The Calcutta Chromosome Read online

  'Where?' said Urmila.

  'In India,' said Murugan. ' Madras to be exact. Now you'd reckon that if a guru-groupie was down in that part of the world at that time they'd home in on Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society like a heat-seeking missile seeks heat. But you'd be wrong. This Countess Pongracz was a real guru-gourmet and she didn't go in for any of that heat-and-serve stuff. The guru she settled on was Madame Blavatsky's arch-rival – a Finnish number called Madame Liisa Salminen, who ran her own little outfit called the Society of Spiritualists. The Countess was Madame Salminen's leading disciple, and she noted down everything that happened to her guru.'

  Chapter 31

  ON THE NIGHT of January 12 1898, records the Grofne Pongracz, a select few Spiritualists gathered, as was their custom, at a house rented by the Society for their weekly seance with Mme Salminen. Several independent sources attest that these seances were generally stately, highly regulated affairs. They usually began with a small reception, with Mme Salminen holding court and handing out cups of China tea. On this occasion however the solemnity of the tea-party was rudely interrupted by an unlikely and unexpected intruder. There were many in Madras who coveted invitations to join Mme Salminen's circle of intimates. Some had been known to go to considerable lengths to infiltrate the group. Thus it was not the mere fact of the arrival of an uninvited guest that took the assembled Spiritualists by surprise: rather it was because the man in question did not seem to be even remotely the kind of person who might wish to be associated with such a group. Quite the contrary. It ought to be noted that in general the Spiritualists, Theosophists and their fellowtravellers looked upon British civilian and military officialdom with undisguised loathing – a sentiment that was reciprocated in more than ample measure. Such was their mutual revulsion that in the barrack-rooms of Madras 's Fort St George, the phrase 'I would rather be a Spiritualist', when uttered by a cavalryman, was generally regarded as the equivalent, in connotative association, to such statements as 'I would rather be dead'.

  Conversely, the sentence 'I would rather be a Lieutenant-Colonel' might be held to constitute a similarly firm statement of preferences amongst Spiritualists and their kin. Yet it would appear from the Countess's brief but vivid description that the intruder in question was precisely a man of military affiliations. She describes him, in her inimitable Magyar way, as a portly, ruddy-faced Englishman in his late fifties, with sparse hair and a Hussar's moustache. The man was clearly in a state of extreme emotional distress, for he was observed to be wringing his hands and tugging his moustache, while his eyes were bloodshot and inflamed, as though he had not slept for several days. Yet something in his bearing belied his overwrought state: the Countess, for one, immediately took him to be an officer of high to middle rank, possibly in an infantry regiment. Imagine her surprise, then, when the intruder made no mention of a rank or regiment while introducing himself. She took it as a rebuff, as a slight on her powers of observation: and it is worth remembering that the Countess Pongracz claimed descent from no less a soldier than the great Attila himself, and moreover was as accustomed to a place of honour in the courtly circles of Imperial Buda as she was to the taverns Of soldierly Pest. She was unlikely to be mistaken in recognizing the attributes of a military man.

  The Spiritualists' suspicions were further aroused when the intruder appeared to have some trouble remembering his own name, introducing himself finally (and not without some hesitation) as C. C. Dunn. No sooner had this cursory introduction been effected, however, than the self-styled Mr Dunn leant over towards the imposing head of Mme Salminen and began to whisper. The countess happened to be close at hand at the time and now, without appearing to pay the slightest attention, she contrived to direct her hearing in this direction. But adept though she undoubtedly was at this rare aristocratic art, she managed to catch no more than a few disjointed syllables: 'Great distance… see you… dreams… visions… death… implore you… madness… annihilation.'

  The countess, like many others in the room, fully expected Mme Salminen to give the stranger short shrift, as she had so many others before him. But here they underestimated the formidable Finn. Mme Salminen took a particular interest in people who exhibited signs of extreme emotion: it was her belief that violent passion, when efficiently channelled, can create the conditions for what she called 'psychic breakthroughs'. Thus, far from turning away the distraught Mr Dunn, she extended him a warm welcome and invited him to join the assembled company when they withdrew to the seance table.

