing. Or maybe I don't understand. It actually sounds a bit flaky to me, put like that. As an idea, it doesn't have the hard lines of Derrida or Heidegger. Oh well. I think harder, but I'm not sure I was feeling anything very definite in that room. But ... Hang on. Surely it doesn't matter how far back I go, as long as I aim for some moment before I came into the Troposphere. So when did I last feel strong emotion? What about the fear I felt as I drove away from the priory? That tumbling-over-itself sick feeling as I waited for the black car to slither out of some side street and start following me. I look at the Departures Board again. Fear: Platform 7. I can't see this working, but I'll give it a try.

I start the long walk down the endless concrete tunnel, ignoring signs to Platform 31, Platform 57, and Platform 99. There's no order here. Eventually I find it: Platform 7. I walk down a set of aluminium steps and see that the train is already there; it's an old rusty thing that reminds me of the oldest and nastiest Northern Line trains that would always seem to grind to a halt just outside Camden. Isn't it a bit lucky that the train is already here? But from down here I can see all the other platforms, all with trains sitting in them. Just as the screens upstairs suggested: There are no arrivals here, only departures. And then I realize that the train isn't "really" here at all. It's just a metaphor—just like everything else here. I rotate the tarnished silver handle and pull the door towards me. Whatever the metaphor is—and whatever this experience "really" looks like—I am left in no doubt that I am now climbing inside fear itself.

Chapter Twenty-two

But so far fear just looks like the inside of an old London Underground train. The seats are covered in tatty green velveteen with a repeating orangy pattern. The floor has a layer of dirt so thick that the real floor could fall away and no one would even notice. The carriages are joined together with creaky mechanisms that you can see (or so I imagine) when you look through the window in the adjoining door. I sit down and a whistle blows. The train starts to move. It slowly creaks its way to the end of the platform and then, suddenly, we're going at what feels like three hundred miles per hour, through a long tunnel and then out onto a landscape I don't recognize. I absurdly think, This must be a Circle Line train, since we're going above ground already; then I realize what's wrong with what I'm thinking, and I stop.

I don't like this landscape. I don't like it at all. The syrupy feeling I have in the Troposphere is now gone, and I feel not simply cold and tired but completely hollowed out, as if all I am is skin. The train speeds up again and I can't help but look out of the window. Looking out of the window feels a bit like when you look on the Internet to find out if your symptoms suggest terminal illness: You know they will, and you know you shouldn't look, but you do. Outside of this window is just one big field. But it's not a green, hopeful field: It's basically mud. And on the mud, I can see burning houses. It should feel just like I do watching the TV news—that hyperreal sense that nothing you see in two dimensions on a screen can ever really happen—but it does not feel like watching TV. The houses that are burning outside aren't just any old semis from the news: They're all the houses I've ever lived in. And I'm inside, and I can't get out; my parents are inside, and they can't get out. I know my sister is already dead. But more than that. This is fear without hope: This is the image of me asleep in my cold bedroom back in Kent, wearing the thick pajamas my mother got me back in the days when we still spent Christmas together. In the image I am not just fast asleep; the smoke from the fire has already knocked me out and now, as I watch, the leg of my pajama bottoms has caught fire and the skin around my ankle is starting to melt. I won't ever wake up again. I am just going to melt, and I won't even know anything about it.

After the fires all I can see are floods: water creeping up and up the outside of the same houses—my houses—until they are completely submerged; until even the people on the roofs, and the people hiding in the attics, are soon dead. My whole family; everyone I've ever known. On one level I know I don't care too much about my family—when did I last see them, after all? But I'm there with them now as we wait for help that does not come; as we accept the moment when the water becomes too high and we all fall into it. There's nothing apart from the water: It's black and cold and it stinks like death. And I'm the first one to go, to stop trying to hold my breath and actually breathe in the black water. That's it. Blackness. My useless body sinks down to where the street used to be. And, in this train of fear, I'm sweating, and my heart's beating so fast that it's like one long heartbeat, or maybe no heartbeat at all.

The worst thing about the images outside is that there is nothing else apart from them. And it's not simply that I cannot see anything beyond the houses and the mud: I know with the deepest certainty possible that there is nothing out there beyond what I can see. There isn't any me here; there is no train. I will die in all those houses and there is nowhere else to escape to. There's no sense that this will ever exist "around the corner" or on TV or be happening to someone else. This is what it must be like to open the door to a dead-eyed man with an axe. This is what it must be like when you haven't fought him off (after all, how could you?) and you're tied up and you know you're going to die. You're not watching this happen to a fictional character; you are experiencing it for real: It's me; it's the end of me. Or, worse: You are like a fictional character, but not one of the leads. You're just one of the victims along the way.

The train lurches on. The alleyways I'd usually never walk down after dark are all there now: a world of dead ends with rapists patrolling the thin dark passages like the ghosts on Pac-Man. I am stabbed a thousand times by people who don't know my name, or what books I like to read, or that if my life wasn't such a mess I'd quite like to get a cat. I watch myself bleed to death like a farm animal in an abattoir, while parts of my own body lie scattered around me, hacked off and discarded. I pray for unconsciousness, but it doesn't come. Oh Jesus. I can't stand any more of this. I feel what it is all like: I'm having an operation but the doctors don't know I'm actually awake. I experience a motorway pileup. I see Adam dying a million different ways. Then I'm killing Adam: I'm killing him in every possible way, and I'm killing everyone else, too. I'm in prison, and I'll never escape. I have no choice.

I have no choice.

I have no choice.

Every millisecond of this horrible journey is an epiphany in which I realize that this is it. This is my last moment of life, and any idea of free will disappeared long ago. And each epiphany is, at the moment I have it, absolutely irreversible. It's not the moment when you think Shit! That was close. It's the moment after that, in a world where you are the unluckiest person on Earth and there's no one to help you and no one to care, especially when everyone you know is already dead....

I can't stand this.

Console? I say, weakly, although I can barely believe that such a thing still exists.

It comes up.

Where do I get off? I ask it.

You get off at your station.

Where is my station?

You have to be able to see it.

What?

You now have no choices.

Well, I knew that.

I want to stand up and go and ask the driver to stop the train, but I know that there is no driver and this isn't really a train. I'm surfing on a wave of fear that's moving faster than ... What did Apollo Smintheus say? Incomprehensible speeds. Think, think. Don't look out of the window. Don't ... I look.

And then I realize that I'm not alone out here. There's actually something worse than being alone with your own worst fears, and I'm just beginning to see what that might be. Faintly—not above, below, in front of, or behind my images of fear, but in some other relation to them—I now sense the howling spectre of something else: layers upon layers of other people's fear. There are misty representations of money burning, of someone being fisted by his own father, of toys that tell you to "fuck off" and then rip out your throat, of the idea that there is no such thing as reality, of someone being abducted by an alien and strapped to a table in a white lab, of nuclear war, of a child drowning, of hundreds of children drowning, of it being all YOUR FAULT, of choking on fish bones, of lung cancer, of bowel cancer, of brain tumors, of spiders—thousands and thousands of spiders, of a prolapsed uterus, of sleep apnea, of eating, of any kind of sex, of rats, of cockroaches, of plastic bags, of heights, of planes, of the Bermuda Triangle, of the live rail, of ghosts, of terrorism, of cocktail parties, of crowds, of the dentist, of choking on your own tongue, of your own feet, of dreams, of grown-ups, of ice cubes, of false teeth, of Father Christmas, of getting old, of your parents dying, of what you might do to yourself, of coffins, of alcohol, of suicide, of blood, of not being able to take heroin again, of the thing behind the curtains, of soot, of spaceships, of DVT, of horses, of fast cars, of people, of paper, of knives, of dogs, of redundancy, of being late, of being seen naked, of scabs, of leap years, of UFOs, of dragons, of poison, of accordion music, of torture, of any kind of authority, of being kicked while you just lie on the ground trying to protect your head until you become unconscious and can't protect yourself anymore.

You—why don't you look out of the window for a while.

My eyes are now shut. Incomprehensible speeds. What does that mean?

I can't breathe. The man with the gun...

There's no man with a gun, Ariel.

There is. The whole world is made only of men with guns. There's no one else in the whole world, just me and billions of men with guns. I feel sick.

Incomprehensible speeds. I can comprehend the speed of light. I can comprehend ten times the speed of light. The only thing I can't comprehend is infinite speed.... That's what Apollo Smintheus said, didn't he? Or did he just say that the train track was infinite? Anyway, what if we were moving at infinite speed? Although I can't really comprehend it (which is, I think, the point of "incomprehensible"), something travelling at infinite speed would actually seem to be at rest at every point that it travelled past. Something with infinite speed, travelling in a loop, should be able to be everywhere at once, surely? Maybe more than once: Who knows? So maybe I don't have to wait for my station. Maybe my station is simply there, outside, and I have to find it.

I don't want to look out of the window, but I do. Now my own fears are in sharp focus again. Everything I've ever written is on fire. Someone's rubbing my name out of every document in which it's ever appeared. I don't know where these images are coming from. They appear to be random, but maybe ... I try to think of Adam again and, as if I'd ordered the memory in the consciousness equivalent of the most efficient fast-food restaurant in the world, there he is, outside the window, fucking my mother. He's fucking my mother and saying to her: "Who's Ariel? I've never heard of anyone called Ariel." He seems to turn and see me watching them. Then he laughs. He pokes her in the ribs and points at me and they both laugh. "I don't have time for this now, Ariel," my mother says. "You're not the center of the universe, you know."

Cars, I think. Driving. Driving towards London from Faversham. Come on. I'm escaping from the priory; from the Project Starlight men. And then I see/feel it. I'm in my car and I'm zoning out into the fear. In the image through the train window I can see the men racing behind me in their black car, driving down the almost-empty motorway with the gray sky above and the snow lying in fields, on rooftops, and alongside the long, curving hard shoulders. I can see them behind me and I know this is the end. In a film, I'd shake them off. But they're going to run me off the road and no amount of gutsy driving or intelligence is going to save me. My life is going to end in a crunch of jagged metal, with my blood spurting onto the windscreen. I don't want to go there, to this place, but I have to. I have to get into that place from this one. My mind is open at that point, I instinctively know that. And the men aren't really there: That's just the fear.

At least—I hope it's just the fear.

How do I get off? Not knowing what else to do, I walk towards the doors.

The image is still the same one outside the windows. I focus on it, and then I press the button to open the doors. The train's still moving but the doors open and...

It's six A.M.—just gone—on the A2 and the sign is telling me that if I keep going I'll end up in London. That's not what I want. Or maybe it is? No. I need the M25 and then a road to Torquay, wherever that is. I glance in the rearview mirror: still no black car. There's another sign ahead of me pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven't lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me. Except ... One of them does mean something to me. It's the town where Patrick lives. But—oh shit. I'm having déjà vu. I remember being here before and taking that exit and getting Patrick to come and fuck me in the toilets for a hundred quid.

Except it wasn't déjà vu. It happened. It happened and then I went to Molly's school and then I got lost in the Troposphere and then I time-travelled back here, in a train full of fear and ... So much for paradoxes. I pull over to the hard shoulder and take out a cigarette. At the same time I check my purse to see if I still have the rest of Patrick's money. No. I've got the £9.50 I set out with and very little petrol. I light my cigarette and pull back onto the road. I'm going to Torquay. And I can't help smiling. I've no idea where I've actually been but—oddly—for the first time since I first went into the Troposphere, I don't feel at all mad. I feel absolutely fine about what just happened. I'm not a whore after all, I think as I drive off again. I got what I wanted without actually doing anything. Or did I actually do it and then overwrite it with something else? Oh, whatever. I put all thoughts of Abbie Lathrop—and the KIDS—out of my mind and, as I drive towards the M25, I try to make myself vow never to try Pedesis again.

It's just gone midday when I park in a big, anonymous car park next to Torquay Library, about 250 miles from the Shrine of St. Jude in Faversham. There's no snow in the southwest, but the sky is as gray and flat as the one back home, as if January has been reformatted in two dimensions and broadcast on a cheap black-and-white portable TV. The Troposphere always seems flat to me, but this is worse; I'm not sure that the real world, with its dirt and its people, is exactly where I want to be. But then I'm not sure the Troposphere is a good place for me, either. I still have half a tank of the petrol that I "forgot" to pay for, but now I need food, and coffee. There's a café just across from the library, next to a big slablike church of a denomination I don't recognize. I decide to go into the café before using the public Internet terminals that I hope are in the library. I'm going to search for local castles and see what I find. I remember Burlem's memory of the one in his town: the one he thought of as being like a giant's ring, ripped off, and left on a hilltop. If that doesn't locate it, I'll try something else, but I'm not sure what.

Even though I have my plan, I still sit in the car for about five minutes before I do anything. What a journey. I drove about two hundred miles before I stopped looking in my rearview mirror for the police (who I assumed would want to ask me questions about the petrol), and the Project Starlight men. Some time after that I lost track of where I was. I pulled into a town I thought was Torquay, but there was nothing at all to distinguish it from every other town I've ever seen in Britain, and I couldn't be sure that I'd actually reached my destination. There was a large roundabout with various signs to industrial estates, and a Sainsbury's supermarket off to the right. I pulled into the Sainsbury's car park and got out of the car for the first time since the petrol station on the M25. My legs felt shaky. I walked in and went straight up to the kiosk and bought a cheap packet of tobacco.

"Where am I, exactly?" I asked the woman, after she'd given me my change.

The way I said it made it sound like a completely normal question. But the woman looked at me as if I were completely odd.

"You're in Sainsbury's, dear," she told me.

But after some further conversation I realized that I was not in Torquay and got some pretty good directions that led me straight to the library.

So now I'm in a car park that is indistinguishable from any other car park in any other town, and I watch as people unload buggies and small children, or pack away large, shiny carrier bags with the word SALE on them. Two women go past, both in those new mobility scooters that look a bit like bumper cars, and they seem to be arguing about something. The gray concrete is smeared with old fag butts, familiar take-away wrappers, and polystyrene coffee cups. I look beyond all of this, towards the thin line of bare-branched trees up a small hill separating this car park from the road above. The trees are the only things that stand out in the grayish-whitish smudge of official buildings and the sky. And then I see something in the trees: six or seven squirrels all moving at once; one in each tree, or so it seems, moving and jumping and rearranging themselves constantly, like pixels on a screen. Their bodies are silhouetted by the pale light of the sky behind them. It's winter, and I can't imagine what they find to eat in a place like this. Aren't squirrels supposed to hibernate? Do they have a god looking after them or does nobody pray for squirrels? I shiver. What if Burlem isn't in this place anymore; or what if I can't actually find out where it is? I imagine what it's like to live as a squirrel—or any animal—in a concrete, urban space, where everything costs money. What will I do if I can't find Burlem? I can't go home; I think it's fair to say that I have no home anymore.

I wonder if the book is still safe.

I wonder if the men have got to Adam yet.

And I feel a pulse like a fist, hitting me first between my legs and then somewhere in my stomach. Is it possible that I'll ever see him again?

I stop thinking and get of the car. There's a billboard layered with rained-on, peeling posters, most of which are advertising a pantomime starring someone from an Australian soap that I've never heard of. Above that there's a sign: NO OVERNIGHT SLEEPING. Shit. I never realized that you could be stopped for just parking your car somewhere and sleeping in it. I walk over to the ticket machine, the cold wind jabbing at my face as if I've stolen something from it. As I'd feared, it's extortionate to park here: about a pound an hour. I pay for half an hour and then use my fingernail to smudge the time on the ticket as I walk back over to my car. Then I prop the ticket in a hard-to-see place on the edge of the windscreen, so only the date is showing, before locking the car door and walking across the road and through a tinkling door into the café.

It smells of soup, plus something sour that I can't identify. It's almost full up, but I manage to get a seat in the corner by a display of greeting cards, jewellery, and Fairtrade muesli. There are various pictures on the walls depicting slim white women in Africa leading choirs of small, brightly clothed children; or helping equally brightly clothed women pull water up from a well. I realize this is a Christian café just as a late middle-aged woman in a yellow twinset comes to take my order. As I ask for the carrot and parsnip soup and a black coffee, I notice the leaflets that are scattered around, and the poster on the wall advertising the times of the service in the church—presumably the one next door. And I wonder: What kind of god is created and sustained by the hundreds of people who must pray here? Apollo Smintheus is the result of six people's prayers and he seems real enough. What does more prayer do? What sort of god does it make? And is this god—the one made by the people here—the same god created by the people in the church near Burlem's house? Is it the same god created by the people in the Faversham priory? What would a god like that look like? I suppose if I met him in the Troposphere, he'd look exactly as I'd want him to look—probably an old man with a white beard: the atheist's view of a Christian's view of God. And what does he do for these people? What must it be like to have millions of people telling you what to do? And I also wonder: What does he ask in return?

While I'm waiting for my soup, I study one of the leaflets. It talks vaguely about "joy." But I haven't seen anything joyful since I've been in this place. I haven't seen anything joyful since ... I can't actually remember when the last time was. And that's why I like reading Heidegger and Derrida and Baudrillard. In that world life isn't a matrix of good and bad; happy and sad; joy and failure to achieve joy. Failure and sadness are there to be examined, like a puzzle, and the puzzle is open to anyone. It doesn't matter how many people you've slept with, or whether or not you smoke, or whether or not you get something out of damaging your own body. You can have a go at the puzzle that assumes imperfection and never asks you for anything.

