The State Funeral

The thing about running from yourself is that he knows the route.

Rasmus had eleven minutes of lead and he spent four of them on the wrong street, because the city was Rotterdam and was not, and the tram lines went where no tram line went at home. He came out onto a canal that should have been a road, with the box under his coat and the rain going sideways, and he understood with complete clarity that he was not going to find a hundred volts by running.

He stopped. He made himself stop, in a doorway, breathing, and thought about it the way the other one would.

Two hundred and thirty out of every wall in this country. His box wanted a hundred. So: who buys equipment from Japan and America and does not throw the transformer away.

Recording studios. Guitar shops. Any place with a vintage amplifier and an owner who refuses to have it rewound.

He found one four streets up, shuttered, with a light on at the back, and he was going through the side door and lying to a very tired man about a broken pedal when the bell over the front door went.

"You will want to ask him what he does," said his own voice, from the shop floor. "He will tell you he is an engineer. Ask him which institute."

Rasmus did not turn round. He had the transformer in his hands, twelve kilos of it, and the socket was at knee height behind the counter, and he had perhaps nine seconds.

"He is my brother," the voice went on, conversational, reasonable, exactly the register he used himself when he wanted a stranger on his side. "He is unwell. He has been in a facility in Utrecht since March and he is not supposed to be near mains equipment."

"That true?" said the tired man.

"No," Rasmus said, and got down on the floor behind the counter with twelve kilos of transformer in his arms and started looking for the socket.

It took longer than it should have. That was the other thing he learned that night: in a film a man plugs something in, and in life a man kneels on a cable drum in the dark feeling along a skirting board with one hand while somebody walks unhurriedly towards him.

"Do you want to know how I found you?"

"No."

"You will want to know eventually, so have it now and save yourself the four days." The footsteps stopped on the other side of the counter. "I did not follow you. I cannot follow you; nobody can, the drift sees to that. I worked out where you would have to be. There are about nine places in a city this size that hold a hundred volts, and you are me, so you would rule out the hospitals because of the cameras, and the universities because of the passes, and you would end up doing exactly what I would do, which is a music shop after closing with a story about a pedal."

Rasmus found the socket. His hand was steady and the rest of him was not.

"I have done this in four cities now," the other one said. "I get there first about half the time."

"What do you want?"

"The box. Obviously the box. You are not stupid." A pause. "And I want you to understand, because it will make the next part quicker, that I am not going to hurt you for it. I have never hurt anybody. I want you to hear me say that in your own voice and I want you to notice that you believe it."

"You killed Joost Peeters."

The silence on the other side of the counter went on a beat too long, and in that beat Rasmus understood that he had got it wrong, and that the truth was worse.

"No," the other one said. "I was in the building when he died and I could have stopped it and I did not, because stopping it meant explaining what was on the bench, and what was on the bench was four years of my life. That is what I did. I have had eight months to find a better sentence for it and there is not one." His voice had not changed at all. "And then I went home and had dinner with my wife, because I wanted one more evening before the whole of it came down, and I have thought about that dinner every single day since, and I would do it again. That is the part you cannot get your head round and it is the part you should be most frightened of, because you are me, and if you are ever standing where I was standing you will find out that you would too."

"I would not."

"You have never been asked."

Rasmus got the plug in.

He came up from behind the counter with his hand on the dial and got one look at him. That was all, and it was enough for a year. The same face, thinner, with a beard grown out three weeks and a coat too good for the weather, and an expression Rasmus had never once seen in a mirror and recognised instantly, which was the look of a man who has stopped negotiating with himself about anything at all.

"You cannot keep doing this," the other one said, almost kindly. "You have one box. I know exactly how it works. And you sleep."

Rasmus turned the dial and the shop went away.

---

He came out standing up, which had not happened before, on carpet, in a corridor with a ceiling twice the height of any corridor he had been in.

There was a man in a dark suit two metres in front of him who had clearly been walking somewhere and had stopped so hard he had skidded.

"Sir," the man said.

Rasmus did not say anything.

"Sir, how did you get behind the line."

"I walked," said Rasmus, because it was the only sentence available.

The man's hand went to his ear and did not press. That was the thing Rasmus noticed and turned over afterwards: the hand went up and then decided not to, because reporting that the President had materialised in a corridor was a thing that ended a career whichever way it turned out to be true.