  It is worth emphasizing here that Countess Pongracz's accounts of seances were not always entirely coherent. She would often jot down her impressions immediately after the session when she was herself in a state of considerable excitation. Often in these situations, the impeccable High German in which her accounts were composed would begin to show signs of strain; sometimes her beleaguered sense of syntax would yield altogether, and instead of complete sentences she would jot down strings of apparently disconnected syllables. Intensive computer analysis has demonstrated that these phonemic clusters were drawn from a melange of Central European dialects such as Slovenian and certain unusual Carpathian variants of Finno-Ugrian (all learned, no doubt, below stairs from the vast staff of the Kastely Pongracz).

  The point, of course, is that we cannot pretend that the Countess was a reliable witness or that an accurate narrative can be constructed from the skeletal word-associations of her diary. However, her accounts can frequently be corroborated with what is known of the protocols and procedures of Mme Salminen's seances, and these facts are not in general dispute. As a rule Mme Salminen and her little flock would withdraw after tea to a room that was lit with only one candle. Sitting around a heavy wooden table, the assembled company would join hands' and attempt to bring their powers of concentration into focus, with Mme Salminen acting as a lens, so to speak, for the dispersed energy of their minds. To be counted as a success a session such as this would have to produce some of the 'manifestations' of psychic energy that were so dear to the Spiritualists – such phenomena as table-tapping, automatic writing, incorporeal voices and so on. On certain special occasions the lucky few were even rewarded with the most highly valued of psychic prizes, so to speak, that is to say a kind of light that was termed an 'ectoplasmic glow'. That 'manifestations' of this kind can very easily be manufactured in circumstances of collective hysteria has of course been repeatedly demonstrated and needs no comment here.

  It must be noted however that the 'glow' phenomenon was a rare and unusual occurrence. It was usually produced only towards the end of a session, and was invariably preceded by other manifestations such as table-tapping, etc.

  On the occasion with which we are currently concerned, it so happened that the Countess Pongracz was chosen to sit beside Mme Salminen and opposite the uninvited guest – the self-styled Mr C. C. Dunn. Now it appears that, despite Mme Salminen's explicit instructions to the contrary, the Countess was in the habit of casting occasional glances around the table at these sessions. It was thus she noticed that after twenty minutes or so Mme Salminen and Mr Dunn appeared to have fallen into a kind of trance, with their heads slumped forward, almost touching the table. When this condition persisted for a considerable length of time, the Countess began to consider the otherwise unthinkable step of interrupting the proceedings (unthinkable because it was the current belief that an interruption would cause a 'spirit' to be trapped in inter-plasmic limbo).

  However, even as she was considering this possibility, Mme Salminen's head was flung back against the chair, suddenly and violently, so that she was staring up at the ceiling, her hair flowing loose, her mouth slack and open. Then Mr Dunn was hurled backwards bodily from the table and flattened against the wall, his feet several inches off the ground. The next instant the single candle was extinguished and the room was suddenly plunged into an impenetrable velvety darkness. The heavy table was upended with a violent crash, and Mr Dunn fell to the floor, screaming in what appeared to be Hindustani:
'Save me… from her… pursuit… beg mercy… '

  The strangest aspect of these hallucinations, the Countess records, was that even in that darkness which was not merely the absence of light but rather its opposite, an antithesis that could only be conceived in the inner eye of the mind: even in this blank darkness they could see C. C. Dunn absolutely clearly, although not with the kind of vision that depends on light; they could see him struggling; the agonies that passed over his face; they watched his futile attempts to fight off whatever it was that had tied him upon this rack of torment – all this they could see, but never once did they glimpse or even imagine the agent of his anguish, what arm or instrument, or whatever means it was through which these hideous agonies were effected. His face was livid with fear, and they saw him flailing his arms, fighting something off, a hand, or possibly an instrument. They saw him cowering on the floor, prostrate but not unconscious, but then just as suddenly the nature of his struggle changed, and he seemed instead to be grappling with an animal, fighting to keep its fangs from closing around his throat; shouting a repetitive string of invocations.

