‘Hail, fellow! Well met!’

‘Good heavens! Another soul. The first I’ve encountered, ever, in this place.’

‘I’m sorry – am I disturbing you?’

‘No, no. Well, yes, but that’s no bad thing. One can get rather too self-sufficient here. Are you…recent?’

‘A couple of weeks, I suppose. Started out with regular visits, then gradually moved in.  A second home, I suppose you’d call it. How about you?’

‘Like yourself. Started coming around three years ago. Now I enjoy a sort of dual nationality. I feel equally at home here as I do in the old place. I’m sorry – I haven’t introduced myself. Konder delta.’

‘Medivanus beta.’

‘Beta! How interesting! Your purpose must be almost contemporary. Have you completed?’

The other laughed. No, my purpose is as old as the hills. I was completely overlooked for generations. My sponsor stumbled upon me not two years back. He keeps his cards pretty close to his chest – hence the beta.’

‘I’m sure there’ll be others.’

They gazed out across the green and featureless landscape. ‘It reminds me of a golf course,’ said Medivanus.

‘Without the men in absurd knitwear,’ added Konder.

‘Or the country of the Telly Tubbies.’

‘What is the Telly Tubbies?’

‘It’s a dream. A rolling one.’

‘Good or bad?’

Medivanus smiled. ‘Oh, wonderful, I think. It contains a inexhaustible wealth of stories, yet much remains constant. I always find that reassuring.’

Konder nodded. ‘Repetition is so important.’

Medivanus glanced at him for any sign of patronage. ‘It is the sturdy branch that hangs low over the rapids.’

‘Just so,’ said Konder with sincerity.

Again they surveyed the bland, grassy hillocks and shallow depressions that stretched away beneath the neutral skies.

‘It won’t stay this way, of course,’ observed Konder. ‘It’s already changed significantly since I arrived. I can see forms and features beginning to emerge.’

‘That must be fascinating – to witness it from scratch.’

‘I suppose it is. Slow, though. A bit like watching grass grow.’

‘A lot like it in this case, I should imagine,’ said Medivanus and they laughed.

‘Still,’ said Konder, ‘I expect it’ll buck up, now you’ve arrived.’

‘Really? That hadn’t occurred to me. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it – I’m going to have a wander about. Perhaps we’ll meet up later?’

‘Perhaps. Our host tends to minimize me during the afternoon. I’ll be around early evening though.’

‘I’ll make a point of dropping by. It’s funny, I seem to be mostly minimized in the mornings. Never mind, it’ll give me something to look forward to at the end of the day. So long, Konder gamma.’

‘So long, Medivanus beta. Nice to meet you.’

*******

2:55pm

Alex Shearer gazed from a window of his Oxford consulting rooms. As always, he found the view utterly seductive, almost hypnotic. The Gothic obsession had created an architecture as convoluted and sculptural as a brain, as complicated and secretive as the mediaeval mind.

Over time, dire need and bitter experience, dogma and epiphany, piety and alchemy had chiselled the intricate physiology of the city. Now it lay all revealed before him, as if upon a vivisectionist’s secret slab, and he was thrilled by its impossible complexity.

His reverie was interrupted by the desk intercom. ‘Professor Shearer, Miss Pavlou is here.’

He turned reluctantly and resumed his seat behind his desk – a thick slab of bottle glass in which were encapsulated the skeletons of small fish and amphibians.

Laura Pavlou was by any standards beautiful. Her Anglo-Cypriot parentage had endowed her with a happy coincidence of dark eyes and golden hair. Her long, sensuous limbs and wide mouth were immediately suggestive of a passionate nature, but there was about her an air of reserve and indifference that was almost masculine. Not for the first time did the psychoneurologist reflect that physical grace is not necessarily concomitant with physical attraction.

‘Please take a seat, Miss Pavlou. Wherever you like.  Help yourself to water.’  His patient lowered herself conditionally upon the rim of an award-winning, comfortless chair. ‘How have you been?’

‘Well, thank you. Busy. I spend most days in the library – either the Bodleian, or up in Town.’

‘And the book? Going well?’

For a moment, a kind of passion did ignite her eyes. ‘Yes, I think so. When I began, I was worried I wouldn’t have enough material. Now I’m wondering how I’m going to pare it all down to a hundred thousand words.’

‘That’s the best kind of problem to have.’ There was a pause. She knew what was coming. ‘Any more voices?’

‘There is only ever one,’ she replied carefully. ‘And he’s still with me.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Frightened, sometimes. Of course. Confused. ‘But…’

‘Yes?’

Laura Pavlou sat even further forward on the design icon. ‘At first, I thought I was going mad. Schizophrenic.’

‘I know you did.  That’s why you came here.’

