Omega

“Personally I don’t buy it,” she said. “To me, it’s too profligate, it doesn’t have any utility. So anything could and has happened—so what, if you’re never going to be in a position to know one way or the other? I don’t see how it’s open to falsification like the best theories. I also think it flouts the principle of Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is the best.”

“There could be stuff we don’t yet know about,” I offered.

“Things beyond our ken,” she said in a portentously doomy voice. “Well, no doubt there are. And always will be.” She paused for a moment. “So what about you, professor? Do you think it’s a runner?”

“I don’t know,” I said hastily. “I’m just the layman here.”

“You’re still entitled to an opinion.”

“I’ve no idea,” I insisted. “Really.”

I don’t know whether I sounded agitated, but she laid her palm on my forehead.

“Some of the best scientific minds have been arguing about quantum interpretations for decades,” she told me. “The jury’s still out. For one thing we don’t really understand how the fuzziness at sub-atomic level translates itself into the actualities of the world we live in. It’s slithery, non-intuitive stuff. Maybe, if you go deep enough, the universe just isn’t designed to be comprehensible to the human mind.”

I thought about it. “Fair enough. Though somewhere there could be another version of yourself saying something quite different.”

“Touché.” She removed her hand and eyed me with curiosity. “You look dead worried.”

“Do I?” I manufactured a laugh. “It was just something I read in the paper.”

She must have suspected that there was more to it than that, but she didn’t press me.

“It doesn’t pay to obsess too much about it,” she told me. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Would it change your life if you knew?”

THIRTY-ONE

“Please wait here, major,” the MP said.

He withdrew, closing the heavy oaken door behind him. Owain lingered for a moment before crossing the lobby to an administrative area.

I didn’t want to be with him. At first I resisted, trying to wrench myself back to my own world. Then it occurred to me that if Owain was active here, he could not be doing anything there. When I occupied him he remained alert to his surroundings; when he occupied me, I was seemingly absent in both worlds. Which meant that perversely I was spared his intrusions when I shared his life.

He perched himself on a stool close to a television that was playing unheeded in one corner. It was the BBC News-24 channel, showing Carl Legr in a meeting with the American chargé d’affaires in Lisbon. The volume was turned down low, but Owain gathered that the discussions had centred on the disputed territorial waters around the Azores. The picture switched to the Chancellor, who was shown giving a speech to a large audience in which he expressed his concern about unprovoked American incursions in the Guianas and Australian territorial waters. His tone was one of measured exasperation. Now there were shots of USAF overflies of the Alliance launch complex in French Guiana, and Nemesis-class submarines that were said to be conducting provocative manoeuvres in the Torres Strait.

The door opened and the MP came out. Owain was on his feet in an instant.

“You can go in, sir,” he was told.

Owain entered the anteroom. It was furnished with antique dressers and upholstered chairs with elegant cabriole legs. The walls were crammed with a variety of paintings from Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” to a 1940s portrait of a tank commander pictured in the turret of his Comet, done in the Documentary Realist style of the period. Owain knew this only because his uncle had told him as much: he had little appreciation of art.

Owain was five floors down in an eastern annex of the War Office where Sir Gruffydd had his private quarters. Bare subterranean tunnels connected it directly to both the Admiralty and the MoD, wide enough to accommodate vehicles in the event of an emergency. By contrast the offices and apartment rooms were fully carpeted and lavishly furnished with items removed for safekeeping from galleries, museums and private houses. Had it not been for the absence of windows, Owain could have imagined himself inside some ancient stately home.

There was a gilded mirror above one of the dressers, folded regimental flags crossed above it. Owain saw that his face looked gaunt, his cheeks sunken. He’d made himself stop at a canteen on the way: porridge laced with currants, followed by a slab of forces-issue fruitcake that sat fermenting in his stomach.