I look down at my wrists—the pinkish, silvery marks—and then I glance around the café. Most of the other people here are middle-aged and dressed in respectably unstylish catalog clothes. They scare me a little; not because of what they might do to me (these people never do anything: They're benign) but because of what I am in their thoughts. These aren't the middle-aged women I remember from the estate I grew up on—women who'd cackle and smoke and discuss the benefits of giving blow jobs without your false teeth. Neither are they like the social workers who'd come round every so often to check we weren't being sexually abused by these women's husbands (it was more usually the sons). No. These are of the same species as the women I remember from the bakery and the corner shop: the ones who don't bother to stop talking about your crazy mother when you walk in because they think you're too stupid to understand. They're the school secretaries who could have simply told me I needed to wash my clothes more often, rather than talking about it behind my back and, eventually, reporting me to the head teacher. They're the kind of women who would never wear flattering clothes—or anything black—because looking attractive equals sex. There's only one other young person in the café: a blond guy with shabby clothes who looks like the sort of RE teacher who'd spend a long time talking about world religions and not so long on Christianity. He looks at me for a moment and I see a familiar desire in his eyes. It's not romantic desire: It's for sex, raw sex, and it's because I look like I'd be up for it. Compared to everyone else in here I look like a whore. But, of course, that's the point of these women. By being what they are, they make you a bad person by comparison, even if all you're doing is wearing lipstick. I try to give him a look back that says "Not today, thanks," and then I pick up the leaflet and pretend to read it again.

The woman with the yellow twinset comes with my soup.

"Six thirty is the next one," she says to me, in a crisp voice.

"Sorry?"

"The next service is at 6:30."

I don't want to appear rude, so I just say, "OK. Thanks."

"Are you local?" she says.

"No. Not really."

I don't mention that I could easily become local: a local bum with nowhere to go—except, I'd guess, the library and the church.

"Oh."

"I'm just passing through," I say.

But respectable people don't have hair like mine, and they don't pass through anywhere. Passing through is the kind of thing men do—truckers and cowboys—and we all know what happens to women who act like men. The woman walks off, making a tutting noise.

When I've finished my soup I look around in my bag for a notebook, so I can write a list of things I'm intending to look up in the library. I take out the tobacco as well. Obviously I can't smoke in here, but I'll roll one to have while I'm crossing the road. I've rolled my cigarette and put it to one side on the table when the woman comes back to collect my bowl. I drain the last of the coffee and offer her the cup, too.

"You can't smoke in here," she says.

"Oh—I know. I wasn't going to, don't worry," I say, smiling.

"Yes, well, just as long as you know." She doesn't smile back. In fact, her body stiffens, as if she thinks I'm about to attack her or something. As if I'm bad enough to do something like that.

What is it about these people that makes me feel as though they're damning me to hell all the time? Or maybe it's not them: It's me. I should tie my hair up; my hair can offend people. I should pretend not to smoke. I should always use my nice quiet BBC voice, not my loud, confident one. I should always offer to help. I should always tell people exactly what they want to hear ... I should join in with people who pretend that meaning exists and makes people like me bad in order to make them good. I should feel absented by their presence. I should lie all the time, because the truth just isn't nice. It isn't holy.

"What's your god like?" I ask the woman, before I can tell myself to shut up.

"What's God like?" she says.

I should never have asked this question. "Yes," I say.

Although all I've done is ask about her god, I've broken social convention and my eyes start to water and itch, and I can feel myself blushing slightly. I don't want a row; I really don't. I only asked the question because I was interested. And I meant to say "Yes" in a timid way, but I don't do timid very well, and it didn't quite work. Nevertheless, I expect the woman to be polite back—or even to answer my question. But instead her eyes harden further.

"He looks after the people who believe in him," she says.

And then she walks away.

As I leave the café, light my cigarette, and sit on a wall to smoke it, I remember the various times in my life when I've tried to find out about religion. It often starts with a logical idea: that so many people around the world believe in a god, or a way of life, that there must be something in at least one of these approaches. So I go to the local library, or the university library, and there's always that moment—perhaps similar to the moment before you choose the bread you want in the bakery—where there seems to be so much possibility. So many books; so much "truth." Surely it can't all be false? Surely it won't all be the same? But all the books do just seem the same to me. They all have the same hierarchies. They all have leaders. Even Buddhism has rules over who can really "belong" and who can't, who is in charge, and who is not. And all the leaders are men.

I remember once flirting with Roman Catholicism when I was seeing a guy who'd been a choirboy as a kid, and who seemed to get something out of the whole thing (and had worked it all out so you could be a Catholic and still have dirty sex). I got a couple of books and magazines from the local church and started to read up on it. I'd kind of bought all that stuff about the Virgin Mary and was in the process of trying to convince myself that a religion that took a woman so seriously must have something going for it. Then I read a humorous anecdote in one of the magazines about a time when Pope John Paul II was visiting some town, and the nuns who were supposed to cook for him messed it up and ended up giving him fish fingers. Obviously the point of the story was that it was funny that the pope had eaten fish fingers, but I couldn't get over the detail that the pope had nuns to cook for him. Surely religious leaders are supposed to be somehow wiser than the rest of us? But I realized then that there was nothing special about this system at all, nothing that made it more profound and extraordinary than the rest of society. If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven't got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the pope, because women aren't good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? If this was the wisest Catholic, I certainly never wanted to meet the stupidest one.

Perhaps this is similar to the anthropic principle, but I am a woman, and after a lifetime of experiment I know I am capable of everything men can do, except things that specifically require a penis (like pissing standing up). I mean it's so obvious it even sounds a bit silly to repeat it, a bit like saying "All humans have heads." So what does religion know about me that I'm missing? Am I worth less in an a priori sense? But that would be utterly nonsensical. How is it possible that religion, which claims to be more profound than anything else, still has less of a grasp on humanity than any personnel department in the country?

It's not just Christianity, either: How could the Buddhists have missed the bit in their thinking about freedom from desire, when most of them seem to desire to be reincarnated well, and in such a way that they can be a man, and be called a "venerable master" and tell other people what to do? Why is religion so disappointing? You expect it to tell you something you don't know, and all it ends up telling you is the stuff you've known for years, and that you long ago decided is wrong.

Over to my left is the big gray wall in front of the church.

ARE WE THE THOUGHTS OF GOD? a poster asks.

No, I realize. It's the reverse.

I put out my cigarette and stop thinking.

The library is a large square space with two floors. There's a checkout desk in the middle of the ground floor, and bookshelves all around it. The second floor is basically just a gallery with a big hole in the middle, so you can stand up there and watch what's going on downstairs, or sit at one of the small desks and try to work, if you don't mind all the noise. I remember the library I went to as a kid. It was always deadly quiet and, at least in my memory, everything in it was orange, including a little sunken bit in the kids' section that to me felt like a huge abyss, and that I would beg my mother to let me go and sit in.

I walk up to the counter.

"Hi," I say, when a bearded librarian walks over to me. "I want to use the Internet."

"Are you a member?"

"Of this library?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. Sorry. I'm not."

"Are you a foreign student?"

"No."

He smiles. "We can give you a day pass. You'll need to fill in this form..."

He gives it to me. But I'm wondering whether I can lie on it, and if so whether they will check. I certainly don't want to leave any written record of myself.

"Maybe I'll see if I can find the information I want in a book first," I say. "But I'll try this if that fails." I did want to look up the Web site of the cult of Apollo Smintheus as well as look for the information on the castle, but maybe I won't bother. After all, I am vaguely in debt to these people.

"Fine with me," he says. "Can I help you locate a book?"

I think this is the most helpful librarian I've ever come across. All the university librarians just act as though you're getting in their way. That's not to say I'm not missing the university, though, and I don't know where else I'll ever find a secular green space with no take-away cartons on the ground. For about the thousandth time today I have a pang: I'm not going back; I'm not going back.

"Um, I'm interested in local castles," I say.

"Ah. Any in particular?"

I smile. "No. Just generally. I want to look at the shapes of castles." That sounds mad. I think quickly. "It's research for a book."

He looks impressed. "And it's Devon castles you want?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Well, you'll need the local history library then."

Oh shit. "Where's that?" I say.

"Oh, it's that little room over there," he says, pointing to a door in the corner. "You shouldn't really go in if you're not a member, but I should think it'll be all right. Obviously you can't take any of the books out. And I'm afraid you can't take your bag in with you."

He signs me in and takes my bag. Then he gives me a laminated pass.

"Just go straight in," he says.

The local history library is a dusty, low-ceilinged room split into three distinct sections by the layout of the shelves and the position of several desks and one microfiche reader. I instantly feel comfortable in here, around the musty smell of old books. There's no one else here but me, and I wonder if I'd get arrested for just crashing out here at the end of the day. Probably.

I drift around looking at faded old spines of parish records and biographies before I realize I'll need the computerized records to find what I'm looking for. There's a terminal in the corner, just under a CCTV playback of what's going on in here. I sit down, but it feels odd seeing myself on TV, and I'm a vague shadow in the corner of my eye as I type in the keywords "castles" and "Devon."

There are several books on Devon castles, and I choose a couple with pictures and take them to one of the desks. I flick through the largest book, which contains line drawings of all the major castles in the area. Exeter Castle and Powderham Castle are too grand and rectangular, as are Berry Pomeroy Castle and Bickleigh Castle. Gidley Castle and Lydford Castle are both too square. There are several castles by the sea. But the castle Burlem was thinking of was on a little mound. Finally I find pictures of two castles that are on mounds. They're both circular. My heart is like a machine that's been turned up a notch. I've now got two choices. I almost know where I need to go. I have to look at another book—this one with more recent photographs—before I see that one of the castles is now really just a ruin, like a tooth left in a giant's mouth.

But the other one looks exactly like Burlem described: like a giant's ring thrown on a hilltop. And I can see what he meant about the absence, as well. The picture I've got here in this book, this aerial view, certainly does make it seem like the space—the thing that isn't there—is more important than the walls, which are. If you look at the castle for long enough the walls blur, and it's as if they don't have any point at all, except to keep all the nothingness in.

Chapter Twenty-three

By four o'clock I'm standing outside the house from Burlem's memory: the one he lives in with Lura (or, at least, the one where he lived in December); the one you get to by walking past the cheese shop and turning right and walking up the narrow cobbled street. It's a tallish, thin gray stone cottage with green wooden shutters over the front windows. It looks cozy, but it also has an air of the fortress about it. Maybe that's the effect of the shutters, or just my paranoia. I'm not actually sure I should be here at all, but I'm fairly certain no one's been following me. Well, at least, no one in the physical world. I realize suddenly that I should have gone into a church just in case one of those Project Starlight guys (or the dead KIDS) is in my mind. It's too late now, though. It was probably too late almost from the moment I set off this morning. If they've been with me at any stage, they'll know where I'm going. But if they've been with me at any stage they won't need to know where I'm going: They'll have their recipe.

But I don't think they are here, anyway. I think I'm on my own.

In fact, I know I'm on my own. I don't think I've ever been so alone in my life. I hesitate before lifting the heavy brass door knocker. My eyes are filling with tears, but I don't want to seem unbalanced when, and if, someone opens the door. When did I last cry? I didn't cry after Patrick fucked me at the university, or in the service station toilet; I didn't cry when my parents finally abandoned me for good; I didn't even cry when I left Adam at the priory, probably hating me, probably gone forever. But now, standing here in the early twilight, in the cold air, with seagulls squawking above me, and stars already beginning to prick the sky, I want to cry more than I ever have before. I gulp it back. But if this doesn't work then I'm totally fucked. I have no home. I have no money. I have no family.

I lift the knocker and bang it twice against the door.

Please be there, please be there, please be there.

I see smoke coming from the chimney: Someone is in.

After two minutes or so I'm just about to knock again, but then a woman opens the door. It's Lura. I recognize everything about her, from the flowing clothes to the gray shoulder-length hair streaked with pink. I suddenly realize that I haven't worked out how I should play this. I know what it's like to make love to this woman; to lie to her; to live with her. But I should probably pretend I don't know her at all. As long as I remember I am me, that's perfectly true.

She doesn't say anything.

"Hello," I say. "I wonder if..."

"Sorry?" says Lura. "Who are you?" Her voice, which I recognize anyway, is educated and low-pitched, with just a hint of a German accent.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but..."

"Yes?" She's trying to hurry me up. Maybe she doesn't like people pissing her around, wasting her time. But I'm not sure she's going to like what I've got to say, either. Although she has to. She has to, because I've got nowhere else to go.

"I'm looking for Saul Burlem," I say.

Lura's face looks as though it's been freeze-framed in one of those movie special effects that lets the rest of the world just carry on as usual around the frozen object. Then she's normal again, except for the fear I can now see in her eyes, like the beginning of a storm.

"You're looking for whom?" she says.

"Saul Burlem," I say. "I need to see him. Would you mind telling him that Ariel Manto is here? Tell him that I found the page and I have to speak to him."

As I speak, the fear in Lura's eyes hurricanes outwards and now she reaches a hand up to her face, as if to steady it: to stop this; to confirm, perhaps, that she's imagining it. This must be the last thing you need when you're in hiding. This, if you're in hiding, must be your worst nightmare.

"Who are you?" she says.

"I'm Saul's Ph.D. student."

"You're... No. I know where you've come from."

"I'm not with them. I'm not part of Project Starlight."

"How do I know that? If you aren't with them then why the bloody hell did you come?" She takes a deep breath and touches her hair. "Saul isn't here, anyway. He moved on, about two months ago. He went..."

"Ariel?"

It's Burlem. He's standing behind Lura.

"Saul," I say, "can I...?"

"Let her in, Lura," he says, in his gravel voice. And then, leaning against the wall in the hallway while I walk in: "Oh fuck."

The downstairs of the house is an open-plan space with wooden floorboards and oak beams that you access by walking through a wide hallway and through an arch. A fire is burning at the far end of the large room, and there are red, brown, and dark yellow rugs everywhere. There's a large dining table on the left-hand side of the room. At the moment it has a newspaper spread out on it with a half-finished cup of coffee on a wicker mat. Just beyond the table there's a black-and-white dog asleep in a cane basket, and then, at the edge of the room, what must be a set of patio doors covered with heavy curtains. As if the dog knows I'm looking at it, it glances up at me sleepily and then falls asleep again. There's a mantelpiece over the fireplace with an assortment of items on it: a couple of rosettes, a framed black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman, a hairbrush, a set of knitting needles, and a vase of blue flowers. The closest thing to the fire is an armchair with some knitting balanced on the arm. There are two sofas—big, deep, and yellow—and they face each other across the fire but set slightly back from the armchair. One of them looks more used than the other, and there are books and papers scattered on it. There's a coffee table—a polished section of tree trunk—between the sofas, with books and old crosswords and Biros all over it. There are tall piles of books on every surface, and the whole right-hand wall is covered with thick pine shelves, a bit like the ones from Apollo Smintheus's apartment, but stocked with what must be hundreds and hundreds of books. There's no TV.

I'm not quite sure how I feel to be here. I'd expected something like relief, the emotional equivalent of having come home after a long wet journey, or having a drink when you are thirsty. But I still ache for that kind of safe, fulfilled feeling, the feeling that I've achieved something by coming here. At the moment I feel rather as if I've dropped in on one of my university professors at home, on the weekend, when his wife is there. And worse: I know, and Burlem must suspect, that I read his mind to get here. What felt like a necessity at the time feels somehow wrong now. I didn't really come here for him: I came here for me. Then again, he must understand that I didn't have any other choice. But I know too much about him now, and we're both aware of that.

The kitchen area is around to the left and runs adjacent to the hallway.

"I'll make tea," Lura says, walking off towards the kitchen. I hear water running and then the click of the kettle being switched on.

Burlem motions for me to follow him to the large dining table. He folds the paper and puts it to one side. Then Lura comes and picks up his mug and takes it away. For a whole two or three minutes now no one has said anything.

"I'm sorry...," I begin.

"How did you find me?" Burlem says.

"Through Molly," I say.

"Molly doesn't know where I am," he says. "No one in my bloody family knows where I am. That's what you give up when you go into hiding like this. One of many things."

"Pedesis," I say. "I used Pedesis. I'm sorry. I've got the book."

He closes his eyes for a couple of seconds and then opens them again; then he runs a shaky hand through his dark hair.

"Fuck," he says again.

"I'm sorry...," I say again. There's a long pause. "They came after me and I didn't know what to do. I realized that the same thing must have happened to you, and so I logically thought that if I came to where you were I might be safe."

"The curse," says Burlem.

"Yeah," I say.

And I think we're both remembering his paper in Greenwich, where we both agreed that we'd read the book if we could, regardless of the curse. I know I'd do it again, but I don't know about him. His face looks rougher and more lined than when I last saw him, and he now has several streaks of white-gray in his hair. Or maybe he used to dye it and now he can't be bothered. What must it be like to have to leave your job like that? To leave behind a daughter?

"How is Molly?" he asks.

"She's doing normal teenage things," I say.

"But she's OK?"

I weigh this question in my mind. All right, so Molly's fucking an unsuitable guy, but then we all do that. When I was in her mind I didn't detect any obvious anorexia, self-harm, or drug abuse. But then, of course, she has the potential for all of that: I knew that from the connection I felt with her.

