The Dervish House (52 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
Topaloğlu looks suspiciously at Aso, who is poking around among the brass lanterns.
‘We’re not police.’
‘You look like police.’
It’s the suits.
‘I’m in marketing and he’s a scientist. We are genuinely looking for a lost family heirloom, a miniature Koran. You’d remember it if you saw it, it’s been cut in half.’
‘The other half of this.’ Aso offers the Ceylan-Besarani half of the Koran on the palm of his hand. Topaloğlu pushes on glasses and peers.
‘Oh yes. That I do recognize. It did indeed come in a job lot from Hazine. They keep an eye out for the religious stuff for me.’
‘You have it?’
‘Ah, no. I sold it on.’
Gleams and glints of highlighted brass swirl around Leyla like wheeling stars. She feels sick, sick in the pit of her belly.
‘I sold it last Monday, part of a job lot of surplus stock. I can tell you where has it. I’ll write it down for you, I don’t do with that handshake business.’ He takes a ballpoint to the back of a business card. ‘Here.’
Leyla reads the address. She reads the address again to be sure she got it right. No mistake. True journey is a circle, a dervish’s turn. God is good, God is very good indeed.
A single jackdaw, black of head and bright of eye, struts up and down the balcony rail of the second floor salon of the Kortanpaşa Palace watching the delegates of the Kadiköy group shuffle forwards in the coffee line. Georgios Ferentinou watches it with pleasure, He has always liked jackdaws. They are urbane, purposeful creatures.
‘A corvidae man, so,’ says Emrah Beskardes, behind him in the line.
‘I like intelligence,’ Georgios says.
‘That’s why I did my dissertation of small-world networks in rook social systems. Did you know they mourn their dead? And they have courts. They identify social transgressors, gather a group of rooks — a jury — isolate and punish them. You’ve probably seen it without knowing what it was, a group of rooks in mid-air, and all mobbing a single rook. That’s a punishment. They go for the tail and pin-feathers. You sometimes see rooks or magpies scrambling around with no tails, trying to fly. They broke the law. I’ve seen children try and help what they think is a poor lame bird, and the rest of the court will set up an outcry — they sometimes even try and mob them. They’re smart but they are bastards.’
Georgios Ferentinou cocks his head, intrigued, an unconscious mirror of the stalking jackdaw outside.
‘You seem disenamoured with the objects of your study.’
‘You don’t love crows, you admire them. They exploit our capacity for chaos. Forget polar bears or whatever kind of tuna we’re supposed to care about this month; crows are the bellwethers of what we’re doing to the planet. The bigger the mess we make, the better they like it. New behaviours are spreading through crow populations like wildfire. Ten years ago Japanese crows learned to drop hard nuts at road intersections for cars to crack with their tyres. And not just that, they’d wait for a red light before picking them up again. Now crows in London are doing that. Ten years to cross Eurasia. There’s an evolutionary pressure, and if it’s working on crows, it’s working on us, we just haven’t seen it yet. Now those same Japanese crow populations are showing behaviours that simply could not have had time to evolve. They can count up to ten. They’re making marks in mud on roosts. Rows of mud dots. Now, if that doesn’t scare you . . . Do you want to hear the theory? It scares the shit out of me: they’re picking up waste nano from the environment and it’s rewiring their brains.’
‘God save us,’ says Georgios Ferentinou and in the coffee queue he feels the clutch of intellectual excitement and fear that comes from the realization that the universe needs nothing from humans.
‘Watch the crows,’ Beskardes says. ‘The crows are surely watching us.’
Georgios knows crow parliaments. He has stood where the accused rook stands. It had been a spring that year too, a late spring made later by the conference in Moscow. Georgios had shivered and huddled through a week of papers and seminars on Imperfect Information, Rational Irrationality, Groupthink, Bubble Behaviour; the fashionable topics of pop-economics; the subjects that earned deals for books with titles with colons and over-explanatory subtitles. He had avoided the mandatory drinking to stupefaction by pleading a touch of flu. He was never certain how deeply his paper on Mental Mappings and Desire Lines: the Psychological Geography of Economic Landscapes had penetrated the vodka hangovers in the lecture hall but citations of it turned up in papers for the next eighteen months, until the next new fashionable theory. But it was a grim week of linger-winter and all the more of a surprise when he emerged from the air-conditioned marble of Atatürk Airport to find spring bursting across Istanbul. There was perfume on the air, clouds of almond blossom delicately screened the minarets and domes of Süleymaniye’s huge complex of mosque and tombs and hospitals as Georgios Ferentinou crossed the park to the Department of Economics. A note in his pigeon-hole. Meeting of the faculty. Two p.m.