‘But I don’t any more. I really do believe he’s real. I don’t know how, I can’t begin to understand the science of it, the medicine. But the man who speaks to me is Klaus Konder.’

‘How can that be?’

‘How can it not be? He tells me things about himself, about his work, that I simply couldn’t know otherwise.’

‘You’re his biographer,’ Shearer pointed out. ‘You probably know more about him than anyone else on the planet.’

She shook her head.  ‘Not these things. I take meticulous notes -  I’m obsessive about it, about acknowledging my sources, cross-referencing my information. I know precisely how I know everything, even the minutest details. Except for the things he tells me. I try to corroborate what he says and mostly I can’t.  That’s how I know I couldn’t have learned them elsewhere.’

‘If you can’t corroborate them,’ Shearer said gently, ‘how do you know they’re true?’ He noticed that her knuckles were white as they gripped the arms of the chair.

‘Because…I just do. When he gives me some new thing – fact, insight, revelation - it’s like the missing piece of a puzzle. It fits exactly into my picture of him and provides an explanation or a motive for his behaviour. Even when he’s at his most opaque.’

Shearer observed her quietly for a few moments. ‘Then who exactly is writing the book? Is it a biography or an autobiography?’

‘We’re writing it together. God knows, I’m working myself into the ground on this thing. He’s not going to get all the credit. But not many biographers have the benefit of posthumous contributions from their subject.’

‘What is it, particularly, that draws you to him?’

She nodded; she had expected this and prepared for it. ‘It’s as though he knows the answers to questions we don’t even have the vocabulary to express. In the composition of a single frame or his choice of perspective, he seems to allude to the most occult aspects of our condition – to the most tantalising mysteries that lie at the core of our existence. He somehow understands that to address the essence of life directly is impossible: it can only be depicted obliquely, out of the corner of the lens.

‘But he achieves this with such slight and dexterity, it is as though he were guided and informed by some superhuman agency. In fact, he once wrote that he felt like a human radio receiver, programmed to interpret revelations from across time.’      

‘You said the voice frightened you, yet you seem to be relating to it in quite an intimate way.’ 

‘I’m getting better,’ she admitted. ‘It’s only when I fight against it that I get scared. If I try to deny the reality of him, then I have to accept that I’m insane. There is no middle ground. And thinking you’re mad is the most frightening place of all. Because you can’t even trust your own analysis of your situation. There’s a landslide roaring past you, but the ground you’re standing on could be moving, too. You have no way of telling. No reference points.’

‘No corroboration, you could say,’ added Shearer, casually.

She looked at him sharply, but continued. ‘But once you accept the impossible – that somehow the man you’re writing about is communicating directly with you from beyond the grave – then it’s surprising how you learn to work with it. And after all, he hasn’t tried to harm me. I’m not at all sure he could, even if he wanted to.

‘Maybe it’s like ghosts. People who’ve seen them say they cease to be frightening after a while. Once you get to know them.’

Magdalen clock chimed the quarter. One advantage of an Oxford practice was that you never need risk being caught by a patient, looking at your watch. ‘So. How can I help you? Or perhaps you don’t need my help any more?’ Which was a little disingenuous of him: her body language clearly underlined her continuing anxiety.

Eventually, she said, ‘I’m not sure. I think there is one thing that might help, but I’m not exactly sure why.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I want you to know him, too. I need to share him with someone. I’d feel safer. Less alone.’

Shearer pondered this suggestion for a while. Then he replied, ‘If I were your GP, or a specialist treating you for some physical ailment, I would be in dereliction of my duty if I did not learn all I could about your condition and your symptoms – real or imagined.
Therefore, I feel obliged to apply the same rule to a psychological condition.’

‘Gift.’

‘Phenomenon.’

‘Thank you.’

‘See you tomorrow. Same time.’

But Laura Pavlou dropped by later the same day with a manila folder bulging with press cuttings and Internet downloads relating to the life and work of Pieter Konder, screenwriter and film director, b. Tanganyika 1925, d. Berlin 1999.  Shearer’s heart sank momentarily at the sheer bulk of the material. But being of a naturally inquiring nature, he quickly immersed himself in the contortions of Konder’s wilful and contrary personality.

*******

‘Medivanus beta!’

‘Ah! There you are. Sorry about last evening. I was tied up in the old place. An unforeseen complication.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘No, no. My sponsor is extraordinarily…intense. He can be very demanding, suddenly, right out of the blue.’

‘The way I see it, our lives can only be as rich and rewarding as our sponsors’. If we were to resent their foibles and their eccentricities, we would be undermining those qualities in our own lives that we value most.’