"She's fine," I say.

Burlem sighs. "Are you still smoking?" he asks.

"Yeah, why?"

"Can I have one?"

"Sure." I take my tobacco out of my bag. "Roll-ups," I say. "I'm a bit skint."

"Can you do it for me?" he asks. "I've lost the knack."

And his hands are shaking too, I notice. I roll two cigarettes and give one to him. We both light up.

"Oh, that feels better," he says. "Fucking weird, but better. Why don't we go over by the fire. You'd better tell me what's been going on. Let me know how terrified I should be."

We get up and walk over to the sofas. He takes the messy one and I take the other. It does feel amazing, sitting in a warm, comfortable room after everything that's happened. But somehow I don't feel quite comfortable. I don't sit back in the sofa, although it's soft and vast. I perch on the edge as though I'm having an interview. There aren't any ashtrays, but I notice that Burlem flicks his ash into the fire, so I do the same.

"You shouldn't have come here," he says.

I think I'm going to cry again. "I know ... But I ... I had..."

"But, well, it's good to see you again." He smiles now for the first time.

"Oh. Thanks, I..."

"And I'm sorry about the book." He sighs. "I feel responsible."

"Don't be," I say. "I'm sorry I freaked you out by coming here. But I honestly couldn't think of anything else to do. I mean ... Just to be in the same room as someone who has had the same experiences as me is..."

Burlem cuts me off. "How sure are you that you weren't followed?" he asks.

"A hundred percent," I say. "Or, well, maybe ninety-nine. But they only want the recipe, don't they? They can get that from me now. They wouldn't need to use me to get to you. They'd only need to get into my head. I've got all the information they need. I can promise you that after the last time I met them in the Troposphere—or MindSpace, as they seem to call it—I've got no intention of letting them anywhere near me, my mind, or my body. That's why I ran. That's why I came to find you. I can't go anywhere anymore. I can't go home; I can't go to work..."

"That's neat logic," he says. "That stuff about only needing to get into your mind for a few minutes to get the recipe. But they want all of us dead. You do know that?"

"No. I didn't know that. Well, I mean I know they're violent and they'll use force to get the recipe ... And maybe even for fun. But I thought that once they had the recipe they'd go away."

Burlem coughs and takes a drag on the roll-up. "When they sell the patent for the mixture—or cook it up illegally; I don't know what they've got planned—they won't want people like us coming along and undercutting their price. They'll want to get rid of any competitors. Well, I don't know for sure, but I expect they do want to sell it; that seems logical."

"They do," I say.

"How do you know?"

"I..."

Lura comes through the large room carrying a yellow tray with a teapot and mugs on it. Burlem quickly shifts some magazines and newspapers out of the way and she puts it down on the coffee table between two stacks of books. Then she sits down in the armchair and looks at me.

"Are you all right?" she asks me, peering over her silver glasses. "I'm sorry if I was rude at the door. We've been hiding for so long, and..."

"It's OK," I say. "I'm fine."

"Ariel knows about Project Starlight," Burlem says to Lura. "She knows what they want."

"Yes, I overheard that," Lura says. "How do you know? I couldn't find out anything about them on the occasions when I tried—well, beyond the very basics."

"I got into one of their minds," I say. "Martin Rose."

Burlem half laughs and half snorts. "How the fuck did you do that?"

"They were waiting for me in their car. I was in a priory and they couldn't come in, obviously, so they were kind of staking me out. I got into the Troposphere from inside the priory and ended up in one of their heads by accident. I didn't even know they were there before that."

"What were you doing in a priory?" Burlem asks.

"Hiding from them. It's a long story," I say.

Burlem pours the tea, spilling at least half a cup onto the tray.

"I think maybe now's the time to tell us all of it, if you don't mind. How you got the book, what happened next, and so on," he says.

"No, that's fine," I say. "But can I stay here, tonight at least? I don't want to impose, but..."

"It's all right, Ariel," says Lura, but she doesn't look happy about it.

"Yeah," says Burlem. "You're fucked in the outside world, just like me."

Lura shakes her head. "How long is this going to go on?" she says softly. Then she looks at me. "You're more than welcome to stay as long as you like," she says. "We've got a room for you." Then she looks at Burlem. "But we're going to have to stop this before we wake up and find that there are ten of us, and then twenty, and then that the whole bloody world knows about the Troposphere."

"It's OK," Burlem says. "Ariel won't have told anyone else."

"No. I haven't," I say. But I don't mention that I've left the book—intact again—in the priory. I think that will make more sense as part of my whole story.

I sit back in the sofa and start telling them about the day the university started falling down, and the secondhand bookshop and everything that happened after that. And as I speak I finally realize that I didn't imagine any of this: As much as anything can be said to be real, this is real.

Telling the story takes hours. At first Burlem keeps interrupting to ask me things, but after about half an hour of intense conversation about the university, and then even more speculation about how Burlem's books ended up in the secondhand shop (his ex-wife, he thinks, claiming the house), Lura steps in and forbids any more questions until after I've finished. At some point she gets an A4 notebook and starts writing things down in it. I get the impression that although Burlem has obviously spent more time in the Troposphere, she's the one who possibly understands how it all works. Which means I'm going to have plenty of questions for her, too. She scribbles most furiously (and has to shut Burlem up again, too) when I talk about Apollo Smintheus, and also when I get to the detail about the underground network, and how I travelled on a train of fear to get back to myself before I made the mistake that was surely going to kill me. At the point when I explain that I was able to change things in people's minds, they both seem to freeze and exchange a look, but neither of them says anything to me about it, and Lura doesn't write anything down.

At about eleven o'clock I'm almost done. My throat hurts from all the talking and the cigarettes I've smoked. My mouth feels dry; that hangover mouth you get when you've only had a couple of hours sleep. We've drunk about four pots of tea since I got here, but I haven't actually eaten anything since lunchtime and my stomach is audibly growling, although I don't feel hungry.

"We need to eat," says Lura, after my stomach makes the noise again.

"I'll phone for a curry," says Burlem.

But he waits until I finish my story before he does. The story isn't complete. I've left out the detail about fucking Patrick in the Little Chef toilets, obviously. But I haven't made it clear that the book is in the priory, either. So I'm not surprised when the first question Burlem asks is about the book.

"Where is it now?" he says. "You've got it with you, presumably."

I shake my head. "I did what you did," I say.

"What I did?"

"Yeah. I left it behind, thinking it would be safer than carrying it with me."

"Fuck" is all Burlem says before he goes to collect the food.

While he's gone I am left on my own with Lura and the dog, who has now woken up properly, stretched, slurped some water, and then come to sit on the sofa next to me. Lura hasn't said anything at all since Burlem left, and I feel I have to say something.

"What's his name?" I ask.

But I know already: Planck; presumably after the quantum physicist.

"He's called Planck," she says. Then she sighs and shakes her head. "You've had some lucky escapes," she says. "I can't believe..."

"What?"

"Oh, nothing. There's even more to the Troposphere than I thought. Although it all makes sense, of course."

"Sense?" I laugh. "Please tell me how it makes sense."

"Oh, we will," she says. "But not now. It's late."

There's a silence for a few seconds. I'm not sure Lura likes me. I scratch the dog between his ears and try to think of something simple I can say that doesn't simply amount to "Tell me whatever it is I don't know—that no one knows—about how the world works, now! Tell me what could possibly make sense of the experiences I've had, because I haven't got a clue."

"How did you come to be here?" I ask her in the end. "How did you make it so they couldn't find you?" I remember that when Burlem cut me off by walking into the church, he was still in the railway tunnel. I have no idea how he came to be here, with Lura, and how they remained undetected for so long. "How did Saul even get out of the tunnel?" I ask.

"He shifted the pile of rubble," she says. "Brick by brick. From the sound of what you've said that tunnel was unstable anyway, and I'm surprised it took another year to collapse after he disturbed it."

"Oh—you think he made it collapse, then? How weird," I say, thinking that the tunnel collapsing was the reason for everything starting: that if the tunnel hadn't collapsed then I wouldn't have got the book, or found the page. Or maybe I would; maybe I would have found those things eventually, anyway.

And I realize that someone will find the book in the priory eventually, as well.

"Anyway," she says, "he got out of the tunnel and got on a bus to anywhere. He just travelled randomly until he was far enough away to get his thoughts together. He went up to Scotland and lived in a bed-and-breakfast for a while, during which time he explored the Troposphere—and was very lucky not to get killed. He sent me a mobile phone and asked me to go into a church on a certain date, at a certain time, and said that he would phone me." She smiles. "It was a bit like being in a film. He was completely paranoid and didn't trust me at all at first, and we kept having to have these coded conversations with me standing in a church talking on a mobile phone—which did not go down well with church people at all. But we got through it. I'm retired now, as you probably know, so I wasn't tied to London when all this happened. We came down here temporarily at first and then ended up staying. It's actually my brother's place, but we have an arrangement." She shrugs. "He needed a place in London, and we've sorted out all the paperwork so we are officially renting this place from someone else entirely, under assumed names. It's complicated, but we thought it was quite solid."

"I have to ask," I say. "What is the logic behind the church detail: You know, that no one can jump into your mind if you're in a church?"

"You don't know?"

"I know hardly anything beyond what I've worked out, and what Apollo Smintheus has told me." I shrug. "I can make a guess, but..."

"What's your guess?"

"That all the prayer in a church—all the extra-charged thought and hope—somehow scrambles the signal, if that makes any sense. You know, like interference."

She smiles. "That's good. That's exactly what I think as well." Now the smile goes. "I'm assuming you know about my book?"

"No." I shake my head. But the way she says it—I realize that this is why she has a problem with me. She thinks I know her as intimately as Burlem does because I've been in his mind. She thinks there's a possibility that I know everything about her. For the second time I get the feeling that she's the wife and I'm the mistress, and she knows her husband hasn't just been screwing me; he's been telling me things about her as well. I remember when I used to have affairs with married men whose wives didn't know, and wouldn't have approved, and those marriages were always in crisis. Inevitably the guy would tell me things about his wife that I didn't want to know—and didn't feel I had any right to know. The special dinner she arranged to try and get their marriage back on track (and during which he called me on his mobile, from the toilet); the special dress she bought to try and get him interested in her again (and which he told me made her look old and fat). I shudder to remember these exchanges. I don't think I've ever felt so bad in my life as when I heard those things, and I stopped sleeping with men like that because I didn't want to be a party to anything so sad.

I want to say something to make this all right, but I can't think of anything.

"Hm" is all she says in response to my not knowing about her book.

A couple of seconds later the dog's ears prick up, and he acts as though something's about to happen. Then, two or three minutes after that, I hear the sound of Burlem's key in the lock and feel the blast of cold air as the front door opens and closes again.

The dog knew, I think. The dog knew that Burlem was almost back.

How does that work?

For the first time since all this happened, I feel my understanding of the world start to shift, as if it's only now—now that I know this is all true—that I can allow myself to start answering all the questions I have: to start adding up all the pieces of information and all my experiences. The dog knows, I realize, because we all potentially know everything about what other people are thinking and doing. We all potentially have access to one another's thoughts. I wonder properly where the Troposphere is, and what it is, now that I'm convinced it isn't just a figment of my imagination. Is it hovering less than a particle away from us, perhaps in another dimension to which we have access only some of the time? Or does it work in another way entirely? But I am suddenly sure that the moment when you catch someone's eye, or the moment you think someone's looking at you, or the moment when you think of someone and then they ring, or the moment when you start getting lost in a building you know so well because most other people in it are lost—these aren't accidents. They relate in some way to the structure of the physical world, to the fact that all our minds are as connected as everything else.

I wonder what Lura's book is about? I was lying, of course, when I said I knew nothing about it. It was sitting there in the back of Burlem's mind the whole time I was with him. Lura's Book. Lura's Book. It's important, but she hasn't taken this opportunity to tell me anything about it. I wonder what would make her trust me.

We eat vegetable curry and rice at the table with a bottle of white wine from the fridge. Planck goes back into his basket and falls asleep as we all start questioning one another on the Troposphere, and what my experiences in it could possibly mean.

"I'm intrigued by this god, Apollo Smintheus," Burlem says.

"Yeah," I say. "I thought I was going mad."

"Maybe you were," he says. "I never met any gods in the Troposphere. In fact, I've never met any other beings in the Troposphere. I didn't think it was possible."

We talk about Apollo Smintheus some more and all the questions of religion I was thinking about earlier today. It seems that neither Burlem nor Lura has thought about the Troposphere in a religious context, apart from noting the detail about the interference caused by churches. Lura seems vaguely—but only vaguely—impressed by my feminist analysis of all major religions, but Burlem seems uncertain about me lumping Buddhism in with everything else.

"Zen," he says gruffly. "Zen's different. And the Tao."

And I remember his desire for the void, tempered by his need to lose desire altogether. And that makes me think of Adam and what happened to him. I hardly know Adam, but I miss him more than I thought possible.

"We've all got our own ways of aiming for enlightenment," Lura says. "I'm writing the book, but he's meditating all the time, trying to see outside everything we already know. There's still so much..." But she doesn't finish the sentence. Instead, she yawns. "Oh. What a day."

Our conversation has meandered around so much. We've discussed Pedesis, and the possibility of time travel using people's ancestors, and Burlem has confirmed that the milky images you get in the console when you're in someone else's mind relate to all their living ancestors: That's why the mice had hundreds and he only had one (his mother). The way you can most effectively go back in time is to use living ancestors until they run out (presumably, for example, Burlem's mother has none, so, if you got to her, you'd have to jump into another person rather than pick another image from the console, and then go back as far as possible using that person's ancestors). We discussed this point for some time, as I couldn't quite see how you'd ever get beyond people who are living now. But then Lura reminded me that distance is time in the Troposphere, and that by jumping across the world using ancestors, you also go back in time, sometimes by years rather than months. When I jumped from Molly to Burlem, I was jumping from Hertfordshire to Devon, and that's what got me back to before Christmas. If Burlem had been in Scotland, I may have ended up in August or September; if he'd been in Australia, I may have gone back three or four years. If you're lucky (or if your journey is well planned), you'll eventually find living ancestors who were dead when your journey started, and each time you jump, you'll go farther back in time. It sounded like a slow process, but Burlem reminded me that the jumps themselves are very quick. He also pointed out that this is obviously what Mr. Y was doing when he died. Mr. Y is a fictional character, but Lumas isn't. Burlem made it clear that this was also how Lumas must have died, and everyone else who was "cursed" by the book. Pedesis is dangerous, just as I discovered when I did it to get to Burlem.

I've also learned that Burlem's Troposphere is indeed the Victorian city he was thinking about when I was in his mind. Lura gets a little cagey when we start comparing our personal Tropospheres. When I ask her how she experienced it, she tucks her hair behind her ear and says, simply, "Oh, a scientific matrix kind of thing. Not something anyone else could visualize, really." And then she gives Burlem a meaningful look.

"We'd better all go to bed soon," he says. "We can pick this up in the morning. There's still so much to talk about. And Lura, why don't you make use of Ariel. She may be able to help you in some way. She's better with science than I am."

"I'm really not," I say.

And Lura looks at me for a second as though she's sizing me up, and then her eyes drop as I clearly fail. Whatever Burlem thinks, we're not just going to settle down together cozily to work out a theory of the Troposphere, or whatever. Not unless I can convince her to stop disliking me.

All night I dream of Adam. In my dream he's telling me that he loves me; that he will never leave me. Dreams are so cruel sometimes. I'm never going to have that life. In fact, these shreds of life that I'm left with—I'm not sure they add up to anything very much.

Chapter Twenty-four

Saturday and Sunday pass by in the same sort of way, with haphazard discussions and my growing sense that there's a lot I don't know, and that Burlem and Lura are trying to work out when to tell me something. We punctuate each day with tea, coffee, and sandwiches, as if our lives are just one long conference. Each evening we all go into the church across the street before having our last cup of tea before bed. I get the impression that Burlem and Lura discuss me when I'm not there, and that Burlem's still trying to persuade her to trust me. They are obviously still jumpy about me being here and pretty much put me under house arrest, apart from the visits to the church. Burlem tries to explain to me about his meditation and Lura mainly avoids me. In the evenings I sit up with Burlem and try not to flirt with him. I'm not sure what is going on with the two of them, but I don't want to get in the middle of it. Every so often the phone goes, but Lura always lets the machine get it. I have the impression that they have a friend whom they've only recently fallen out with, but I don't get any more details than that.

My room is small, white, and cozy, with exposed beams and a short, fat, four-poster bed with a pink blanket over a white cotton duvet. I spend most of my time sitting on the bed, writing notes about the Troposphere. I mainly do this to keep my mind off my desperate need to go back there. But Burlem and Lura have forbidden me from going back in, at least for now. They're worried about this mission that Apollo Smintheus has in mind for me, as am I. And it's so clear that getting lost in it is a danger, although I'm sure that I can now get back anytime I want using the underground system. But Lura and Burlem seem unconvinced by this system, even though it must definitely exist. I wish they'd just tell me things directly instead of whispering in the kitchen and then stopping when I go in to make coffee. I know they want to get the book back from Faversham, but I don't know how we could ever do that.

