Chapter Seven The Orange Tree
Seven
The Orange Tree
He’d already had something to eat and some proper attention to his wound, and he felt a lot better.
The villa was rented by the Brytish Embassy from its owner, a Syrian diamond merchant, and was often used to put up visitors or newly arrived staff before they could find a place of their own.
Timur Ghazarian had taken Malcolm there and arranged it all with the embassy officials; the economic attaché would be coming to see him later that afternoon, and would no doubt have some interesting questions to answer.
So Malcolm sat in his long chair under the orange tree, with the sunshine golden on the pages of his file and the leaves rustling quietly overhead, and considered what he might say to the attaché.
Part of the problem was that the task Oakley Street had sent him there to do wasn’t economic so much as philosophical, and the diplomatic service hadn’t yet seen fit to appoint any officers to the post of philosophical attaché; Malcolm would have to do the best he could.
He’d been trying to make notes as he went along, but the paper in the file was annoyingly shiny and his pencil slid over it without leaving much of a mark.
He felt strange, passive, calm, almost indifferent.
It was a long time since he’d felt like simply sitting still; perhaps you needed a special gift to do it without restlessness; or perhaps it was something to do with the oceanic feeling of wide, unforced attention he found himself paying to the garden, the distant sounds of traffic, the light playing on his chair.
No doubt it was partly due to the medication they’d given him.
He put the file back on the little rosewood table beside him, and picked up the stone again.
It was a long oval in shape, about the length of his palm and as thick as the tip of his little finger, a dull greenish-black with no iridescence; it was smooth, as if with long wear, the edges worn down thinner than the center.
It was very hard; he’d tested it with his pocketknife, and hadn’t made a mark.
It felt a little heavier than it looked.
Because one surface was not at all shiny, but a smooth and inviting matte, the idea occurred to him to try the pencil on it.
It worked beautifully; he’d forgotten the pleasure of using a sharp pencil on a surface that resisted the line without impeding it.
He remembered who had pointed this out to him first: it was Mr. Palmer, the art teacher at his elementary school, who’d shown him how much more satisfactory it was to draw with a sharp pencil on paper with a slight tooth than with a blunt one on paper that was glazed like porcelain.
“Feel it,” he’d said. “Educate your fingers as well as your brain.”
So Malcolm was perfectly at home in the world of the senses.
And when he touched the stone with his pencil-point, sharpened only a few minutes before, he recognized the coming-together of the right tool and the right material with a little sigh of satisfaction.
But why had Glenys Godwin sent it to him?
Timur Ghazarian had known nothing more about it.
Malcolm drew a curved line, and then on impulse added a series of zigzag markings along it like the scintillating scotoma, his personal aurora, the spangled ring.
When he’d done that, he wrote his name underneath, and then he had the shock of his life.
The spangled ring gently vanished as if sinking into the surface of the stone. Then his name disappeared in the same way, and some new words appeared in a handwriting he recognized:
Polstead? Is that you? GG
Glenys Godwin…
This was impossible. He blinked and shook his head, as if he was trying to wake up from a daydream; but there were the words, and that was the way she signed her initials.
Chief? he wrote.
Yes. Where are you?
Aleppo. Villa Edessa. Where is Oakley Street?
Oakley Street is in Hemel Hempstead.
That made him pause. Then he wrote: So romantic.
The answer came at once: There worketh a spell.
And he replied: Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel.
Good. Tell me what the Magisterium’s doing.
Malcolm wrote down everything he’d observed, including what he’d seen at the Thuringia Potash building, which took some time. As he wrote, the words a sentence or two before faded into the stone, leaving room to write more.
Finally he wrote: And what in the world is this stone? Can anyone else read it?
I have an identical one—there are two of them. It’s a resonating lodestone. They only communicate with each other. Now, why won’t you obey orders? What the hell are you doing in Aleppo?
Recovering from being shot in the hip. I’m going further east.
“Sir, Mr. Polstead, sir, there is a visitor to see you.”
It was the servant who looked after the place. His leather slippers made no noise on the flagstones.
“Who is it, Ali?”