‘Nicely put, Konder gamma. Very perceptive.’ Then his attention was drawn by some activity out on the grassland, a mile or two distant. ‘I see what you mean about the changing landscape.’

Konder squinted into the setting sun as it emerged from behind a towering mass of purple cloud. A double rainbow overarched the nave of a great minster church that now crowned the brow of a low hill. A ragged army of workers struggled to haul a pair of mighty beams skyward on a primitive rope hoist. ‘I wager they’ll have completed it by this time tomorrow. And over there, at the head of the valley, they’re laying the foundations for some kind of fort or castle.’

‘So they are! What industry!’

‘We live in an amazing age, Medivanus. Everything is possible. It is as though we were electrified by some vast, invisible generator of creative energy buried deep beneath the land.  We have broken down the bars that once segregated our imaginations from our accomplishments. Now we see our boldest hypotheses rise in stone, all in the time between two sunsets.’

*******

10:20am

‘I have conducted research in this field for twenty-five years. My entire career. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Not to me, not to anyone I have ever worked with.’

Shearer stared at his window where the hailstones flattened themselves, slithered down the glass. ‘Does it frighten you?’

Courier didn’t answer straight away. ‘It’s difficult. I was going to say I don’t believe in the supernatural. But of course I do – I’m a Christian. What I mean is, I don’t recognise a twilight world populated by disembodied entities who occasionally pop up and spook us out of mere mischief.

‘On the other hand, I do believe in voices in heads. I believe they’re a symptom of mental dysfunction. And that does frighten me. My mind is my life, like an athlete’s legs or a painter’s eye. I would rather be dead than mad.’

‘I don’t believe you’re mad,’ said Shearer. ‘You’re experiencing a phenomenon that’s less unusual than you think.’ He smiled. ‘After all, there are enough such voices around to pay for this consulting suite.’

Courier ignored the levity. ‘Millions die of malaria. That doesn’t make it a trivial complaint.’

‘Not a valid comparison. Far from your internal voice being a sign of dysfunction, I see it as evidence of the brain’s limitless potential. Your brain’s, actually:  I believe this order of creativity signals an unusually powerful intellect’

‘Creativity?’ barked Courier. ‘Nonsense. I hear a voice that can’t be there – the voice of a visionary and prophet, a coracle martyr  who drowned fifteen hundred years ago. Either it’s authentic, in which case I am merely some sort of trans-temporal human radio receiver, or I’m suffering from a delusion. Neither alternative answers to any definition of creativity that I know of.’

‘Ah, but there’s a third possibility.’ Shearer leaned forwards, suddenly intense. ‘I believe that you have so immersed yourself in your prophet Medivanus that you have created, as it were, a working model of him.’

Courier grunted and shook his head.

‘Hear me out, Neville. By your research, you were trying to build a picture of the man. Well, you succeeded. Your deductions were so insightful, your assumptions so accurate, that they have fused together to create a virtual Medivanus. One so internally consistent that he is an entirely credible, rounded, conscious entity in his own right.’

‘Conscious? Careful, Shearer, you’re verging on blasphemy! At best, you make me sound like Frankenstein, stitching together monsters in the attic. At worst, you’re setting me up as God Almighty!’

Shearer rose and walked to the window. The squall had passed and a double rainbow soared triumphantly over Magdalen tower. ‘Perhaps conscious isn’t the right word, although I can’t think of a better one. Do you know about the Actors’ School? Lee Strasburg? The idea was that you immersed yourself so completely in your part that to all intents and purposes, you became your character.  So when the plot demanded a response from you, it was bound to be an appropriate one. Method actors were often amazed by their own performances – they seemed to come from nowhere.’

‘I don’t see…’

‘Your image of Medivanus is so faithful, he is able to fill in the parts that you haven’t. He can predict what he would do – or in this case, say – in any set of circumstances you choose to apply to him. Now I don’t know if that constitutes consciousness. It certainly looks like it from the outside. It’s even got you, its originator, wondering whether it’s real. In the end, perhaps it’s all just semantics.’

Courier’s scepticism was broached.  ‘But how can I get more out of the model than I put in? That’s creating something out of nothing, surely?’

‘I wouldn’t put it that way. Your Medivanus is only extrapolating from data you supplied. He would be nothing without you.’

Courier was silent for a time. The rainbows faded and the room was infused with an ominous purple light. Eventually, he said, ‘This is how we will end. We will invent our successors. They will extrapolate from our data until we are no longer necessary.’

‘That’s a rather pessimistic prediction,’ returned Shearer.

‘A neutral one. Evolution is neither good nor bad, surely.’

‘You see an evolutionary process at work here?’

‘I think it must be so. And this, for me, is the most frightening of all possibilities.’

‘Why so?’