And I'm not sure exactly how I feel about everything. I'm warm, comfortable, and well fed for the first time in ages, but in another sense my life is over. Not over, maybe, that's a bit dramatic, but everything I thought I "had"—my job, my Ph.D., my few friends, my flat, my possessions, my books—I'm pretty sure they're all gone now. And unless Lura changes her mind about me, I'm not going to be able to stay here forever.

On Sunday night I am having the same dream I have had since I got here, in which Apollo Smintheus is standing in front of me saying, "You owe me." I am awoken by the rain pounding the skylight like an industrial machine, and the clock says that it's four A.M. On Monday the sky is drum-metal gray and the morning is broken up with sudden pulses of strip-light yellow lightning. At about midday there's one crack of thunder, and then it stops raining. Burlem has the radio on for a while, and it warns of some huge storm coming, with winds of eighty miles per hour. But the storm doesn't come.

On Tuesday morning the sky is as blue and sharp as a reflection in metal. I'm thinking, Is this the calm? The eye? Lura decides to do some gardening and I just sit there smoking at the dining table while she locates her gardening gloves and goes outside without saying anything to me. Through the window I can see what looks like a falcon perching on one of the telegraph posts behind the house. I wonder if Lura's seen it. It's so beautiful; it's more like something from a book than from real life. It's more like a picture or a word than a thing. And I wonder: Does language distance us from things so much that we can't believe in them anymore? Or is it just because I've been in the Troposphere so much that I'm in the habit of looking at things like that, like the falcon, and assuming that I invented it, and that it's a metaphor for something else? I put out my cigarette. Maybe I should go and try to make peace with Lura. I haven't had any fresh air for days.

She's on her knees by one of the flower beds, turning the soil.

"Hello," I say, walking towards her. "Can I help?"

"No, it's all right," she says without looking up.

I should just go away, but I persist. "Please," I say. "Let me help for a bit?"

She sighs. "Trowels are in the shed."

I get a trowel and a piece of tarpaulin similar to the one Lura's using to kneel on. I walk over and place my tarpaulin next to hers, and start copying what she's doing. We stay like that for five minutes or so before I realize I'm going to have to start any conversation I want to have.

"I'm sorry for turning up the way I did," I say.

"Hm," she says back. The same short closing-down sound she always makes.

"And ... Look. I've been wanting to say this for a few days. I really am sorry that I went into Burlem's head to get here. I do know things about you that you probably don't want me to know and I'm so sorry I've intruded." I take a deep breath. "It's one of those problems with the Troposphere that you don't think about until it's too late and you've already done it. I mean, all my experiences in there so far have really been experimental." I think again; that's not quite true and she knows it. I have to be honest if I want to connect with her at all. "OK, I guess the one time I did use it in a deliberate way was when I wanted to find Saul..."

"Why do you call him 'Burlem' sometimes?" she asks me, still turning the earth.

"Er, I just do," I say. "I think I picked it up at the university. A lot of people there call him 'Burlem' rather than Saul."

"Surely they call him 'Professor Burlem,'" she says, frowning.

"Not the other members of staff." I shrug. "Does it bother you?"

"Yes. But I don't know why."

"I'll stop doing it. I really am sorry, you know."

We both carry on turning the earth. I find an earthworm, which I carefully pick up and move somewhere safer. Lura watches me do this, but I have no idea what she's thinking.

"What did you find out about me when you were in Saul's head?"

"Hardly anything," I say. "I know you slept together in Germany—that's the only intimate detail I do know. There were obviously a lot more details about the two of you, but remember I was just trying to find out where he was, not how he felt about anything, so I followed one set of memories rather than another."

"Hm."

"I really am sorry. Look, you're welcome to go into my head if you want, anytime you want. I've got some pretty sordid stuff in there, including some details I left out of my 'story so far' I told you the other night."

"It's OK. But thanks," she says, and goes back to turning over the reddish earth with her trowel. What I've said seems to have made no difference at all.

But then she smiles.

"I always like to garden when I've got something to turn over in my mind," she says. "It's repetitive and relaxing, don't you think?"

My God. Has she actually just started a conversation with me?

"Yes," I say. "It is, actually."

"Saul has to do everything in a 'Zen' way, at the moment. So he puts his whole being into turning the earth, if that's what he's doing. Not that he ever does the garden. But sometimes when he paints a fence, or wires a plug, you can see him doing it: giving up himself to the activity and not using it as an excuse just to think about something else."

I wonder what she's turning over in her mind. Probably how she's going to ask me to leave. I don't quite know what to say next. But I don't want the conversation to end, either. For the first time since I've been here I don't feel as though Lura despises me.

"Oh, there was another answerphone message earlier," I say.

"Ah. The writer. Again."

"The writer?"

"Yes. This is the problem I'm turning over in my mind." She sighs, and there's a long pause. "Saul tells me you know a lot about thought experiments."

"Yes," I say. "I am—or maybe I should say 'was'—doing my Ph.D. on thought experiments."

"Hm. Would you say that a story can be a thought experiment?"

"Oh yes," I say immediately. "I'd say all thought experiments are stories."

"That's interesting. Why?"

"Well, because all thought experiments take the form of a narrative. Well, the ones I understand do." I realize I'm talking to a real scientist and suddenly see I need a disclaimer. "I'm sure you can tell me about thought experiments that aren't stories. But..."

She's frowning. "No. I like the idea of thought experiments being stories. I suppose if they're not stories then they're actually hard science and not thought experiments at all. Einstein's trains ... Schrödinger's cat. Hmm."

"Yeah—they're two that I'm studying quite closely."

"Well, we'll have to talk properly about them at some point. But, for now, you agree that a thought experiment could be a story?"

"Yes, definitely. Why?"

"How about if I ran a thought experiment by you? It's concerned with the Troposphere, and although it does exist as a story—with characters and so on—I haven't actually seen the story, so I'll just tell it as a kind of story but with no characters, if that makes any sense."

It doesn't really, but I nod. "Go on. I'm intrigued."

"What have you already worked out about the Troposphere?" she says. "And I mean the very basics."

"Um," I say. "It's a place made of language."

"More specifically?"

"Well, thought," I say. "And it's made in metaphor and..."

"Thought," she repeats. "Excellent. Yes. It's a place made out of thought. So we might want to pose the question: What is thought? Would you agree?"

"Yes."

"And our experience of the Troposphere shows us that thoughts aren't just invisible, imaginary nothings. They are inscribed as soon as they happen, and in that sense they become entities. Would you agree with that?"

"Yes. I'd agree with that."

We're still turning the earth, although this bit is really done now.

"Right. So we want to consider this idea that thoughts have substance."

I remember something from Apollo Smintheus's first document.

"Thought is matter, perhaps," I say.

"Yes! Exactly. But it's hard to visualize how thoughts are matter exactly."

"Yes. I must admit that I haven't been able to see it."

Although the sky is still completely blue, a couple of raindrops fall on my face. I look up to see where they're coming from, but there aren't any clouds.

Lura smiles at me. "All right," she says. "Here's the story. The thought experiment. What would you think of the following scenario? Imagine a computer, with a vast hard drive memory. There's a program running on the computer—maybe a little like a game, with characters and locations. Now, the little characters in this program are written in binary code. Say they're part of a simulation game. You must have seen the type of thing I mean, where you create, say, a little town for them to live in and then the software generates effects like rain and droughts and wars?"

"Yeah. I know the kind of thing you mean," I say.

"All right, well, this next bit takes a leap of faith. What do you know about artificial intelligence?"

"I know that Samuel Butler was concerned that machines could become conscious as easily as humans did," I say. "That machine consciousness is as inevitable as human consciousness."

"This is interesting. Go on."

"He argued that consciousness is just another part of evolution. It's a random mutation that could happen to anything. And after all, machines are made out of the same stuff we're made out of ... And we feed machines all the time. We feed them fuel, and language..."

"Yes!" She taps the soil with her trowel. "Good. But don't jump ahead."

Since I don't know where this is going I'm not sure how I can stop myself jumping ahead by accident. But I turn over some more earth and just say, "OK, sorry. Go on."

"Imagine that some mutation happens in our computer simulation. The little characters become conscious. Now. What would their thoughts be made of?"

I visualize my laptop sitting on a desk, with this game playing out on it. I imagine what it would be like to be one of these digital, binary characters. How many dimensions would you be aware of? How would you interact with other characters? I think about what this world is made of—basically zeroes and ones—and then I realize that in this little world everything would be zeroes and ones. The little characters may not be able to see them, but everything, including their thought, would be made from the same thing.

"Their thoughts would be made from the same code their world is made from," I say to Lura. "Zeroes and ones."

"Yes, very good. Yes—if it was a contemporary silicon machine, which would obviously be coded in binary."

"So it would be up quarks and down quarks, if it was a quantum computer."

Now she smiles. "You do know something about science," she says. "Except you're not quite right. Up and down quarks are still a binary system. The whole point of quantum computing is that the quarks can be in a combination of different states, and can therefore carry out more than one calculation at once."

But I'm already feeling sick, because I think I know where this is going.

"Now tell me," she says. "The grass and trees in our binary world. What are they made from?"

"Zeroes and ones," I say.

"And the houses, and the water and the air?"

"Zeroes and ones."

"And what happens to thought in this world once it has happened? Does it disappear?"

"It gets stored on the hard drive." I pause, thinking about temporary caches and the difference between RAM and ROM. "Does it?"

"Yes. It's information rendered in zeroes and ones just like everything else in this world. So would you agree that the hard drive is expanding at the rate that these beings think?"

I think about this. I've stopped using the trowel, so I put it down and sit back on the tarpaulin. Another couple of raindrops fall from nowhere: the same invisible cloud in the sky.

"Yes?" I say. "I'm not sure about this one. It sounds like it's potentially a trick question."

"Yes. It is. The hard drive itself doesn't expand, or change, or gain mass, or anything like that. But the information on it changes. It gets written on all the time. If you thought the hard drive was just empty space to be written on, you'd think it was expanding. But if you realized that it was just information being coded so it made sense—but not more or less information altogether—then you wouldn't think it was expanding. You might argue that there is no empty space in this scenario."

"OK."

"So. What do you think so far?"

"I think I feel a bit sick."

"OK. But why?"

"Because what you say makes perfect sense. The Troposphere is like a hard drive that we wouldn't normally have access to although in theory we could, as it's on the same machine ... And. Oh shit. We're living in a computer simulation. Is that what you're saying?"

"Ah," she says. "Good. That's interesting. No. I don't believe we are living in a computer simulation. The computer is a metaphor."

"A metaphor for?"

"That's what I want you to think about for a while," she says. "You've already helped me with my conundrum about the writer. But now I want you to think about something else. In this computer simulation, if thought and matter are made of the same thing, then how is matter made?"

The rain starts coming down more heavily now, even though there are still no clouds. Lura gets up.

"Maybe it's this famous storm," she says. "Let's go in."

Once we're inside Lura goes off towards her study.

"Think about it," she says to me again.

So I do. I sit on my bed and I think it all through. I spend all day doing it: playing the thought experiment to the end with a little more detail each time. If thought and matter are the same thing, then how is matter made? I think about matter, and what it is—just quarks and electrons—and I wonder how quarks and electrons are really different from zeroes and ones. In both of these possible worlds they "make matter" in the same way. Or, at least, they are matter: The rest is just shape and perception. Or perhaps shape and perception are the same thing. The universe, just like the computer world, comprises the same amount of matter. Quarks and electrons can be combined to form anything you like in the physical world: a seed, a tree, carbon. And then things rot and get made again, out of the same stuff.

In the computer world you could make something from zeroes and ones—a pornographic picture, for example—and then you could overwrite it with something else entirely if you had the right software that let you fiddle around with the memory on the level of zeroes and ones. You could make it look as though the image had never been there: that it was unwritten space all along, or a document about a tree. But you might leave a trace; fossils, for instance, are traces. Quarks and electrons frozen in time, refusing to be broken down and made into something else.

So, how is matter made?

Later, over a dinner of mushrooms on toast, the discussion starts again.

"I told Ariel about my book," Lura says to Burlem. "Or at least that thought experiment about the computer."

"That's the only bit I really understand," he says. Then, to me: "The rest is mostly maths."

"I haven't answered your question yet," I say to Lura. "'How is matter made?'"

Burlem laughs. "That's a nice conundrum to set someone for a rainy afternoon."

The sky has been darkening all day, and by three o'clock I wasn't sure what was happening outside: whether it was night, or the storm. At about five o'clock I was making a coffee and I saw Burlem trying to entice Planck out of the door. But all the dog would do was reverse back into the house. It was the quickest way to get out of the rain, but it looked faintly comical.

"I didn't expect you to," Lura says, with a friendly smile.

"But I get that quarks and electrons are just like zeroes and ones," I say. "And it seems obvious to me now that thought is matter..." Except I have a bit of a problem with this. If thought is matter, then everything is real. But I thought that nothing was real. Derrida's difference; Baudrillard's simulacra. If thought is matter, then everything becomes real. But if you turn the equation around—if matter is actually thought—then nothing is real. Can both of these ideas be true at the same time? Can this equation work in the same way as 'energy equals mass'?"

"Although thought doesn't make more matter," Lura says, "neither thought nor matter can come from nowhere."

"No. I can see that, I think. But thought kind of ... shapes..."

"Encodes," Lura says. "Thought encodes matter."

"Which means what?" I take a sip of red wine and my hand trembles.

"When you think, you potentially change things."

I think about this, and everything she's said. I imagine the little binary people in their world where all the stuff they see around them, and all their thoughts, are made of the same thing. Presumably in this world you could create things just by thinking them. There'd be no difference between a thought of rain and rain itself. But surely that doesn't follow in this world.

"Are you saying that if I think a tree, I can make a tree?" I say to Lura, unconvinced.

"Not in this world," she says.

"But in the computer world? In the thought experiment?"

"Sort of," she says. She looks at Burlem. "She has a very good knack for simplification," she says.

"Not a skill you really need in an English department," he says. "But yes."

"Why 'sort of'?" I ask Lura. "Why can I only sort of make a tree by thinking it if I'm one of these beings?"

"Because it depends on what sort of code you're thinking in," she says. "Whether you can think in machine code or just within the software program."

"I'm having trouble with this," I say, frowning.

I can barely taste my food. I'm so aware that this is reality we're talking about: This is the room I'm in, and the chair I'm sitting on, and my mind and my dreams and everything that makes me exist. I have the bizarre sensation that if I get any of these questions wrong, things will start melting around me: that the existence of everything depends on this.

And then I think, Don't be stupid: It's just a theory.

But I've seen the evidence for it. I've been in the Troposphere.

But the Troposphere could mean anything, surely?

"Trouble?" Burlem says, laughing. "Oh, join the club."

"I mean, it's as though the whole world is turning, I don't know..."

"Upside down?" Lura says.

"Yeah. But in more dimensions than just four. I can't..." What do I want to say? I'm not sure. "So what is machine code?" I ask. "And why can't I think trees?"

She takes a sip of wine. "My whole book is about what this 'machine code' possibly is. I'm not sure myself yet. I've got my hypothesis that it exists, but I'm still looking for the mathematics that completely explains it ... I think I'm probably seventy-five percent there." She puts her wine down. "You know, of course, that in the real world you can't make something just by thinking it. You can't create a ten-pound note when you're poor, or a sandwich when you're hungry. The mind just can't do that."

"It's a shame," Burlem says.

"But we also know—or we've agreed for the time being—that thought is matter. Thought is encoded; thought never goes away. Everyone's thoughts exist in another dimension, which we are experiencing as the Troposphere."

"Yes," I say, putting my fork down.

"We know thought is matter because it is happening in a closed system, in which everything is made from matter. Just like in the computer program in our thought experiment. There's nothing in there that isn't written in code, because, well, you just can't have something on a computer that isn't written in code. Anything outside the system by definition couldn't exist within it."

I imagine my laptop again, and the little binary beings in their little world. I'm outside of their program—their world—as is the plastic case that holds the screen and the hard drive, and the computer screen itself, and the desk the laptop sits on, and the whole of this world. And the beings would never, ever be aware of those things. Even if we did decide to tell them about it—we'd have to put it into their world using their code. And then, somehow, it would be part of their world.

"But we also know that thought doesn't create more matter," Lura says.

"I can see that," I say. "The computer beings couldn't just will more RAM into existence, for example."

"Good," Lura says. "But the matter that is there can be manipulated."

Where have I heard the term "spoon-bending" recently? This is what comes into my mind, but I don't say anything. I'm not even sure spoon-bending really happens, and there don't seem to be any examples of people thinking of a goldfish, for example, and making one appear. Magicians who seem to turn silk scarves into doves don't really do it: It's just an illusion.

"I'm not sure I can see how matter is manipulated," I say. "I mean, well, maybe I can just about see how it can be..." And then my brain cartwheels around and I think I can see it all. "Hang on," I say. "Do we just see what the majority of people see? Like, I could think a tree and it wouldn't be there, but if lots of us thought a tree, that would be enough?"

"That's intriguing," says Burlem. "That's what we thought of last, before Lura started working on the book properly. But the world is not a projection of the Troposphere."

"Yes—that's very good," Lura says. "But I think it's got more to do with this idea of the machine code. Machine code is the code that makes the machine run, rather than the software. The machine code tells the software what to do. The machine code sets the rules for everything in the system: how the trees are invented in this computer-program world, for example."