Georgios can still recall the room’s every detail. The flask of university coffee, the jar of powdered apple tea beside the flask of hot water. A plate of small sweets and Western-style biscuits. There was blossom outside the window. He can still recall the seating arrangements. Ogün Saltuk was to the left of Emine Arin the Vice Chancellor.
They asked about the Moscow trip. How was the weather? Not like here. Shame. The delegates? Cosmopolitan. Good. The quality of the papers? Mixed. Good. Professor Ferentinou’s offering? Well received. Excellent. Then Vice Chancellor Arin looked to Ogün Saltuk and Georgios knew that everything had ended.
‘Professor Ferentinou, your contribution to the Department of Economics, and to the field of Experimental Economics over the past twenty-five years . . .’ Ogün Saltuk began. Georgios cut him off.
‘You’re making me redundant.’
‘This is the University of Istanbul, we don’t make respected academics redundant. However, there have been funding issues with the Durmuş Yılmaz Chair.’
‘It’s my chair that’s redundant, not me,’ Georgios said but he was falling, the world was air, there was nothing to grasp.
‘Now that’s hardly fair,’ said Vice Chancellor Arin. ‘There have been funding shortfalls across all faculties.’
There were six around the table, all known to Georgios, all stone-faced. Only Saltuk had lacked the propriety to look ashamed.
‘Effective from when?’
‘The new academic year,’ Saltuk said.
‘I’m due six months’ notice . . .’
‘If it were up to me, but it’s a financial matter.’
Georgios sat with his hands loosely curled in his lap. The bravado was blowing out of him, two small sallies of defiance was all he could muster.
‘I, I don’t know what to do.’
‘Professor Ferentinou,’ Vice Chancellor Arin said, trying to avert a shaming, uncontrolled emotional scene.
‘I won’t get anything, I’m not young, I’m not a young man. What will I do?’
‘Professor Ferentinou.’ Such unction in Ogün Saltuk’s voice. ‘I’m sure the faculty could consider this more an early retirement than closing a chair, don’t you think, Vice Chancellor?’
This is decided already
, Georgios thought.
This is rehearsed dialogue. All they are concerned with here is that I don’t throw them from their script
.
, Georgios thought.
This is rehearsed dialogue. All they are concerned with here is that I don’t throw them from their script
.
‘My postgraduate students . . .’
‘I will take over as their adviser of studies. We do work in parallel fields.’ Georgios hated Ogün Saltuk then, hated him with Hellenic depth and passion for now the years of academic abrasion, of simmering tension, of barely contained resentment, were laid open like upturned cards. Every single sniping and carping and snipping and tiny questioning of his ability, his authority, his originality, his loyalty, all were steps to this grubby coup. ‘There is one small thing,’ Saltuk added. ‘You’ve a number of government and MIT clearances to politically sensitive information. We will have to review those, I’m afraid.’
‘Why not just call me a Greek traitor and be done with it?’ Georgios stormed out of the room. There was a tight singing in his ears as he raged down the airy corridors, across the quadrangle, a shuddering tightness in his chest. Foolish hopes, vain fantasies surged and crashed in his mind, a visiting lectureship, tenure in the United States or Germany or Britain, a best-selling book, a career as a lovable pop-economist, a Nobel Prize nomination. As well wish for superpowers, as well hope for a god to reach down from the muscular, glorious clouds rushing across spring Istanbul. He was finished. The wind blew and sent almond blossom flurrying around Georgios Ferentinou’s head.
It was the leaves that were in flight when the University of Istanbul Department of Economics announced the creation of a new post, the Tansu Penbe Çiller Chair of Economic Psychology, first incumbent, Professor Ogün Saltuk.
Georgios’ coffee cup rattles in remembered rage against the saucer. Dark and strong, the long-maturing anger of old men. He must do it now. He has the opportunity, he has the armament. Not for revenge. For the truth. For what he has deduced, perhaps vainly, perhaps foolishly, perhaps with the insight that only an outsider, an exile in his own city, can bring. When he confronts Ogün Saltuk, his motivation will be justice.