  Then abruptly the noise ceased and the candle flared up again so that they were no longer in darkness. Opening their eyes they saw that the table was exactly where it had been, and that they were all sitting in their places, except the unannounced guest, who was cowering in a corner, stark naked.

  And then Mme Salminen spoke her first words, in a whisper so soft as to be audible to none other than the countess, who was seated beside her. All this while Mme Salminen had been sprawled in her chair, her head thrown back, her eyes blank and unseeing. When she spoke it was without properly regaining consciousness. The sentence that escaped her lips was: 'There is nothing I can do: the Silence has come to claim him.'

  Having said these few words she collapsed on the table.

  Her alarmed acolytes removed her immediately to her bedroom, where she remained until well into the next day. On gaining consciousness her first act was to send for the countess. The two women remained closeted together for several hours.

  Unfortunately the Countess never provided a written account of their conversation of that day, but she is known to have described it later as the turning point of her life.

  However the actual influence of Mme Salminen on her disciple's subsequent career remains disputed. For instance, when she attributed her pioneering archaeological work in excavating early Manichaean and Nestorian sites in Central Asia, Nepal and Bengal to the influence of Mme Salminen, her friends assumed that this was merely a manner of speaking – a grateful acolyte's rendering of homage. But in her advocacy of the teachings of Valentinus, the Alexandrian philosopher of the early Christian era, they were more inclined to take her assertions at face value. When she asserted that it was Mme Salminen who had revealed to her the truth of the Valentinian cosmology, in which the ultimate deities are the Abyss and the Silence, the one being male and the other female, the one representing mind and the other truth, few disputed her account of the matter, for these beliefs clearly did not merit a prosaic explanation.

  Yet, accustomed as her friends were to her eccentricities, they became seriously concerned when she moved to Egypt in the late 1940s, to search for the most sacred site of the ancient Valentinian cult: the lost shrine of Silence. Some of them were to recall later, after her disappearance, that she had often spoken of a description that Mme Salminen had given her: of a small hamlet on the edge of the desert; of date palms and mud huts and creaking waterwheels.

  Chapter 32

  URMILA SHIVERED, despite the clammy heat.

  'So do you think it's all connected?' she said. 'The message that was sent to you, and these bits of paper that the fish were wrapped in… '

  'Are you kidding?' Murugan said. 'You bet they're connected. Your fish wrappings pull it all together. Look at it this way: Cunningham had the only lab on the continent where Ron had a snowflake's chance of making a breakthrough; Ron knew this and by late 1896 he was desperate to get his ass to Calcutta. But Cunningham just wasn't buying it: he'd set this lab up like his own backyard barbecue and he wasn't going to let some punk kid break up his party. Ergo: if Cunningham was the principal obstacle to Ron's moving to Calcutta, it follows that at this point in time – late 1897 – he was the single greatest obstacle to the solution of the malaria puzzle. If someone was looking over Ron's shoulder at this stage, it wouldn't take them long to figure this out. So what do they do? They call a timeout and go into a huddle and when they go back on the floor they've got a new gameplan: Cunningham's got to go. And sure enough, that's exactly what happens: suddenly in January 1898, Cunningham changes his mind; he throws the game and takes his tail off to England. In between he makes a pit-stop in Madras where he goes through some kind of psychotic episode. Those papers, that message on my screen – someone is trying to get me to make connections: they want me to know I was on the right track'

  'But wait a minute,' said Urmila. 'What do you mean "want you to know"? It wasn't you who found the papers. It was me – and I met you by accident – because you happened to be at Romen Haldar's house when I… when I fainted.'

  'Is that right?' said Murugan. 'OK, now you tell me exactly how you happened to "find" those papers and we'll try and see if your accident theory holds up.'