"OK," I say.

Now, on my little image of my laptop I can imagine two layers of code: the stuff that makes the program and the stuff that makes the machine work. I can see that the two would be closely related, but that one—the machine code—is operating on a deeper level than the other.

"So in our world, what is written in machine code?" Lura asks me.

"Um," I think quickly. What tells our world how to work? Do we even know? "The laws of physics?"

"Yes. Excellent. And?"

"And...?"

"This is impressive," says Burlem. "It took me longer than this."

I think for a few minutes. While I'm thinking, Burlem finishes eating and tops up everyone's wine; then he clears the plates away and stacks them in the dishwasher.

"What about philosophy?" Lura prompts me. "Metaphysics?"

I nod slowly. "OK. So ... What are you saying? That some people think in this machine code?"

"Possibly," she says. "Who do you imagine would think in machine code?"

"You mean as opposed to the more 'ordinary world' kind of code?"

"Yes."

"So the code of the ordinary world is basically language, and machine code is the thoughts of ... um ... scientists? Philosophers?"

"Yes. Now think of a historical figure. Someone who would be capable of this."

I sip my wine. "Einstein?"

"Good answer. But now I've got the hardest question of all. When Einstein came up with his relativity theories, was he just describing the world as it was already or..." She raises her eyebrows and leaves a space for me to finish her sentence.

"Making it work like that," I say. "God."

"Do you see it?" Lura asks.

"I think so. You're saying that Einstein came up with relativity theory as an explanation for the world, but what he was actually doing was constructing it? So when he said that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, he wasn't observing nature's speed limit but actually setting it."

"Yes."

I roll up a cigarette for Burlem and then one for myself. I do it almost in slow motion, my brain using 99 percent of its processing power to think over what Lura is saying, and most of the remaining 1 percent just keeping me alive while I do that. There's very little left for self-destruction. But still, I manage to light my cigarette, and Burlem lights his.

"Have you ever thought just how fucked-up twentieth-century physics is?" he asks me.

"Yeah. Obviously. You know that's one of my interests."

"It's odd, don't you think," Lura says, "that Einstein found exactly what he was looking for, even though it shouldn't have made sense. It was a brilliant theory, of course, but so outlandish compared with Newtonian physics. Then Eddington went off to look at the eclipse and Einstein's predictions were proven. They keep being proven. You can't build a GPS system now without taking relativity theory into account. And even the cosmological constant, which Einstein rejected and said was his biggest mistake—even that refuses to go away completely. And then there's quantum physics..."

"Which Einstein didn't like," I say.

"Hmm. Yes. Well, what's the one main thing we know about quantum physics?"

"It's absolutely crazy?"

"Yes." She laughs. "And?"

"Um..."

"It's the study of things you shouldn't be able to see," she says. "It's the study of things no one has ever looked at, or thought about very much. And what happened?"

"They found that everything's messed up and uncertain," I say.

"Uncertain. That's the key word," she says.

I frown. "How do you mean?"

"No one had ever said what this tiny stuff should be doing," Burlem says. "So when they looked at it, they found it was doing whatever the fuck it liked."

"Oh you do paraphrase in an awkward way," Lura says. "Matter doesn't 'do what it likes.' Quantum matter just had no laws. No one had decided whether or not light was waves or particles. And then people were surprised when they found that it was both at once."

"But didn't Newton's laws apply to everything?" I say. "I mean, once they were invented."

"Ah," says Lura. Then she doesn't say anything else.

"Sorry?" I say.

"This is where it gets complicated."

"In what way?"

"Well, I'll tell you in a minute over coffee. But for a moment, think about this. There is a possibility that the quantum level is fundamental: that when you look at subatomic particles you are actually looking at the most basic parts of the physical—and mental—world. I suppose you might call them the basic building blocks. And in terms of my theory, perhaps it's not a surprise to find that on that level the electron is everywhere at once until you decide where it is—and therefore what it is. It fits the theory. Matter has to be coded before it can mean anything. And thought is what encodes matter. Thought decides where the electron is."

We move onto the sofas with a cafetière full of coffee. Lura knits as she speaks: pale green cashmere turning from something that looks like string into something that looks like the sleeve of a cardigan as the gray needles click-click-click in her lap. She explains to me the way in which she believes the laws of the physical world are constructed. She says that there was never any a priori existence: no sense that matter was anything or obeyed any laws until there was consciousness to perceive it. But, because consciousness is also made from the same matter, the two areas that we always think are distinct—the human mind, and the world of things—started working together to create, refine, and mold each other. Conscious beings started looking at things and deciding what things were and how they worked. Thus, the first fish didn't just chance upon the weed it needed to survive: It created it. And no one "found" fire by a lucky accident. Someone just had to think fire and, as long as the thought was in this "machine" code, there it was. And, for a while, things worked exactly the way everyone assumed they did. And there were no competing laws, so everything was simple. Earth did revolve around the sun, and magic did exist. But then other people came along—also people able to think in this machine code—and decided that the world worked differently. The sun became the center of something called a "solar system" and the stars stopped being the burn holes of the saints. Magic gradually faded.

We talk about chaos theory, and how butterflies suddenly acquired the power to cause hurricanes; and we talk about evolution. Lura explains her theory—part of her whole project—that once someone has thought something into being via this machine code, that theory has to survive. Some do and some don't. Newton's theory had some small glitches that were worked out in Einstein's theory. Einstein's theory was a mutation, but it was stronger. It survived.

"So knowledge or, at least, its effects are democratic?" I ask.

"Yes, but not in the way you might think from what I've just said."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's not belief that keeps things in the physical world—the Enlightenment took care of that. You can see only what can be proved. Everything else just haunts the Troposphere. This mouse god of yours must be one of many. I've been thinking about this since you got here and told us about what you'd seen. Everything's recorded in the Troposphere, of course, and if enough people believe in one thing, then the energy seems to come alive. I think that there are conscious beings in the Troposphere made out of this energy. Ghosts, gods ... And they have omniscience because we've given them that power. But they can't act in the way we can. They are not agents. Omniscience implies infinite knowledge—but not necessarily the possibility for any action. That's why, when Apollo Smintheus's cult prays to him, he has to get you to do his task for him. You see, you just can't have gods in the physical world. In the physical world you have to be able to prove things exist."

"But if Apollo Smintheus was standing right here, we'd have proved that he existed," I say.

"No. Think about it," Burlem says. "All you could prove is that you could see him. Even if you took a photograph, people would say it was a forgery."

"Whoops," I say, smiling. "I forgot all about phenomenology there and almost became an empiricist."

Burlem smiles back. "Indeed."

"And the question isn't whether or not Apollo Smintheus exists, but what existence is."

"Exactly, and, for now, Apollo Smintheus isn't consistent with the laws of physics, so he's consigned to the Troposphere. He can't exist in the physical world because he wouldn't make sense here."

"Which probably isn't a bad thing," Lura says.

"But didn't Einstein's theories go against Newtonian physics?" I say. "I mean, they were probably more against the laws of physics than Apollo Smintheus."

"Yes, but he thought them in machine code," she says. "Or, to put it another way, in mathematics. Einstein was able to think relativity into existence because he could think it into the very fabric of the universe. And of course his theories were plausible. They went with what had come before, even if they seemed counterintuitive."

I make a little gasping noise. "Mathematics. Of course." That's what machine code is made from. That's what makes the laws of physics.

"Yes."

"And that's what you see when you go into the Troposphere, isn't it?" I say.

Lura doesn't catch my eye. "Yes," she says.

But my mind is racing on.

"So what if someone who could think in this code thought about God?" I say. "I mean, didn't Einstein even say that he was trying to read the mind of God? He believed in God—so how come that didn't make God a physical being?"

"Because you can't create your own creator," Lura says simply.

"You can't create anything outside the system," Burlem says.

"But ... So how come God exists in the Troposphere? I'm still not sure I get that. I can see how an entity like Apollo Smintheus would end up there. But God with a capital 'G': He's supposed to be the creator—just like you said."

"God has other functions," Lura says. "As you pointed out the other day, God is simply a collection of people's thoughts about how we should live and what the world means. I expect that if you met God in the Troposphere he wouldn't claim to have created the whole thing. You have to sit outside something to create it. And we just don't know what's outside."

I think about Jim Lahiri's book again, and the argument I got so excited about when I was talking to Adam and Heather. I can't help thinking about those questions about the beginnings of everything. Is there a multiverse? Or is God sitting beyond the laptop; the entity that switched the whole thing on?

"What about time?" I say.

"What about it?" says Lura.

"Well, no one thinks that relativity only existed from 1905, or whenever it was. People think that there was always relativity, but no one noticed it before."

"What do you think?" says Lura.

"I'm not sure," I say. "But there does seem to be the possibility that these theories have backwards effects ... Or am I going nuts?"

"No. That's very sophisticated," says Lura. "You could give that some more thought. Of course, the other possibility is that the way the world works is always changing." She doesn't say anything else for a minute or so, and when I look at her lined face, it seems tired.

"Who's the writer you were talking about before?" I ask. "The one who keeps leaving all the messages."

"Ah," says Burlem.

"Oh," says Lura. "She's interested in my theories and she's condensed some of them into a short story. She's having it published in Nature magazine, but I wasn't sure I wanted her to. She offered to put my name on the piece, but I'm not sure I want to put my name to all of this just yet. And as for my book..."

Lura's eyes drift away from mine and settle somewhere on the table.

"What's your book called?" I ask her.

"Poststructuralist Physics," she says. Now the click-click-click noise stops. She sighs and puts her knitting in her lap. "It will never be published, of course," she says.

"Why not?" I say.

"Because there's no evidence for anything I've said tonight. There is no such thing as poststructuralist physics."

She shrugs: a small, almost imperceptible movement.

"What about the Troposphere?" I say.

"The Troposphere is going to be gone," Burlem says.

"Gone? But ... How?"

"You're going to destroy it," he says.

Chapter Twenty-five

I'm sitting on my bed with my thoughts flapping in my mind like chaotic butterflies.

Oh fuck.

Now I understand why Apollo Smintheus took a special interest in me.

So I can change things in people's minds—just like the KIDS can. I can make people like Martin Rose want to go to the toilet so badly that he leaves his stakeout. And I made Wolf refuse to tell Adam where the book was when the Project Starlight men were surely in Adam's mind, listening in. But I thought everyone could do that. I didn't think there was anything special about me. Now it turns out that there is. Lura also thinks I could probably think in machine code; that I have that potential. And that's why Apollo Smintheus wants me to seek out Abbie Lathrop and, through her, to change history. So now Burlem and Lura want me to go even farther back and convince Lumas not to write the book at all. They say I can have as long as I want to plan my journey—after all, once the book is gone then the knowledge is gone. The Project Starlight men will never find the book in the priory because the book will not be there anymore. There won't be any Project Starlight. But I am bothered by paradoxes again: They are pinning me down by my wings. If I had already done this and been successful, then I wouldn't need to go. And I don't have all the time in the world, really. Martin and Ed could come here tomorrow and blow my brains out. The fact that they're here, in this world, and they want to do this—surely that implies that I have already been unsuccessful.

Except ... I'm not sure that time works in exactly the way we all think.

But maybe I'd better not think about that too much ... I'm actually a bit scared of thinking anything, now I know what my thoughts potentially are.

So I wanted knowledge, and I got it. But did I ever want this kind of knowledge? Did I ever want to know that there is no God: that we are God? That there's not necessarily a creator or a reason? We make reason and only dream of creators: That's all we can do. But I knew this all along, right? Maybe. But how awful this is: How awful to be proved right; for someone to demonstrate to you that yes, there's no Daddy up there who's going to approve of you because you got the puzzle right. No supreme being is going to clap and give you a special place in heaven because you understood some of Heidegger. God might be up there in the Troposphere, but the Troposphere is simply our thought. And there really is nothing outside of that. Our thoughts spin quarks up and down and smear electrons into whatever we want them to be.

Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking and that every single action in the universe could be predicted—if you had something powerful enough on which to do the prediction. There's no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known. In that world I'll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes. It's what happens when you try to combine God with science. It's narrative, pure and simple. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is. And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability. But if you don't take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics and everything else that's taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will. You can decide to become rich. You can grow up to be president. Improbable, but possible.

But in this new world of poststructuralist physics I have so much free will that nothing means anything anymore.

But you believed that before, Ariel. You've read Heidegger, Derrida. You got a thrill out of it all: no absolutes. It's what you believed. Everything depends on everything else.

But I didn't want it to be true. Or, I wanted it to be true for the closed system of language in which nothing is ever absolutely true, anyway. I wanted uncertainty. But I didn't want the world to be made only of language and nothing else.

Maybe that's why Burlem's heading for the void.

And that's where I'd be going, too, if I didn't have to go into the Troposphere again, with a real possibility that I'll never come back. But I suppose that Burlem and Lura's reasoning is clear enough. If I'm going back to change Abbie Lathrop's mind for Apollo Smintheus, why not just keep going and change Lumas's mind for the human race? And of course what they said made sense. The Troposphere shouldn't be there. If enough people knew about the Troposphere, we'd have the worst possible scenario: no God—and no free will, either. People would simply be able to control other people's minds. Those with power could simply manipulate the rest of us to think what they want us to think. Any "bad" or "revolutionary" thoughts could be erased.

Yeah: like I'm going to erase the thoughts of Abbie Lathrop and Thomas E. Lumas.

Later that night, I can hardly sleep. And when I do drop off I just find I'm dreaming of Apollo Smintheus again. Most of the dream is the same as the one from the other night, with him saying, "You owe me," over and over again. But the other half of the dream is about everything he said about time travel and paradoxes. I'm asking him, "But how can I go back in time and change a world that is not already now changed by what I did?"

And he's saying, "You already have."

I get about an hour's sleep in the end.

When I get up in the morning the rain has stopped and Burlem's cooked me porridge. I'm not sure I want porridge: I think I want to smoke a lot and then go through the kitchen drawers until I find the sharpest knife, and then I want to spend a few hours alone convincing myself that I'm real and I'm human and I mean something. But in the end I just eat the porridge and then smoke one cigarette with a glass of water. Lura comes down from her study at about ten o'clock.

I'm sitting on one of the yellow sofas finishing my second cigarette of the day. The fire is dead and I flick the stub into it. Burlem is out walking Planck. Lura makes herself a cup of herbal tea and comes to sit in the armchair.

"So," she says.

I cough a little. "So," I say back.

"What a night," she says. "How do you feel?"

I look beyond her and out through the patio doors. The grass is still damp from the frost last night. I can see the patch of earth that we dug over yesterday, and it looks redder and fluffier than the rest of the garden.

"I feel completely wasted," I say. "All that thinking ... And I didn't sleep very well."

"Oh? Because of the thinking?"

"Mainly because of bad dreams," I explain. "Time-travel paradoxes."

"Ah."

"And the human foot."

She smiles and sips her tea. "The human foot?"

"Yes," I say. "No one knows exactly how it works—well, not well enough to be able to replicate one. And then there are things like junk DNA and cognitive processes, and the way quantum theory doesn't match up with gravity, but everyone thinks it must ... How does that work?"

"You may have to explain more clearly," she says. "How does what work?"

"Well, clearly no one's been able to 'think' these things into existence, but they do exist. I suppose what I'm trying to ask is how poststructuralist physics accounts for things that exist in the world without explanation, if the explanation is what creates them."

Lura's nodding. But she doesn't speak yet.

"I mean," I say, "in the scenario you've described, how is there any mystery at all?"

"Good question," she says. "Very good question."

"Is there an answer?"

She sighs. "Yes. I think so. It's interesting you were thinking about time-travel paradoxes, because..."

"What?"

"Well, all these questions are really about creation. What is a creator? What does a creator do? When does creation take place? Of course, scientists hate the word creation and creationist. Science says it is against creationism, or intelligent design—or at least, it's against them being taught alongside science, in science classes. But science is itself a form of creationism. It is the scientists, after all, who create the world." Lura sips her tea and then puts it down. "And we're so used to the idea of creation as something that happens in the beginning. First the world was created, then we were created; then things started to happen. That's the way the story usually goes. But what if it's the future that creates us, not the past?"

"Shit..." I say. "But..."

Lura laughs. "But how does that work? It doesn't; not according to classical physics."

"So ... This is connected to that question I asked last night, about thoughts having 'backwards effects,' isn't it?"

"Yes."

"So you're saying that in the future someone will come up with a theory that, for example, reconciles quantum physics and gravity, and that this theory makes the world work the way it does now? So scientists are just discovering things that have already happened?"

"Yes to the first bit, but no to the second. Einstein still created relativity by thinking it," she says, picking up her tea again and taking a sip. "But someone in the future will do the next bit, and someone else will do the bit after that, and it will all trickle down through history."

"So we're living in a world that has had infinite people in the future thinking about it already," I say.

"No. Because the future hasn't happened yet. And the future may not be infinite."

"But..."

"It's not a cause-and-effect universe anymore, Ariel. Nothing really happens before or after anything else. You could say that in some way everything happens at once."

I think of the train of fear, and the way I was able to return to myself at any point I wanted. But that was because I was moving on something that had no mass, that was able to travel infinitely fast. I was travelling on emotion, not on anything real.

But is thought real? Does thought have mass?