"Sir, I am going to walk you to the Blue Room," the man said. "And I am going to ask you not to do that again."

They passed a portrait on the way, and Rasmus made himself look at it the way you make yourself look at an X-ray.

Himself. Older by five or six years, greyer, in a collar he would never have chosen, under a legend in Dutch that he could read perfectly well and had to read three times anyway.

R. Holt. President of the Republic.

And under that, small, the dates of the office: a list that went back, in this country, to a year that was not 1815.

---

In the Blue Room a woman called Saskia Vermeer put a folder in front of him and started talking about Thursday, and it took him ninety seconds to work out that nobody in the room thought he was anything other than the President in a strange mood.

"Rijksweg 12 is closed at the Bunnik junction from ten," she said. "You are in car three. The Chancellor's people have asked twice more about the wreath and I have told them twice more that you are laying it personally, because you said, and I quote, that a head of state who sends somebody else to a war grave should not be a head of state."

"That sounds like me," Rasmus said.

Wil Doorn, who ran his protection and looked like he had not slept since the spring, did not laugh.

"Sir, I want the route changed."

"Tell me why."

"Because I have been telling you why for nine days and you have been saying no for nine days, and I would like it on the record that I said it a tenth time." Doorn put two photographs on the table, face up, the way you put down a card you do not want to play. "They have moved a team. We know it is a team, we know where it came from, and we know what it is for. I cannot tell you the name of the country in front of Vermeer because she has not got the clearance, and I am going to tell you anyway, because I do not think you have been listening."

And he said a name, and Rasmus, who had spent his whole life in a laboratory and had never in that life been in a room where a man said a thing like that out loud, understood two things at once.

That this was real.

And that the President of the Republic had been told, nine times, and had said no.

---

They brought him to the President at eleven that night, in a study with the curtains shut, and Doorn stayed outside, and the door made the particular sound that a door makes when it is thicker than a door needs to be.

He was sitting. He did not get up. He looked at Rasmus for a long time with an expression of total, unhurried interest, and then he said:

"Nine and a quarter."

"Yes."

"On a bench supply, in Delft, on a Sunday, because you were chasing a line and you were annoyed about it." He tipped his head. "I did it on a Tuesday. What is the drift on yours?"

"Twenty millihertz. Give or take."

"Mine too. It is the same grid." The President almost smiled. "That is the part that took me longest. Lisbon, Warsaw, here, all of it locked together, four hundred million people on one note, so the whole continent is one door. And then the English are on their own grid ninety miles away and might as well be on Mars." He turned his hand over. "You have worked that out."

"Yes."

"Have you worked out what to do about Thursday?"

"I'm not the one who has to."

"No," the President agreed. "You are the one who has to decide whether I do."

He got up then, and poured two glasses of water, and gave one to Rasmus, and it was the ordinariness of it that Rasmus found he could not manage.

"They are going to kill me at the Bunnik junction," the President said. "Doorn is right about all of it and I have told him no nine times, and he thinks I am a fatalist or an idiot, and he is going to spend the rest of his life believing he failed. That is the first thing I am sorry about. There is a list."

"Change the route."

"If I change the route they do it in November. If I close the road they do it at the residence. If I resign they do it anyway, because the point was never the office, it was the file I published in February and the people it named." He drank some of the water. "I have been the most photographed man in this republic for six years. I cannot disappear. A president who vanishes is a manhunt that never closes and a country that never settles, and they will look for me in every hole on Earth, and one of those holes is a laboratory in Delft with a box in it."

Rasmus put his glass down very carefully.

"Say the rest of it."

"You know the rest of it."

"Say it anyway."

"A president who is assassinated," the President said, "is a closed file. A funeral, an inquiry, a street named after him, and nobody looks for him again, because everyone watched him die." He said it without any drama whatever, which was somehow the worst available way to say it. "I need a body with my face in car three on Thursday morning. And there is exactly one of those in the building."

---

Rasmus found that he was on his feet and did not remember the decision.

"You brought me here."

"I did not bring you anywhere. You arrived, which I have been expecting for four years, because I have been running the arithmetic on who else gets here and how often." The President spread his hands. "I have a box. I built it the same week you did, at the same age, off the same paper, because we are the same man and there is no mystery in it. Mine has been in a safe since I took office. I could walk out of this room tonight."