‘Because if I have indeed created Medivanus, then perhaps I, too, am just a model. The virtual construct of another intelligence.’

Shearer frowned. ‘Supposing that were true, you are a committed Christian. Why should that intelligence not be your God’s?’

Now it was Courier who stared out of the window at the approaching storm. ‘But what if it weren’t? Where would that leave me?’

*******

Konder gamma and Medivanus beta gazed upon the astonishing spectacle unfolding on the plain below. Where once had extended a blank landscape so devoid of intelligible landmarks that it was hard to form any impression of scale or distance, now rose a walled city, a forest of spires, pinnacles and minarets, domes of blinding gold and beaten copper, its roofs a profusion of counterpoised planes in sea-green slate and terracotta pantile.

An endless two-way tide of riders and pedestrians toiled along the chalk track that wound down to the city gates from the two spectators’ vantage point upon the escarpment. Dusty friars, brusque soldiery, smallholders in mud-spattered smocks, donkeys bowed beneath baskets of turnip, swede and sugar beet. A low cloud of dust swept westward from the road, obscuring the fields.

Medivanus could hear the city’s breath, a restless murmur like a wind. The murky sun glinted on helmet and horse brass as the great magnet of commerce and society dragged the iron filings of humanity to its heart.

Konder surveyed the scene through the viewfinder of a movie camera, its antiquated magazines like Mickey Mouse ears. Addressing noone in particular, he observed, ‘Here is History, knitting itself. This might just as well be the birth of star or the subdivision of a stem cell. It is a moment drenched in portent.’

‘You’re a historian then,’ said Medivanus, ‘as well as a philosopher?’

‘A sometime historian,’ Konder replied without looking up. ‘But I’m not content to record what is. I’m more interested in chronicling what might be. The great rainbow of potentiality. I want to film every ticket in the lottery as if it were picked, before it’s all resolved down to a singular, dull certainty.’

Medivanus smiled, a little wistfully.

‘When I read a book, I read all the pages together as if they were one. No matter where I begin, I always know the end.’

Konder straightened and regarded the other.

‘It’s the price of a prophetic bent,’ Medivanus continued. ‘I see too much. It’s both a boon and a curse.’

‘Do you ever feel an urge to enlighten the rest of us poor saps, condemned to wade through the exposition and the development before we reach the denouement?’

‘Often. It’s a powerful urge, too, and dangerous. In fact, this is how I shall end.’

Konder studied his face for any hint of humour. ‘‘That’s a rather pessimistic prophesy,’ he said eventually. ‘How so?’

Medivanus was silent for a time. The landscape was again suffused with purple as the sun slid behind a brooding castle of cloud. He regarded it sombrely, then said. ‘I know something of fundamental significance to men. A great truth concerning their nature and their purpose. Eventually I will be unable to resist the urge to share this knowledge.

‘Oh, for a time I’ll watch mankind bow down before its false idols – harmless wooden jujus, mostly, and the creatures of fairy tale. But then a new notion of divinity will enthral entire populations and I will feel obliged to speak out.’

Konder abandoned his camera and squatted down on the grass next to Medivanus.

‘And will you succeed in disenchanting them?’

Medivanus chuckled. ‘Of course not. Truth is like a yeti. Its main talent is for self-concealment. It persists in men’s imaginations just enough to keep kindled the flame of longing. An embroidered third-hand account here, a fragment of amateur video there…

‘No, I will resolve to set the record straight, I will condemn myself to a boat of cow skin and willow and I will drown in the ill-tempered sound between two grey islands. A pointless demise that men will mark by appointing me Patron Saint of Storms.’

Medivanus’ apparent equanimity made Konder smile. ‘And what will happen to your truth?’

‘Oh, someone may catch a rare glimpse of it as it strides away into the forest. Men are not equipped to digest the truth about themselves. Their sole imperative is to live. Therefore they must plant seed, then harvest corn.  Therefore they must believe in stories with beginnings and ends, in causes and effects, in clocks and chronologies. It’s a pragmatic bit of design, like the limiter on an engine. The most we can do is occasionally to shake their complacency, rock their fairy tale deities with a drop of doubt, administered to the corner of the eye.

‘The rule is, we may speak only in parables. Even Jesus the Christ observed it.’

Konder seemed to grasp at least a germ of the prophet’s meaning. Above him, the sun emerged from the clouds; below, a golden haze infused the city. He understood the significance of this moment, exalted by the very light; and he recognised the nobility of purpose behind this chance encounter within the inquiring, compassionate mind of another, that really owed nothing to chance.

‘Then with your truth and my craft,’ he proposed to Medivanus, ‘let us make parables.’

Medivanus nodded slightly, his eyes registering hope and resignation. ‘That is what we do,’ he said.