It must. We've already agreed that thought is matter.

Or have we? I'm still not sure about all this.

"Sorry," Lura says. "This is a lot to take in."

"No," I say. "Don't be sorry. I want to know it all now before I go back into the Troposphere. I want ... Lura?"

"Yes?"

"When—and I suppose if—I get back, the book won't exist, right?"

She nods. "I hope that's what happens."

"So you don't actually know?"

"No. I don't know what is going to happen."

"It's possible that I'll never have met you," I say. "After all, Saul will never have given his talk, and therefore never met you, and therefore never found the book, and therefore never had to run away. And the Project Starlight men won't be chasing us all and ... I won't actually even know Saul, because I met him at the conference. So I won't be doing a Ph.D. anymore and..."

"That's a cause-and-effect universe, though," Lura says. "I don't think we are living in a cause-and-effect universe."

"So what do you think will happen?"

"I think the book will go, but everything else will stay the same."

I remember Apollo Smintheus. The mice would all just dissolve into the air, I think. The world wouldn't change. No one would notice. I just don't get it. How can you go back to edit the past and expect it only to change the future a little bit?

"You think. You don't know?"

"Sometimes thinking is knowing," she says.

And then I wonder what this is. Is my last trip in the Troposphere an experiment or something less or more than that? But I have to go. I know all the reasons why. And I am glad Lura is telling me all this before I do. Presumably my thoughts won't change? I hope not. There's still so much to think about.

My stomach churns. I've made a decision. I'm going to do it this afternoon.

I tell Lura.

"Yes," she says. "I think it's the right time."

When Burlem gets back we all have another cup of tea, and they ask if I want lunch before I go, as if I were a weekend guest about to take a train back to London. I should have some lunch, but I don't have any appetite at all. I don't want to say good-bye, exactly, and it's clear that they don't want to, either. Saying good-bye would be a bit frightening, and it's not even clear that we are saying good-bye. Perhaps I will be able to find my way back, and perhaps I will still know who they are when I get here.

The black circle on the card. Perhaps I don't even need that. But I take it out of my bag anyway. And so I find myself lying on my bed just as the sun starts to fade in the sky like a dissolving tablet, wondering if I'll ever see anything in this world again. I'm sure I no longer need the liquid; so now all that remains is for me to lift the black circle up above my eyes. And I'm blurring away from here. Good-bye, I think. I didn't want to say it before. But suddenly I have to. I have to end this properly. Good-bye, Lura. Good-bye, Burlem. Good-bye...

It's nighttime in the Troposphere, as usual. I'm standing on a familiarly cluttered street, with too many edges and outsides and insides. But I can make sense of it. There are cobbles beneath my feet, but on either side of me there are great looming gray buildings set behind rows of shops, casinos, herbalists, brothels, sex shops, pawn shops, and toy shops. There's a tiny antique bookshop on the corner, and I think: Burlem. But I can't see anything at all that relates to Lura. The neon flickers everywhere. OPEN. OPEN. GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS. Some of the signs are just arrows, and when I look at them they seem to be pointing at other arrows. One of them says YOU ARE HERE. Another points to a doorway that, when I approach it, looks like the entrance to a mouse hole. Do I want to see Apollo Smintheus? I suppose I have to see him. I have to find out exactly where to find Abbie Lathrop. I walk towards the mouse hole.

And then the sky darkens.

There's movement. What's happening? I catch a glimpse of brown, and then blue. That color blue: Where have I seen it before? But I don't have too much time to speculate because the next thing that happens is that both the KIDS walk out of the mouse hole.

"Aha," says one of them, the one in the cowboy suit.

"Too fucking easy," says the other one, his blue cape moving in a nonexistent breeze.

They both giggle.

Oh God.

"Well, there's her mind. There's the gate. Let's go in and finish this job," says the first one.

"It doesn't look like everyone else's minds," says the boy in the cape. "It's all full of weeds."

"Yeah, well. Who cares, right?"

"Wait," I say.

"Wait," says the one in the cape, mimicking my voice.

"Yeah, right," says the other one. "Wait."

They giggle again.

"We never get to have any fun in here," says the one in the cape.

Shit. Shit. What do I say now?

"This is going to be the most exciting thing we've ever done" says the one in the cowboy suit. "Woo-hoo!" He makes a little whooping sound as if his parents have just told him that he can have that toy, or that they are going to the zoo, or that he can stay up late and watch the film with everyone else.

"I know what happened to you," I say. "I'm really sorry."

"Why? You didn't kill us," says the one in the cape.

"No, but..." I want to say something about how I understand; about how I think I might be one of them. But nothing comes.

"Shut up, Benjy," says the cowboy. Then, to me: "Don't try to psychoanalyze us, bitch."

The other one opens his eyes wide, and then laughs.

"OK, coming through," says the other kid. He pulls a skateboard from under his cape. "Come on, Michael."

I've got to do something. But what could I possibly do? There aren't even any weapons here. No metal bars or anything like that. Although I get the impression that those things wouldn't work so well on these two.

Where is Apollo Smintheus?

Please help me, I think.

"We've already taken care of your lover boy," says Michael, the cowboy.

The other one stifles another giggle. I don't know why he tried to hide it: It's not as if I can do anything about it.

"He's really lost his mind," says Benjy. He rotates his finger around by one of his temples. "Cuckoo. Cuckoo," he says.

Oh God. What does this mean? Did they get to Adam in the priory? I imagine them sneaking in there somehow, despite everything being closed, and finding him: creeping into his mind like deranged little goblins. What would they do then? Perhaps they tried to persuade him to come out with the book. But they didn't know the book was there. So what would their motivation have been? Just spite? Or maybe they thought he knew where I'd gone. Maybe they wanted to find that information. And then, for whatever reason, they turned his brain into spaghetti. Just as they'd promised to do to me. Just as they are now going to do to me, because there's nothing I can do to stop them.

And then I see another shape moving down the street towards us. It's a man, walking alone. At first I think it's Apollo Smintheus, but this figure isn't quite as tall. And then the shape comes closer and I realize that it's a man running.

It's Adam.

"Are you sure you succeeded with that?" I ask the boys.

And I'm grinning now. Adam's carrying two rocket launchers, one slung over each arm. Where on earth...? And then I see that he's carrying something else, too. A white paper bag with twisted edges, like a bag of old-fashioned sweets. What is happening? Am I dreaming this? No. This is real. As real as anything can be.

The KIDS turn to see what I'm looking at.

"Oh. It's the priest," says Benjy.

"Bor-ing," says Michael.

"Hello," I say, as Adam hands me one of the rocket launchers.

"Ariel," he says, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes. "At last."

"Where the ... I mean how did you get these?" I ask him.

"Oh, I met God," he says. "It's great in here, isn't it?"

"Um..."

"Well, apart from these little fuckers."

"Oh no," squeals Benjy, stamping his foot. "We got the wrong guy."

"Whoops," says Michael.

Wolf, I think for a moment. They saw me with Wolf.

"I told them you were involved with Patrick," Adam says.

"How do you know about Patrick?" I ask.

"I'm afraid I know everything," Adam says. "I'll tell you how in a moment."

He raises the rocket launcher and aims it at Michael.

"Adam," I say, aiming mine at Benjy, but more shakily.

"What?"

"We can't. They're just kids."

"Yeah," says Benjy. "It's not fair."

He begins to cry. Then Michael starts crying, too.

"You said you were going to get us some sweets," says Benjy. "But instead you're going to hurt us. You're just like all grown-ups. I hate you."

I notice they don't say kill. And I remember what Apollo Smintheus said. Nothing can be killed in the Troposphere. So how are we ever going to get rid of these kids? And why is Adam here? I don't understand anything about what's going on.

"Do you want some sweets instead?" Adam asks, lowering the gun.

Michael's lip is trembling. "Yes," he says. "Yes, please."

"Me, too," says Benjy. "Me, too."

Michael is now wringing his hands together. Benjy seems unable to stand still. He's jiggling about like a toddler who wants to go to the toilet.

"OK. Well, don't eat them all at once," says Adam.

He walks over and hands Michael the white bag.

"Share them," he says, as Michael immediately dips his hand into the bag.

"Ow, get off," says Michael, as Benjy tries to force his hand in at the same time.

"Boys," says Adam.

They both manage to take a fistful of pink, yellow, and green sweets from the bag. They stuff them into their mouths until their faces look so inflated they might burst.

"Why are you giving them sweets?" I ask Adam.

"Watch," he says.

As the boys eat the sweets, they seem to fade, slightly. At first I think I might have something in my eyes, and so I rub them. But of course your eyes can't go wrong in here. They boys really are dissolving into the landscape.

"They're disappearing," I say.

"They're on the way to God," Adam says. "The guns would have done the same thing. They're just, um..."

"Metaphors," I say. "Like everything in here."

"Yeah."

The boys have now almost completely disappeared. Another minute passes and they've gone, and all that's left is the empty white paper bag.

"What exactly is God going to do to them?" I ask.

"Free them," Adam says. "Make them properly dead."

"Can God do that?" I ask.

Adam nods. "He may not have created everything, but He's good as a manager."

I laugh. "That sounds like the kind of thing you'd read on one of those fluorescent posters they have outside churches."

"Yeah, well," says Adam, laughing, too.

And then I realize: We're together, alone, in the Troposphere. Adam is actually here. Or at least, it certainly seems that way.

"Adam," I say softly.

He walks closer to me. So much for not feeling anything in the Troposphere. The syrupy feeling intensifies to a point where it's almost uncomfortable, but only in the sense that an orgasm is uncomfortable. And everything in me seems to slow down. This doesn't feel like it would in the physical world: There's no racing pulse; no sweaty hands. My body feels like a misty landscape, melting into its sky.

"Ariel," he says.

We put the weapons down and embrace. It feels as though a million years pass, with us standing like this.

"I found the book," he whispers. "And this vial of liquid. I came to find you."

"How did you find me?" I ask. "The Project Starlight men couldn't do it. I thought I covered my tracks quite well. I..."

"Shhhh," he says, into my hair.

"Really," I say. "I have to know. Did God help you?"

"No. God doesn't approve of what we're doing."

"Then...?"

"The mouse god. Apollo Smintheus. He said he'd show me where to find you. But those boys seemed to want to tag along as well, and everywhere we went, they went, too. I thought I'd be able to do something about them before you came back in and opened up the gateway. I was almost too late."

"What do you mean?" I say. "What gateway?"

"They can only get into your mind by themselves when you're actually in here. Otherwise they have to go with Ed and Martin. You know that already, but you've probably forgotten."

"So you've been inside my mind," I say. It's not a question. I know the answer.

"Yes. But you bounced me out when you first went into the church. But I just jumped back in when you left the church. I just waited in the Troposphere in between."

"How did you find the book?" I ask.

"I dreamed it," he says. "I dreamed everything."

"What?" I say. "What do you mean?"

"Just that," he says. "I dreamed you putting it in the bookcase, and I dreamed you accidentally letting the vial roll out of your bag under the bed. Later, when I was in your mind, I saw it all again, like déjà vu."

"Oh...," I say. I'm not exactly sure what I want to say next. "So..."

I don't want to let go of Adam, but I do.

"Have you seen Apollo Smintheus?" he asks me.

"No," I say.

"I don't know what happened to him. He was supposed to be watching out for those KIDS."

"His mouse hole is just there," I say, and we walk towards it.

And inside me two things are happening. One is that my whole body feels like a smile. I'm not alone in here anymore. I can actually talk to someone. Not just that: The someone I can talk to is Adam, the person I thought I'd never see again, and the person I think I love. But the smile keeps warping into a question mark. And I can't bear to ask, or even think about it. How long has he been in here?

Chapter Twenty-six

Apollo Smintheus is tied to a chair, and he looks very pissed off.

"Oh, thank you," he says, when we untie him.

He stands up, sways a little, and then sits back down again.

"Oh," he says. "Those little brutes."

"They've gone now," I say. "Well, I think they have."

"And you two are reunited," he says.

I'm wondering whether Apollo Smintheus has told Adam about the dangers of staying in here too long: whether he's shown him a screen of himself in the physical world, like he did with me. Where is Adam's body? Is it still in the priory? I wonder if anyone has found him and saved him. I remember those images of Apollo Smintheus in my dreams: You owe me. You owe me. And I wonder if it was Apollo Smintheus who got into Adam's dreams, and why he wanted him to come in here as well.

It's a horrible thought, but for a second I imagine that it's a punishment: because I took my time coming back; because I haven't yet completed his mission.

"Where's the address?" I ask him. "I need to know how to get to Abbie Lathrop."

"Don't you want coffee first?" he asks.

"No. I just want to go. I'm going to see Adam back to the physical world, and then I'm going to go straight off and do this. I don't have much time."

Apollo Smintheus seems to narrow his eyes slightly.

But Adam's quicker to speak. "I'm coming with you," he says to me.

"You can't," I say. "Don't you know...?"

"Know what?"

I look at Apollo Smintheus, who doesn't seem to want to catch my eye. Then I look at Adam again. His big eyes are as warm and clear as a midsummer morning. They're so deep, I think again. But here they don't look like fossils from the past, they just look like a promise of the future.

But what do his eyes look like in the physical world? I think.

"You're not supposed to stay in here too long," I say.

"Did I not mention that...?" Apollo Smintheus says.

Adam looks at me. "I've been in your mind, Ariel," he says. "And, on the way back to your mind, Saul Burlem's and Lura's. I know everything."

"But..."

His eyes leave mine. "I wasn't going to talk about this now."

"Talk about what?"

"I think it's already too late. There was a very big storm yesterday. Apollo Smintheus said that when you get weather in the Troposphere..." But I'm not listening properly. Why didn't Apollo Smintheus save Adam? Why didn't he tell him to go back?

Sadness in here feels like a warm flannel. But it's still sadness; the warm flannel is over my face and I can't breathe properly.

"It can't be too late! Apollo Smintheus must have told you about the trains?"

"I did," says Apollo Smintheus. "Well, sort of."

"He told me there was a way I could get back to where I'd started. But I didn't want to go back there. I wanted to find you."

"But Adam..."

"What?"

"Adam, you can't ... You didn't..."

"I think I'll leave you two to it now," says Apollo Smintheus. "Here's that address for Abbie Lathrop." He produces a slim white business card, very similar to the one he first left for me: the one I found on the street after I'd done Pedesis for the first time. I take the card and look at it. When I look up, he's gone. I'm here on my own with Adam.

"I don't like it in here that much," says Adam. "Let's go outside."

There is no outside, I think. Not anymore.

But I follow him down the jumbled-up street, anyway. We pass a car showroom and a small haberdashery. I want to cry but it doesn't work. I don't think you can cry in here. But raindrops start falling softly from somewhere above me, and when I look up, the night sky seems wet and glossy.

We end up in a meadow by a river. The bright moon seems to touch every part of the black water, and moves through the tall yellow grass like gentle fingers. There are benches that face the water, and Adam sits on one of them. I sit on one, too. The wood isn't cold. Like everything else in here, it doesn't seem to have a temperature. Tiny drops of rain still fall from the sky, but they don't feel wet.

"Ariel," says Adam, taking my hand.

"Why did you do this?" I ask him.

"I wanted to know...," he says.

"Know what?"

He shrugs. "Just to know. I couldn't go back."

"But ... Why did you want to find me?"

"I just had to. And I missed you."

I breathe in for a long time. Then I sigh. "I missed you, too. But..."

"What?"

"Shit. Adam. Why?"

He shrugs again. "Apollo Smintheus told me you needed me."

"I would have found you when I got out. I'd..."

Adam looks away from me and out onto the river. An owl hoots.

"Fuck," I say. "So it's all too late. Nothing means anything anymore. Everything's..."

"Don't say it," Adam says. "Just come with me."

He takes my hand and we stand up. We walk down the path, past thousands of trees that seem to reach up into heaven. Moonlight strobes on their leaves, and bats flicker in and out of the trees like shadow puppets against the black of the sky. Soon we come to a clearing: a circle of thick, soft grass, surrounded by trees. We walk into the clearing and Adam immediately pulls me towards him.

"Ariel," he says. And he kisses me.

But what's happening? This kiss is a million kisses. This kiss is every kiss. Our lips seem to press together with the force of ten thousand hurricanes, and when his tongue meets mine it feels like the softest electricity: a million-volt shock happening in slow motion, one electron at a time, where each electron is the size of the sun.

And in the sky, there's lightning.

The rain starts to hammer the ground, but I can't feel it.

Adam is pulling me down onto the grass.

As I close my eyes I can see that there are tornadoes everywhere, but I can't even feel a breeze. All my clothes have gone. I'm so naked it's as if I don't even have skin. Adam's taut body moves down onto mine. And when he enters me it's as if I'm being turned inside out, and the whole world is penetrating me; and that means I contain everything.

Afterwards we both lie there on the ground, shaking. I know everything about Adam now, and he knows everything about me.

"Oh...," says Adam.

"Yeah."

"Oh ... Is that...?"

"No."

"You don't know what I was going to ask."

"Yes I do. You were going to ask if that's what sex is like usually."

He takes my hand. "Well, something like that."

"And the answer is no."

"But we'd never done it before," he says, and I can see him smiling in the moonlight.

I imagine tornadoes around the Shrine of St. Jude. But maybe he's right.