"Then walk."

"I have told you why I cannot."

"You have told me why it is inconvenient." Rasmus heard his own voice come out flat and unfamiliar. "You can go. You would be alive. You have decided that you would rather be alive somewhere and have this country not look for you, and to get both of those you need a man to be shot in your place. That is not a corner you are in. That is a preference."

Something moved behind the President's face, and it was not shame, and Rasmus understood with a lurch that it was recognition. The man was enjoying being argued with. He had not been argued with properly in six years and here at last was somebody with exactly his own equipment.

"All right," he said. "Yes. It is a preference. Do you want to hear the rest of the preference?"

"No."

"You will hear it anyway, because you are going to be in this building until Thursday whatever either of us says, and you would rather know." He sat back down. "There are one hundred and forty names in the February file. Eleven of them are already dead. If I am killed on Thursday the inquiry publishes the whole of it, because that is how this republic works when it has a martyr, and those hundred and forty people are finished. If I disappear, the file is a curiosity attached to a missing crank, and every one of them dies in a bed at ninety."

"That is not my arithmetic to do."

"It is somebody's."

"Then do it yourself. Get in the car."

"I am fifty-one," the President said. "And I find that I do not want to."

---

They looked at each other across a very good carpet.

And Rasmus, who had been running for nine days from a man with his own face, and who had watched that man lie to a shopkeeper in his own voice with his own cadence, heard himself say the only thing he had that this man did not.

"How many of us do you think there are?"

"Unknown. Large."

"I have met one." Rasmus waited until he was certain he had the room. "Three hours ago, in a guitar shop in a Rotterdam that is not this one. He has grown a beard and he has stopped arguing with himself about anything, and he has been hunting me across four worlds, and do you know what he wants? He does not want my life. He has one. He wants the box, because a box is the only thing that gets a man out of a world where he has done something."

The President had gone very still.

"And you are about to make the easiest box in the multiverse," Rasmus said. "Put it in the ground with a state funeral on top of it and a published inquiry telling every version of you exactly where it is and exactly how famous the man in the coffin was. You will be the only Rasmus Holt in creation whose machine has a monument over it."

"The safe is not in the ground."

"The safe is in a building that will be a museum inside a year. You know it will." He leaned on the desk. "You have thought about everything except the one thing you cannot think about, which is other people, because you have never in your life had to. There is no version of this where you die famous and the box stays quiet. You are not closing a file. You are putting up a sign."

The clock in the study did what clocks in studies do.

"Sit down," the President said at last, and his voice had changed.

"No."

"I am not going to hurt you. I have never hurt anybody. That is the whole of my problem." He rubbed his face with both hands, and for four or five seconds he was simply a tired man of fifty-one in a room with the curtains shut. "Doorn is outside. If I open that door and tell him what you are, they will have you in a cell in The Hague by two and nobody will ever be able to explain you, and you will be a man with no documents and no history who got into a secure building, which in this country in this year is not a thing anybody survives."

"I know."

"I am telling you that so you understand that I am choosing not to." He looked up. "Take your box and go out through the garden door. Doorn's people are on the north side until three."

"And Thursday?"

The President of the Republic looked at the curtains for a while.

"Thursday," he said, "is mine."

---

Rasmus went out through the garden in the rain, with a stolen umbrella and twelve kilos of somebody else's transformer, and found a socket in an unlocked garage four streets from a building where a man was deciding how to die.

He read about it afterwards, because the box does not care where you are and the news travels ahead of you in a way he has never been able to account for.

The President of the Republic was shot at the Bunnik junction on Thursday morning at ten past ten, laying a wreath he had insisted on laying himself. The inquiry published the February file in full. One hundred and forty names. There is a street.

And in the fourth paragraph, in the small print of a report he read standing up in a library in a world that was not either of theirs, there was a sentence about the identification of the body, and the sentence said it had been formal and immediate, and had been carried out by the head of the President's protection detail, a man named Wil Doorn, who had known him for six years and had told him nine times to change the route.

Rasmus stood in the library and worked out what that sentence meant.

The President was fifty-one and did not want to.

Somebody had got in that car.

And whoever he was, he had the same face, and he had said yes, and the only thing anybody will ever know about him is that a man who had known the President for six years looked at what was left and said, without hesitating, that it was him.