“He would not give a name, sir. He looks not respectable. If you like, I will stay nearby while you talk.”
“Thank you. No need to stay nearby. I’ll call if I need to.”
“Sir.”
The servant withdrew. Malcolm wrote: Visitor, more later, and laid the stone upside down on the papers beside him, and then on second thought laid a piece of paper on top of the stone.
He looked up as the visitor arrived. Ali showed him into the garden and withdrew without a word.
“I am Abdel Ionides, dragoman, interpreter, guide, factotum,” the visitor said. “And I hope that you are Mr. Polstead.”
“I am Malcolm Polstead. Good morning. What can I do for you, Mr. Ionides? Please, do sit down.”
Malcolm indicated another chair. Ionides was intriguing: his clothes were shabby and tattered, almost those of a beggar, but his bearing was easy and confident, and his heavily scarred face expressed a quick and subtle intelligence.
He moved the chair a little into the shade and sat down.
“I heard your name,” he said, “from a young man who is determined to kill you. But there is something strange here, because he referred to you as Mr. Matthew Polstead. And from another source I heard your name as Mr. Malcolm Polstead, and now you yourself say Malcolm. Which is the correct name, sir? Is there another English gentleman with a similar name?”
“Malcolm is correct. And your young man must be Olivier Bonneville.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Where is he now? Do you know?”
“No. I last saw him near one of the dead cities to the west of Aleppo.”
“The one called al-Khan al-Azraq?”
“It has other names, but that is the one, yes. I had a brief conversation with him in which I learned your name, incorrectly as it now seems, and I persuaded him not to kill the person I was guiding towards Aleppo. He might be still in the desert, or he might have arrived in this city; I don’t know. ”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“It was not difficult.”
“Why did he want to kill the person you were guiding?”
“In order to get hold of something she had. He is an arrogant young man full of passionate desire for vengeance, which he calls justice.”
“Yes, I believe that. And you came here just to warn me about him?”
“No, not only, Mr. Polstead. I came also to ask you about a particular problem. It concerns the Rusakov field and its associated particle. Dust, of course.”
Asta opened her eyes. She had been lying on a flagstone in the sun, seemingly fast asleep, but now her red-gold fur was anbaric with attention, and Ionides’s gecko daemon reacted in a similar way: she ran from his shoulder down his arm and then sprang from his hand to the table.
Asta leapt up to join her there, and they touched noses cautiously.
“Why do you think I can tell you anything about that?” said Malcolm. “It’s a matter of physics, and I’m an historian.”
“I know you were involved in the transfer of some documents and papers concerning the Rusakov matters.”
“ ‘Involved in the transfer’…” Malcolm had to smile. “You could put it like that. In fact, I stole them, but that was a very long time ago. I’ve never been professionally involved with that field of research. What’s your connection with it?”
“Until ten years ago, I was a professor of mathematics at the University of Alexandria, and I was closely involved in the study of the Rusakov field. My colleagues and I made some discoveries that came to the notice of the authorities, and we were commanded to stop. But we continued, and the institute I directed was forcibly closed. My enemies in the university administration concocted a scandal, entirely false, and made it impossible for me to continue in any academic field. Since then I have lived as a dragoman, guiding, translating, arranging things for my clients. Sometimes a beggar, sometimes a thief. The world forces us into these roles, and we have to play them as well as we can.”
“Tell me about your discoveries about the Rusakov field.”
“Thought experiments only, for the last ten years. At Alexandria, I was studying variations in the field strength. The gravitational field, the anbaromagnetic field, they vary with distance. We all know that. This field, the Rusakov field, seemed to be indifferent to distance. There was a minimum strength that remained the same no matter how far from the source—”
“The source? What’s the source, in this case?”
“This is where the danger begins. This is where it becomes forbidden. The Rusakov field is related closely to human consciousness. When it varies, it does so not because of distance but because of the attention of a human observer. The equations are hard to follow, but the implication is that the Rusakov field permeates everything in the universe. There is consciousness everywhere. Not all the same kind of consciousness in every part, but something it would be hard to call anything else. And that was what the authorities objected to.”
“Of course they would. But in this case, which authorities do you mean?”