I put my head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around me. I feel so small and warm, like I'm an acorn he's holding in the palm of his hand. But at the same time I feel as if I'm the one holding on to him. He only exists here now. And if I do this and then go back... Don't think, Ariel. Just have this moment. But if there's no Troposphere, I won't be able to see Adam ever again. Perhaps I'll go back and find that I don't even know who Adam is. Perhaps I won't miss him, because I'll never know I knew him.

But if the book is the only thing that disappears? If I make it so it was never written?

Then maybe I did know Adam. Maybe he did move into my office. Maybe the railway tunnel did collapse. But not because of Burlem. And maybe I became a Ph.D. student, anyway. Maybe Burlem still did the conference in Greenwich, but on another subject. Maybe he talked about Samuel Butler. I would have gone to that. We still would have talked and we still would have got pissed together and we still wouldn't have had sex and everything would be more or less the same.

I can sort of see how that might work.

But Adam would still be dead.

Perhaps I'd wake up from a scary dream about men chasing me and there'd be a knock at the door, and a policeman would be telling me that he just passed away in his sleep. A tragic mystery. But don't be stupid. No policeman would come and tell me anything. They'd tell his relatives, and I wouldn't even be invited to the funeral because no one would have known we were involved. Perhaps I'd read about it in the university newsletter, or in one of those "Sad news" e-mails.

I sit up.

"Where are you going?" Adam asks sleepily.

"I've got to ... Well, basically, I'm going to 1900," I say.

"And I'm coming, too."

"Are you sure you want to?"

Adam sits up and shakes his head. "We've just shared the most amazing experience that I've ever had," he says. "And I'm not leaving you. Not ever." He pauses. "Not until you have to go back."

I don't know what to say next. Until I have to go back. I didn't have any lunch. Who knows how much time I've got? You can only use the underground system if you are alive. But does it even matter now whether I am alive or dead? I really don't know.

"So what do you think? Should we aim for America and then go back in time?" Adam asks. "Or the other way around?"

"Hmm?"

We're walking hand in hand back towards town, the moon racing us down the river and winning. The way I feel with him now is hard to describe. It feels as if we've already grown old together. I know, already, that we're going to die together.

But he's already dead.

"Pedesis," he says. "How shall we do it?"

"I think we're going to have to go back and forwards around the world in order to jump the time," I say. "We can aim for Massachusetts later. In fact, maybe we should be aiming for one of Abbie Lathrop's descendants and then carefully jumping backwards from there. I'm not actually sure what would happen if we missed her. Say we jumped back ten years too far or something. You can't exactly go forwards in time here—well, you can, but it has to be in real time. We'd be stuck in Massachusetts for ten years."

Adam sighs. "I think you know more than me about doing this."

"I'm not sure. I mean, I managed to find Saul Burlem, but only because I found out about his daughter and found her in the physical world. I don't really know how to approach this problem. It's over a hundred years. It's huge."

We walk through a gate and then the river goes off to the left while we walk towards the right, past some old boat-building sheds towards the city.

I frown. "Surely you know as much as I do about this?" I say.

"Why?"

"You've been in my mind. You must know everything."

"I'm not sure I do know everything," he says. "Your mind is very complicated. Everything I know about you ... It's real and unreal all at once. No ... That's not a very good description. It feels ghostly in some way. As if I thought I was there—I thought I was you—but now it's just a dream. I remember it all, but it doesn't make sense yet. That's the only way I can describe it."

I think about the moment when he penetrated me in the clearing and how I knew then that what we were doing wasn't physical. It was as if I was the void and he was everything real, and the sensation of him entering me was like the largest presence filling the smallest absence. Our minds were making love, and in the moment when I came I saw his whole life as if I was him and I was dying.

I felt the humiliation of my father's belt.

I knew what it was to be hungry.

I walked in bare feet over brown, dusty earth.

I kept worms as a science project, but really I thought of them as my pets.

My father smashed up my wormery when he was drunk.

My mother never said anything.

(They're both dead and I don't miss them; I miss what could have been.)

Those hot, wet evenings when my cousins would stay over.

The ghost stories that frightened me.

The little bell I would ring during Mass, when I was an altar server.

The cold echoey church, and the way it comforted me because the violence in the Bible was on such a large scale that it made my father's actions seem small. I inverted my life, so what was real became unreal, and everything that was said in church was the truth and everything else was a lie.

My father never saying he was proud of me, even though I joined the church for him, because it was the only thing I could see that meant something to him, the man who didn't like rugby or cricket, who said that sports were for "poofters" and arts for "nonces" and school didn't prepare you for the real world and that men should work and pray and do nothing else. The excessive alcohol consumption was somehow never factored into his philosophy of life.

The night I told my cousins about the Holy Ghost, to scare them.

And on another occasion I told them all they'd go to hell.

When I decided to go into the seminary for all the wrong reasons.

The morning my father discovered me in bed with Marty, my cousin.

The hollow look in his eyes when he looked at me after that.

Trying to make myself holy. Blank. Blank. Blank.

Adult life: I'm trying to be a father for everyone...

But I look at women. I try masturbation but I hate myself.

I try self-flagellation. It just makes me feel more aroused.

When the priest from the village rapes my sister I feel as though I did it.

My father abandons the church.

My father is God now.

I am going to eliminate all desire from my life.

(...)

I know him, but I don't know it all: I wasn't connected to his mind for long enough. I don't know what's in the gaps. There's still an eternity of knowledge of him that I don't have. And I want it now as much as I want to breathe.

We're in the city again now, walking towards the place where Apollo Smintheus's mouse hole was. It isn't there anymore, but the street is still exactly the same apart from that. This was where I emerged into the Troposphere from Burlem and Lura's house. All I'd have to do to get back to the physical world would be to carry on walking. I could go back and tell Burlem and Lura that I simply failed. Then Adam could live in the Troposphere and I could come and visit him.

But that's not possible. That would be the same as only having him as a memory.

"Why don't you hate me?" I say, even though I already know the answer.

"What do you mean?"

He's holding my hand so tightly that it might break. I don't care.

"Well, you know everything now. All the sex. All the ... everything."

"I understand it all, though," he says. "I know you."

"Yeah. I know what you mean." We stop outside a pawnshop. I'm not sure why. Then I see the café glowing somewhere inside it. It's the dimensional problem again.

"Shall we have coffee before we go?" Adam asks.

"Troposphere coffee," I say. "How can I refuse?"

We sit at a table outside, and after a couple of tries we realize that all you have to do is think coffee for it to appear. Well, actually it takes a bit more effort than that. You have to think coffee and believe it will appear, and then it does.

"Why did you come looking for me?" I ask. "The last time I saw you I really pissed you off; I could see that. I shouldn't have said..."

"It doesn't matter."

"Maybe not. But why?"

"Would it be stupid to say that I thought I'd fallen in love with you?"

I look down on the table. "Um..."

"Sorry. I'm not that good with words. Well, I am good with words, but not these sorts of words. Oh, that actually does sound stupid. Why did I fall in love with you? On reflection, it wasn't a great move—well, objectively speaking. But..." He sighs. "I couldn't help it." Now he runs his hands through his hair. "Oh. I can't explain."

"It's OK," I say. "I don't understand why you feel that way but..."

"What?"

"I was going to say I'm glad you do. But I'm not sure. You'd be alive if it wasn't for me—and The End of Mr. Y."

"Yeah. But." He closes his eyes and then opens them again. "I wouldn't have this." He opens his hands as if he's holding the world, but there's nothing in them. He just means that I should look around and see what he would be holding, if his hands could hold ideas, and metaphors, and multidimensional buildings.

"Why do you see the same thing I see?" I ask.

"Hmm?"

"You see the same thing I see. The same Troposphere. I thought this was the inside of my mind?"

"It is."

"Then..."

"I died inside your mind."

"Oh." I get that Troposphere pain, briefly, like a dull blade cutting me up inside, slow and dirty. I can't think about this. "What was your Troposphere like?"

"Very similar. A city. But it was daytime. There were more parks. But it did have a graffiti problem that yours doesn't have."

"It was daytime here once as well," I say. "I don't know what happened to that."

"Oh well. I like night. It's romantic."

"Like that meadow and the river," I say. "That space was very romantic. But I'm not sure those came from my mind. It's funny..."

He tips his head over to one side for a second. I think we both know what happened when we made love by the river. His mind is inside me. "Hmm. Yeah. Both our minds at once. And all the minds in the world are in here with us ... We could do and see anything."

"Adam..." I reach for his hand across the table. "I want..."

But that sounds wrong here. This isn't a place for wanting.

"What?"

"You. But wanting sounds wrong. I wish we were still in that meadow..."

"Mmm. Why don't we go back?"

"No. I owe Apollo Smintheus. I'd be dead if it wasn't for him."

"We'll do his mission, and then Lura's mission and then..."

"Yeah." And then. "OK." I finish my coffee. "Let's go."

Adam finishes the last of his coffee.

"Mice," he says, suddenly.

"What?"

"Why don't we use mice?"

"For what? Oh ... I see. Go back to Abbie Lathrop using mice. Wouldn't that take ages? I mean to get back a hundred years using Pedesis we'd really need to be crossing continents every few jumps. Remember that time is distance in the Troposphere. The more distance we can cover in the physical world, the more time we can jump through in here."

As I say the phrase I feel something like déjà vu. That expression: Time is distance in the Troposphere. I keep hearing it and I keep saying it, but I don't know what it means. The Troposphere is made from thoughts. Distance in the Troposphere is just the arrangement of thoughts. What do I already know?

Distance = time.

Matter = thought.

So what if there's another equation to add:

Thought = time?

Then, I guess, thought really is everything. And it makes sense: Time isn't measured in anything other than thought. The only thing that separates today from yesterday is thought.

"What are you thinking?" Adam asks.

I laugh. He can see what I'm thinking: It's all around him.

"What?"

"I'll tell you on the way," I say.

"Hang on. We don't even know where we're going yet."

"Oh. Yes. You're right. OK—do you understand about the distance thing?"

"Yeah. I think so. If I'm in someone's head and I can see all their ancestors, I can jump to any of them. If one of them lives in Norfolk, and I'm in Kent, I'll go back maybe a couple of weeks at the same time as I do the jump. But if one of them lives in Africa and I'm in Kent I could maybe go back a couple of years."

"That's right," I say. "So maybe we find a well-travelled family to go back through."

"Look up," Adam says.

I do. I can see the black sky hanging there like something I just clicked on, with the moon like a big digital button. But its light is still real, draped over the buildings and the street. Just beneath the sky I can see the gray tower blocks that seem to be everywhere in the Troposphere, just rising out of the ground and pointing upwards.

"What am I looking at?" I ask.

"The tower blocks," he says. "Where the animals live."

"Why do the animals live in tower blocks?"

"I don't know: This is your metaphor."

"Oh. I suppose I wouldn't think of them as shops. People are shops. People are part of an economy in a much more direct way..." I shake my head. "Oh, I don't know."

"Well, let's find some mice."

"But the time ...?"

"We'll see how far we have to jump before we get into a lab mouse, and then it should be just millisecond jumps all the way back to Abbie Lathrop, surely?"

"I don't think all lab mice are descended from her stock," I say. "I can't remember what Apollo Smintheus said. Damn."

Console? It comes up.

"Can you see that, too?" I ask Adam.

"Yeah," he says.

"Hmm. I wonder if it's possible to send messages on this thing?"

But we don't have to. There's the broken sound of a small engine struggling to fire, and then a red scooter comes around the corner.

"Good plan," says Apollo Smintheus, getting off. "Mice. I like it."

"So where do we start?"

"I'll take you to a descendant. But that's all I can do."

I want to say thanks, except that I'm doing this for him, anyway.

But I do owe him.

"Thanks," I say.

We all walk towards an office block. There's an entry phone, but Apollo Smintheus manages to get us buzzed in by saying something I don't understand in that unfamiliar language of his. While we walk up a set of concrete stairs, I try to plan this, but there isn't too much time. But surely what Adam said is right. Apollo Smintheus said before that all of these mice are inbred. We should be able to go back to Abbie Lathrop directly. We should ... Apollo Smintheus has stopped outside a door. And Adam is opening it.

You now have one choice...

You ... I... We're walking quickly over bare floorboards and our claws are going click-click-click as we move. It's like the sound of Lura's knitting needles, but in a much larger, more bare space.

"Adam?" I say.

"Yeah."

"I don't think we're a lab mouse."

"I know."

I become aware of the mouse registering our voices—or, actually, only my voice—and I immediately know that we shouldn't communicate with each other like this. The mouse... I can hear sounds in my mind and I try to run away from them. Faster, along the wood. I haven't eaten for several hours and I remember that if I run down here and then follow my own scent through the large gap in the wall I will probably find something.

Console!

It appears. I can see lots of images. Most of them are moving, but one is still.

"I'm going to let you do all the choosing," Adam says. "I'm not even going to look."

"OK. But shhh. I think we're disturbing the mouse."

"Sorry."

Voices, voices. I can hear a person but I can't see her. I remember another time when I heard voices like this and there was pain. And then hands on my back, but hands gloved with something that wasn't shiny and smooth, and then sickening movement in the dark, and then freedom: Something I had never known before.

This new voice sounds like that one, a little. But all voices are danger.

I fix my mind on the static image in the console. Something tells me that this could be the lab animal. The mouse we're in now was freed. I can sense that from his memories. But...

We switch. And...

You now have one choice.

You ... I can hear something muffled and distant.

"No!" It's Adam screaming. "Ariel, no..."

But I can't hear him because I am screaming, too. But I can't even hear that properly because the pain stops me registering anything very much. I want to die....I don't know what death is, but there's something in my mind that does, and understands that I should be able to move and that there shouldn't be metal spikes in my eyes, that if they weren't there I would have less pain in my head, and maybe I'd be able to see. What is seeing? The world is a black slab and I have never known anything apart from this. Each day it takes an effort to draw air into my lungs, and that's what I spend my life doing, just trying to breathe....

"Jump again," Adam's saying. "Oh God..."

The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before.

The console is still there, faintly.

I don't think I've got any legs. I don't think I have ever walked.

Everything is black. I pick an image from the console: any image.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We are standing at the entrance to a maze. A new world! How exciting. Maybe this is finally going to be the way out. I've been down this passage before. And this one. I can smell the food at the end. It's the same stuff again, but it keeps me alive, and it keeps me doing this. I'm only halfway down an unfamiliar passage when a gloved hand picks me up, and the feeling of the material against my fur smells the same as the walls of my world, and all my life I have been comforted by these smells. Now I am being placed down again: my feet touching the glass. Where's my reward? This is the wrong tank. Where's the sawdust? This doesn't smell like my tank. I can see the same symbols on the ground (and which I can now read, and which say HappiMat™) but something is terribly wrong. Fear pierces me like the needles my carers use on me every day. My brothers and sisters are lying around me, but they're not trying to fight me or mount me. They smell different. I walk over and look at them. I nuzzle one of them with my nose: He's cold. They are all just lying there like the wet cloths our carers sometimes leave in the tanks when they have finished wiping off some of the smell. I walk over and sniff them.... They're not right. They're... Ow! Get off. Another gloved hand takes hold of me, but this one isn't gentle....

"Ariel!"

"Sorry."

We jump.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We're being injected again. I don't know what is worse: the sensation of the cold, sharp needle going in, or the sensation of it coming out again. Once it's in I want it out, but once it's out I feel dizzy, and I can't make my nest properly and ... I don't actually care about my nest. I feel something warm and wet creeping down my legs. I just want to sleep. My nest smells sour now but I need to sleep. I can't even be bothered to lick myself clean.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We can't breathe because of all the smoke. I can't move my head.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We are flying through the air and then landing with an awkward bump, and then flying again. My friend is flying as well, and another mouse I haven't seen before, and all around us people are laughing; although I can't understand the language, something in my mind can hear the carers saying, "Stop juggling the mice, Wesley." I am very dizzy and I want to go back in my tank.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We can't understand why this keeps happening. I keep making my nest in exactly the way I like it (the way my mother taught me), and then I find it's gone. The hand takes it away. And then the hand gives me more nesting material and I start building again. Every night I sleep on bare glass, despite all the nests I have made.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We can't sleep with these lights on all the time.

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We

You now have one choice.

You ... I...

You now have one choice.

You...

You now have one

You now have

You now

You

You

You

You

You

We're now jumping so fast that it feels like a fluid journey, just as Mr. Y described in the book. It takes a lot of concentration, although it is hard to concentrate when you're essentially surfing on a wave of pain, fear, humiliation—and the constant simple desire for a warm, quiet nest. This is a wave of death: a wave of dead black bodies and dead white bodies and gloved hands and bony fingers and the pain of the needle and the pain of the tumors and the blindness and trying to lick off your own blood when it's still pouring out of you, and being left with your legs and back broken in a pile of other broken bodies and still thinking that there'll be food at the end, and that the carers will put you back in your tank just as they always do after something bad happens.

While I surf, Adam tries to locate details.

Most of the labs have calendars on the walls.