Coffee-equipped, the line rotates back into the main salon with the dismal view over the gas tanks. It’s a working break; the opening Blue Sky session has over-run and Ogün Saltuk is keen to wrap it up and move on. Georgios suspects that his MIT masters are not getting what he sold them. Fatih Dikbas is blathering on about macro-economic terrorism as a geopolitical instrument, drawing on Russo-European gas diplomacy in the first decade of the century. He is a dreadful, dreary speaker. Ogün Saltuk fidgets and glances at the clock. Finally Dikbas meanders into an inconclusive silence and after a few hanging seconds Ogün Saltuk says, ‘Any further comments? No?’
Georgios Ferentinou’s arm is flat out before him on the desk. Now he raises it slowly to the vertical.
‘I’d like to say something.’
‘We are hoping to move on from this part of the programme,’ Ogün Saltuk says, making a winding-a-skein-of-wool gesture with his arms that is at once childish and patronizing. ‘There will be another opportunity for Blue Sky thinking at the pre-wrap session tomorrow.’
‘I do believe that what I have to say demands immediate action,’ Georgios says. The whole room seems to draw breath at once. The silence hangs. The jackdaw is at this balcony window now.
‘I’d like to hear Professor Ferentinou,’ Beskardes announces.
‘So would I,’ declares Selma Özgün. ‘His voice has been lacking in these sessions.’ Heads nod in agreement around the tables.
‘Very well then,’ Saltuk says, chewing at his bottom lip. ‘Do share with us, Professor Ferentinou.’
Georgios clasps his hands and leans forward. He finds faces among his peers.
‘At the start of these sessions Professor Saltuk asked us for leaps of intuition. Wide blue skies, everything is permitted. In that spirit I would ask the group to consider the possibility of a terrorist attack on the Balkans, Central and Southern Europe using nanotechnology agents delivered using the gas pipeline system.’
Rumbles, mumbles, sittings-up around the horseshoe of tables. Georgios glances at the edges of the room. As he suspected, Major Oktay Eğilmez is not to be seen. Beskardes has written
cool
on his magic slate.
cool
on his magic slate.
‘At my age I find I think a lot about sanctioned fears. The sanctioned fear of nanotechnology is what the press calls the “grey goo scenario”, the runaway replicator that reduces everything to its own matrix. However, as any biologist will tell you, we live in that world already; the overwhelming majority of the biomass on this planet is bacterial: biological replicators. If we’re told anything about the nanotechnology revolution, it’s that it is the convergence of the biological and the artificial.
‘We are the scum on the surface of that bacterial world, we are the survivors. No, what is much more interesting to me, and, I suspect, to a so-called terrorist group, is nanotechnology’s potential to reprogramme our personalities. The ultimate victory in any conflict is hearts and minds. In the past it has always been easier to kill than to convert, but this is the age of ideological conflict. Our military has developed nanotechnology packages to improve concentration, aggression, team-working, enhance sensory inputs and, significantly, diminish empathy. Pilots, long-distance drivers, coders, performers, actors, sportsmen and women routinely use nanotech, and the image of the nano-snorting Levent trader who can’t start the day without inserting a nozzle into his nostril is beyond a cliché now. We routinely use nanoagents to improve concentration, sociability, power of recall, to increase our ability to learn or give us access to secure short-term information. We can buy moods, emotions, aspects of personality quite foreign to us. Young people on a night out can take sociability, eroticism, dis-inhibition. We give it to our schoolchildren at exam time without a thought. To even gain admission to this group I had to inhale a nanoagent which placed a contact number in my short-term memory. What we are engaged on is a massive, unregulated and improvised experiment in reprogramming ourselves. The true end of nanotech is not the transformation of the world, it’s the transformation of humanity. We can redefine what it means to be human. No doubt there is some ugly adolescent expression like “neuro-hacking” to describe it, but my point is: this cannot have gone unobserved by those with agendas of political, social and religious evangelism, those for whom hearts and minds is victory. Nanotechnology is the weapon of choice of the Proselytizer. It is the Sword of the Prophet. I have reason to believe that we have reached a point where this kind of attack is not just possible, but likely.’
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