  Urmila began to tell him about the events of that morning, and the night before – the phone-call to her family, her promise to cook fish, and the providential ring of the doorbell at seven fifteen. And slowly, as she told the story, her account grew more and more uncertain, so that when she got to the unknown fish-seller, her voice faded into a barely audible murmur.

  'But why would anyone set about the whole thing in such a roundabout way?' she said. 'If they want you to know something why wouldn't they just tell you – why involve me and Romen Haldar and…?'

  Murugan paused to scratch his beard. 'The truth is,' he said, 'that I don't know. But a couple of things are clear enough. Someone's trying to get us to make some connections; they're trying to tell us something; something they don't want to put together themselves, so that when we get to the end we'll have a whole new story.'

  'Why?' said Urmila. 'What purpose does it serve? What good will it do them if we get to the end or not?'

  'I'm not absolutely sure,' said Murugan, 'but I guess I could sketch one possible scenario.'

  'Go on,' said Urmila.

  'All right,' said Murugan. 'Now suppose, just suppose you had this belief – don't ask me why or anything, this is strictly a let's pretend game – just suppose you believed that to know something is to change it, it would follow, wouldn't it, that to make something known would be one way of effecting a change? Or creating a mutation, if you like.'

  Urmila made a doubtful noise.

  'Now let's take this one step further. If you did believe this, it would follow that if you wanted to create a specific kind of change, or mutation, one of the ways in which you could get there is by allowing certain things to be known. You'd have to be very careful in how you did it, because the experiment wouldn't work until it led to a genuine discovery of some kind. It wouldn't work, for instance, if you picked someone out of a crowd and said: "Yo, here's a two and here's another; add them up and what do you get?" That wouldn't be a real discovery because the answer would be known already. So what you would have to do is to push your guinea pigs in the right direction and wait for them to get there on their own.'

  'So what you're saying,' Urmila said, 'is that someone is telling you something, through me, in this very roundabout way, as a kind of experiment; because they're trying to change something?'

  'I couldn't have said it better myself.'

  'To change what?' cried Urmila. 'And why? What do they want to do with us?'

  'We don't know,' said Murugan. 'We don't know what; we don't know why.'

  'So you mean to say,' said Urrnila, 'you and I are trapped in an experiment, and we don't know what it's for or why?'

  'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Fact is we
're dealing with a crowd for whom silence is a religion. We don't even know what we don't know. We don't know who's in this and who's not; we don't know how much of the spin they've got under control. We don't know how many of the threads they want us to pull together and how many they want to keep hanging for whoever comes next.'

  'You mean,' said Urrnila, 'they may keep the rest for someone else to put together – some time in the future?'

  'I'd guess that's the case, yes,' Murugan said. 'These guys aren't going anywhere in a hurry. They've been planting carefully selected clues for the last century or so, and every once in a while, for reasons of their own, they choose to draw them to the attention of a couple of chosen people. Just because you and I happen to have been included doesn't mean they've closed the list.'

  'So where is it all going?' said Urmila. 'Where will it end?'

  'It won't,' said Murugan. 'Let me tell you how this works: they have to be very careful to pick the right time to turn the last page. See, for them, writing "The End" to this story is the way they hope to trigger the quantum leap into the next. But for that to happen two things have to coincide precisely: the end credits have to come up at exactly the same instant that the story is revealed to whoever they're keeping it for.'

  'So what are they waiting for?' said Urmila.

  'Could be any number of things,' said Murugan. 'Maybe they're waiting to find some previously unreported strain of malaria. Or maybe they're waiting on a technology that'll make it easier and quicker to deliver their story to whoever they're keeping it for: a technology that'll be a lot more efficient in mounting it than anything that's available right now. Or maybe they're waiting for both. Who's to say?'

  He was cut short by a roll of thunder. Looking quickly around, Urmila noticed a sheltered spot under the overhanging roof of the derelict outhouse. She squeezed under it and seated herself on the ground, pulling her knees up against her chin. Murugan followed, crawling in beside her and creakily crossing his legs. Within minutes the rain was pouring down before them, off the edge of the overhang.