And I notice that as we go back the lights become dimmer and the tanks become smaller. There are no more HappiMats. We hear sirens and explosions, and we travel through labs that all smell of metal and gunpowder. But each tiny jump is a new kind of pain. By the time we reach 1908 I have bled thousands of pints of blood and vomited and pissed myself and fallen asleep in my own shit, and each time—every moment—I have just wanted to crawl into my nest, because something I am born with tells me it's good and comfortable in my nest, but all the time I have known that there's something not right about my existence. I either don't have a nest, or someone has taken it away, or I simply know that there shouldn't be glass walls around it.

We slow down as the calendars start showing 1907, 1906, 1905....

And then there she is. She's lifting our friend out of a box full of sawdust.

In the console the black mouse she is holding is blurred.

And we jump. We're in.

Chapter Twenty-seven

You now have one choice.

You ... I... We are taking one of the best mice—one of the black ones—and putting it in a box. Does it need sawdust? No, it's not going far, and the dumb animal probably wouldn't take any notice, anyway. Everyone knows that mice don't feel. They don't have a soul, as my friend Dr. Duncan MacDougall will prove just as soon as his experiment in Mass. General Hospital is conducted. The human soul weighs something: He will prove that. Animals do not have souls to be weighed. The mice squeak when I pinch them but it's just a physical reaction. They have no real minds. And the creature shouldn't get used to luxuries, anyway. There won't be much comfort where it is going. But if the scientists like this one, then I feel sure they will order more. Will sawdust make the mouse look better, perhaps? Like a little black chocolate in a box? I can't decide. I take another look inside. The dumb thing is quivering in the corner as though a cat is after it. But it does appear pathetic there on the bare wood of the box. I'll add some sawdust, and then I will get changed.

This is going to make my fortune. Can it? I'm darned unsure that anything I do will ever go quite right, but with God's will, we all just carry on—the pioneer spirit, just like Mama said. What am I going to wear? I think.... My most fancy formal skirt and that black shawl, although I don't want to look like a widow in mourning. In that case it should probably be the green jacket.

I'll tell him I can supply him with all the mice he needs for his experiments. And then they'll earn their keep at last. The waltzing mice—what a disaster! Why did nobody want the waltzing mice? I thought they'd be exactly the kind of thing that children would adore: little mice that danced around. But then that awful woman pointed out that there was something wrong with them: that they danced because of an ear defect. Well, it didn't take a genius to work out that there was something wrong with mice that danced instead of walked—but it was fun. Why didn't the children love them?

It sure is difficult working with fancy mice. It was worse working with poultry. Was it easier working with the children in the school? I can hardly remember. No, now I come to think of it, that was the worst of all. Being a schoolteacher was the worst of all the dead-end paths in my life. The children did have minds, and that made a difference, somehow.

I look at mouse number 57, twitching in his cage. He'll be the next to go.

I think I am a good mouse breeder.

I want to be rich....

"Adam?"

Who is Adam?

"She can hear us."

"I know. Stupid bitch."

Oh my. Oh my. I'm hearing voices. Well, one voice.

"Let the mice go," says Adam.

"I don't think she can hear you. Let me do it. Open all the boxes, Abbie Lathrop, and let the mice go."

Oh my. I feel a little faint. I'll just sit down for a moment. But...

"Let the mice go. You don't know what you're doing. You have no idea of the pain you're causing by your actions. Let the mice go."

Adam is being a little kinder than I feel, but she can't hear him: I'm the one they can hear. I'm the one who can change minds. Of course, now we're in this woman's mind we understand exactly why she's doing this. But that doesn't make it right, and it's going to take a lot more than a little bit of empathy for a lonely, miserable woman to cancel out the crushing waves of torture we had to surf to get here.

"Do you know what happens in a lab, Abbie?" I ask her, inside her head.

"Oh, shut up." I clap my hands over my ears. "Go away. Demons!"

"Let the mice free and we will go away. Otherwise we will stay here forever, telling you what a worthless piece of shit..."

"Ariel!"

"Do it for God, Miss Lathrop."

"You're not a demon?"

"We are not demons. We're your conscience."

"My conscience?"

"Let the mice go. Let the mice go. Let the mice go."

And then Abbie Lathrop gets up and, with a shaking hand, re-leases the wooden catches on all the cages.

That could have been more subtle, but it worked.

The console is still up. I look at the Quit button and then we're out on the Troposphere. Adam and I fall into each other's arms immediately, knowing we don't have to say anything about the experience we've just had. I feel as though something has been lifted from me because I don't owe Apollo Smintheus anything anymore. But the weight of what I know about suffering makes that lifted weight feel like a speck of dust I have just brushed off myself. And I still feel haunted: not by Apollo Smintheus, of course. Something has replaced that, but I'm not sure what it is.

The Troposphere looks exactly the same as usual, except that when I bring up the map in the console we seem to be thousands and thousands of miles from where we started. There's something different about the map now and I realize what it is: There are little yellow circles dotted here and there, and I understand that these represent train stations. These are the way I could get out of here, if that was what I wanted to do.

We only have to get back to the early 1890s to find Lumas, and we're already in 1900. We cross from Massachusetts into New York via a travelling salesman, and then we find a newspaper editor whose grandfather still lives in England. Once we're in his mind, we don't have to make too many more jumps to get to London in 1894, a year after The End of Mr. Y was published. We make the next jumps quite steadily. First we cover most of the time and then we do the last of the distance, working our way across London until we are standing outside Lumas's publishing house. And the person whose mind we are inside is a Mr. Henry Bellington, age twenty-two. He is holding a thick manuscript under his arm.

We've agreed not to talk when we are inside people's minds, so I am left to make my own impressions of the things around me. The first thing I notice about Victorian London is how wonderfully quiet it is. Mr. Bellington doesn't agree. He finds it chokingly oppressive, with the beggars and thieves and all the thick black smoke. But then he isn't used to a world of air traffic, car engines, mobile phones, and the constant thick drone of electricity in the background.

Bellington is shown into the publishing house.

And then it's only two jumps into the mind of Lumas's editor.

I only need his address. Do I know it from memory? Yes I do.

And then it's out of the building via a pigeon on a window ledge, and then into a hansom cab with a young accountant, and then off again once we're on the Strand. And then I simply hop from person to person until I'm standing outside Lumas's front door. But the people whose minds I am inside don't want to stop and after I've jumped a couple of times simply with the purpose of standing still, I choose Quit in the console and end up on the Troposphere again with Adam.

"That was good," he says.

I look around. My mind has done something odd—and rather tacky—to this part of the Troposphere. Although it still feels like a futuristic city, this district is like the film set for a Hollywood film that needs to briefly depict 1890s London. Everything seems to have the volume turned up. Abandoned hansom cabs lie everywhere, just as in Burlem's version of the Troposphere, but these seem hastily drawn, as if I want them here but don't really know what they look like. There's a Dickensian fog everywhere, although I've never properly read Dickens, so it only seems to halfheartedly hang over everything, set in an uncertain state somewhere between actual fog and coal dust and the smoke from all the London chimneys. There's also a pennyfarthing leaning against some wrought-iron railings.

The street is cobbled and all the buildings are made out of red brick. There are lots of shops here, all with ornately designed frontispieces. On one side of the street they seem more familiar than on the other. There's something called the Musical Bank, and a vegetarian restaurant, among various other things. I recognize these buildings: They're from stories and novels I've read. The Musical Bank shouldn't be in London, though: It's from Erewhon. But the vegetarian restaurant is from Conan Doyle's The Red-Headed League. The other side of the street has shops with just as extravagantly designed signs, but these are places I don't recognize. There's an ironmonger, a jeweller, a bank, a tobacconist, and a bookshop. Farther down on the fictional side of the road is a pub that's glowing in the console in the same way that Apollo Smintheus's mouse holes glow, and all the various coffee shops. I've never seen a pub on the Troposphere before.

I point it out to Adam.

"Shall we take a break before doing Lumas?" I say.

He shrugs. "OK."

But I'm stalling for a reason, and I think he knows what that reason is. Once I convince Lumas not to write The End of Mr. Y, everything is going to change. And I'm not even sure I want to change Lumas's mind.

The pub doesn't look that different inside from the dives I used to drink in when I was a student in Oxford, or even from places I've gone on a Sunday afternoon in London. The place is done out in bottle green and brown, with a long curved wooden bar, and plush green seats. All the fixtures and fittings seem to be familiar, except that there are oil lamps instead of electric lights, and the tables seem more polished. There is no one behind the bar, and there are no customers, although there are half-finished drinks on one of the tables, along with a book of matches, a packet of playing cards, and what looks like a manuscript for a book. What's that all about?

Adam and I sit down at a table in the corner.

"If we think of alcohol, do you think some will appear?" Adam asks.

"Let's try it," I say.

A couple of minutes later we have a small glass bottle of vodka and two glasses.

"Were you thinking of vodka?" Adam asks.

"Yes," I say. "How about you?"

"Yes. It's my 'trauma' drink."

I laugh. "Mine, too. I thought yours would be Communion wine."

"No. I've discovered vodka since then. It's the only thing my father refused to drink, which gives it a special sort of appeal."

"Yeah." I nod and look down onto the table.

"I'll open it then," he says. He picks up the bottle. "Ow, it's cold."

"Good," I say.

He pours a glass for each of us. And when I put mine to my lips I find it smells of bison grass: my favorite sort of vodka. I knock it back in one gulp. I'm trying to drink away the mice, and I'm trying to drink away what's happened to Adam, and most of all I'm trying to drink away the responsibility of being here, and being able to change things. But I'm not sure that Troposphere alcohol actually gets you pissed. Mind you, I do feel a little more relaxed. I pour another glass and drink it slowly while Adam keeps sipping his first one.

"I can't stand this," I say.

"Ariel?" he says. He reaches for my hand across the table. "What is it?"

I sigh, as though all the air is leaving my body. "Can't you see it?"

"See what?"

"The mice ... What we've just done for those mice. We should do that for everything. We could go and prevent the Holocaust. We could stop the atom bomb from being invented. We could..."

"Ariel."

"What?"

"We can't edit the world. We can't just go and rewrite it, as if it was just a draft of a book we weren't happy with."

"Why not?"

"Well, aren't you here to stop the possibility of that? Lura and Burlem sent you back here to take the book away so that people wouldn't even have the option of doing that. It's important. It's important that people can't change history."

"I know. That's why I'm not sure about changing Lumas's mind," I say, drinking more of the vodka. Amazingly, it is working, and the syrupy feeling intensifies the more of it I drink. "I mean, who made me God? I shouldn't get to decide any of this. But since I have been put in this position, and I do get to decide, I want to go and erase Hitler."

"But you know you can't."

"Do I?"

"Yes. Think about it. If Hitler were in your position, he'd erase something else. If the pope were in your position, he'd edit the world differently again. You've got to close the loophole that lets people do this."

"What if I know I'm right?"

"Come on. I know your mind. You can never know you're right."

"Hitler thought he was right," I say. "But everyone agrees that he wasn't."

"Of course he wasn't right," Adam says. "I'm not just saying that every opinion is as valid as every other..."

"Moral relativism," I say. "It's a trap."

"Yes, but you must still realize that you can't decide. We can't decide. It's not up to us. History has to make itself. And it probably will anyway, whatever we do. In erasing Hitler, we could just open the door for someone worse. I'm not even sure that what we've already done will have actually changed anything. Abbie Lathrop could decide to just get some more mice. If she doesn't, someone else will. We've helped those mice, but not all mice."

I drink more vodka. "I'm glad you're here," I say. Then I realize what I've just said. "I mean with me. I'm not glad you're here in the way you are." I put my glass down. "Adam?"

"What?"

"What do you think will happen to the Troposphere once I've been into Lumas's mind and stopped him from writing the book?"

"I don't know."

"I don't want you to disappear."

"Even if I do, it's worth it."

"Is it?"

"Yes. Now, we should hurry up and do this. You'll need to get back."

I don't say anything.

"Ariel?"

"Yes, I know. I just want to..." I get up.

"Where are you going?"

"Just over here."

I walk over to the table and look at the manuscript on the other table. Just as I thought, the title on the front is handwritten, and it says The End of Mr. Y. I turn away and walk out through the doors, with Adam following me.

"Will you come in with me?" I ask him.

"Of course," he says.

That way, I think, there's less possibility of him disappearing once I've done what I have to do.

We walk to the bookshop down the street, and I look in the window. There are various Samuel Butler novels there, as well as Zoonomia. I know who is behind the door, I just have to actually open it. I can't think about it anymore. I'm here now, and I know I'm not going to decide not to do this, so I may as well just do it now. I kiss Adam before we walk to the door and I open it and go in.

You now have one choice

You ... I ... We are sitting at the old desk in the draughty sitting room, writing, as usual. This book ... I have to write it; I have to finish it. Is it possible that people who do not write can ever understand quite how this feels? I have set poor Mr. Y going like a top, and now I have to keep him spinning until he reaches his end. And then I have to stop him spinning and put him back in the toy chest, limp with death. Oh, what a cruel God I would make! Can I have him live? No, don't be ridiculous, Tom. To have him live would break all the rules of tragedy, and more than that: It would not be the truth. So Mr. Y will die, and he will die by my hand. And then... And then.

My hand trembles when I think of that. And then, of course, I must die as well.

I have made the most solemn oath, with myself as a witness, that I will not visit the Troposphere again until this novel is completed. But when I go back, I am never coming out again. This cough will be the end of me otherwise; I understand what the doctor told me. As well as that—I want to be free of my right leg and these eyes. Of course, I am also cursed to suffer the most grievous impecuniosity, and I have known for many years that I shall never fuck again. Oh, when will this book end! Each time I dip my pen into this ink bottle (the sixth this month) I wonder if this will be the last bottle of ink I shall use and if this will be the last pen nib I wear out, and if so—in both cases—I wonder if I should frame the damn things or burn them. I am now obsessed with endings: the ending of this novel, and the ending of my own life. Can I be content now that I have a title? Perhaps. The End of Mr. Y has a pleasing double meaning, although I am convinced that most reviewers will be far too dull to notice anything like meaning and, if they review my book at all, will simply reference that awful business with Darwin.

Oh, I feel weary. This lamp oil smells toxic.

Perhaps I should just toss the whole book in the fire.

What am I thinking?

I can hear the coarse clip-clop of hooves outside, as men younger than I take to the clubs for an evening of entertainment and cunt-sucking. But mine is a more lofty purpose. Oh, it is so very cold in here, and I have only a little more coal.

When I began this long, arduous composition, I admit that I was seeking revenge. I desired that every man should hold the knowledge that I had been given. For I am Mr. Y—in spirit, if not in precise detail, and I, too, paid all the money I had in the world for another taste of this medicine that has since become my most demanding mistress. The man who sold it to me will have nothing of value once I have completed my book.

And then I shall end my life, just after I have ended the life of Mr. Y.

But ... What thoughts are these? Am I now to have a crisis of conscience? Am I now, when the whole novel is more than seven-eighths complete, to wonder what the results of its publication will be? Oh, curse these introspective nights. But now that I can see the narrative taking shape on the page I wonder: Will others try the recipe as I have? And how many will die that I may get my revenge? And... No! This is an absurd thought. But it insists on petitioning me, anyway. What would happen if those who read my book not only discover the Troposphere, but find some way to alter it?

I will burn the book.

No! No ... Not my book.

My hands are someone else's as they grasp my most precious manuscript and, with me as their unwilling assistant, toss the pages into the fire. The warmth is brief but intense as all two hundred pages crackle and pop. The fire cares not what is ink and what is white space. The book is gone.

What have I done?

What have I done?

I fall to my knees and begin to weep.

Quit.

Back in the Troposphere, it has started to rain.

"I wanted to spend so much more time with him," I say to Adam.

"No. Look at the weather. You need to get to the station."

The night sky looks smeared, as if it were a windscreen with all the night and all the rain happening behind it.

Adam calls up the console.

"There's a train station just around this corner," he says. "Hurry."

But I am not moving. I am not following him as he starts walking.

"Adam," I say to his back.

"Come on."

"Adam."

He turns to face me, water dripping down his face. "What?"

"I'm not going back."

"Ariel..."

"There's nothing you can say to change my mind. I don't want to go back."

"But you've got your life to live. You heard what Lura said—you've got the potential to become the kind of thinker who can change the world. You could be the next Derrida, or ... anything you want."

"But I know what I want."

"I'll always be here. I'll always be in your dreams," he says.

The rain is bouncing off the pavement like tears on a table.

"That's not enough," I say. "That's not enough in so many ways."

There's a crack of thunder in the sky. I think this may be the end for me.

"Ariel!"

Adam has to shout now because the rain is so loud. Lightning fissures the sky, ripping it open so that more rain and darkness can fall out. I can hardly see in front of me, but I can feel Adam's hands on my arms. I can feel him pressing me against the wall and kissing me hard.

"You have to go," he says.

"Don't stop," I say. "I want to be making love to you when it ends."

He pauses. Nothing is happening except for the rain falling down.

"Adam, please," I say. "I can't get what I want outside of here, I know that. And I also understand that this is the curse. But I want the knowledge I can find in here. I want us to go to the very end of this together. I want us to go back as far as we can go, to find the edge of the Troposphere. I want to know how it all started, and what consciousness is. I'm staying."

The thunder stamps all over the made-up sky as Adam and I sink to the ground, our clothes melting off by themselves. But I can feel the rain on my face and dripping in my hair. This time, I can feel the rain.

And this time when he enters me I black out.

But when I wake up, the sun is shining.