If Then Page 13

  “As bailiff?”

  “As husband.”

  She kissed him and her fingers hesitated at the back of his head then rested on his shoulders.

  Another distant thud in the earth. The lampshade swung.

  He was strong and straight; the softness around his face and jaw was long gone but his eyes reminded her of the hollows in a forest, with their rotten shadows. She preferred not to look at his eyes anymore. The eyes she had loved had been bright blue, sad and funny, her favourite part of him. Now the whites were jaundiced, and the skin of the orbits slack and exhausted. Sometimes he slept with his eyes open. She dwelt on the parts of his body that showed his strength – his shoulders, his forearms, his angular calves.

  He moved close to her.

  “Imagine this is goodbye,” his voice was deep and aroused. “Imagine I’m going away to war for a long time and this is the last time we will be together.”

  She got down on her knees, unbuttoned his trousers, closed her eyes and gave into the compulsion. This quick and uninhibited response to his suggestion made him moan and gasp. The implant interfered with desire. Sex was one of the things he forgot about until it was almost too late. The need to unburden himself did not get through to consciousness until the very point of crisis. She liked the sex that this side effect produced. It was so unequivocal. All he needed was a reminder that sex existed and then his response was immediate.

  His skin smelt cold and his musk was fainter than usual. He pushed her away, turned her over and pressed his fingers into her. Love was a generalization, and quite meaningless. Marriage was far more specific, and consequentially interesting. She liked to be fucked in this way now and again. She didn’t want him to fuss over her needs, that is, she didn’t want her needs to be identified and collected like butterflies. She just wanted them met. She turned back and he moved onto her and into her. With her arms and legs wrapped around him, they kept each other afloat. Marriage is survival. Yes, she wanted to survive. To survive and to come. That was not too much to ask.

  Afterwards, he made her tea. On the street below, people gathered. They did not go about their usual morning business but looked southward. The grunts of the cannon were answered by gossipy tremors underfoot. The window quivered under her fingertips. When she turned around, he was dressed again, efficient and focused upon his role. The dreamy compliance of night gave way to the hard realities of morning. How long would he be gone? Was it dangerous? How would she cope on her own?

  “When will you return?”

  “Soon as I find Hector,” he replied.

  He took her hand, and considered it. She didn’t look up in case she saw into his eyes.

  “People like us should do what we are told,” he said, “if we know what is good for us.”

  He kissed her forehead then left the flat. She watched him walk up the street toward the war memorial, rucksack slung over his shoulder. He walked down Market Street and across the bridge.

  The Bowles’ house was just across the way. A new family was already living there. He thought of Agnes again. When her little brother was lifted onto the cart alongside her, her first thought was to protect him from the collapsing world.

  He would speak to the douanier. Ask him if he had heard anything about the family. He took a few paces and then stopped again.

  Everything he had thought or done up until this moment had been mistaken. The world was not as he had believed it to be, and neither he nor Ruth understood this strange new age. Only Alex Drown knew what was happening.

  The road up Cuilfail was very steep, the hedges overgrown and splendidly ripe with rustling and green perfumes. Walking was a way of shaking off the feeling of weakness brought on by fear. At the top of the hill, the douanier’s men loitered around the watchtower. He asked briefly if they had seen or heard about the fate of the evicted. No, they had heard nothing. He’d be better off asking at the Offham Road gate or waiting until the douanier’s inspection the next morning. Had they seen Hector? No, they had not.

  He passed through the gate and set off across the Downs. A browsing wind considered and reconsidered the long grass. Cows idled in the valley. A new day. He would spend it on the Downs looking for Hector and, if he could not find him, he would visit Alex at the Institute and tell her that the stretcher bearer was lost.

  10

  It was dusk by the time he reached the Institute, and the trees overlooking the grounds were noisy with birdsong: the caw-caw of rooks, the glitch and warble of a nightingale. Nature had the upper hand over the grand artifice of the house: bindweed gripped the flagstones and the hedges were overgrown and steeped in their own musk. The east wing of the house hid under a pelt of green ivy; lilies, ripe-budded, quivered on an algae-choked pond. On the lawn, the wheels of an overturned wheelchair turned lazily. The house had let itself go.

  The lights were on in the Round Room. The sound of a small generator came from somewhere in the foundations, and, close to the door, James overheard the glinting sounds and brittle routines of dinner service. Proximity to the house increased the pressure in his temples. His limbs felt tired and the veins on his hands and arms were swollen and prominent.

  A musty air wafted out from beneath the house. Cold and damp, it reminded him of his operation to receive the implant. They had wheeled him along the rutted stone floor of the cellar then hefted him up onto the operating table. Mozart on the stereo – the surgeon preferred to operate by requiem. A large detailed photograph of the moon was suspended directly above the table for patients to contemplate as they slipped into unconsciousness. The moon grew so big, then faded. He awoke fighting. Two orderlies restrained him while Alex shouted at him to pull himself together. In a sealed yellow bag on a small trolley lay an excised part of him, marked for the incinerator. He couldn’t remember what he had lost.

  During his recovery at the Institute, he got to know the art room, the bedrooms, the communal dining room and professorial side offices partitioned within the shabby aristocratic languor of the house. The other residents were both student and patient, inmate and professor, and they came from all over the world: Neha and her sentient garden; Sunny Wu and his skilful forgeries; Jamsu, the enormous Tibetan who could sketch the shape of the unthinkable; Ken, the Yoruban prince and controller of roads. They shared a peculiar childishness and had always reminded James of physics undergraduates; brilliant, anti-social and abstracted. The first procedure every inmate underwent was to prevent the plasticity of the brain from degrading with age. Then the body was infused with adaptogens synthesized from astragalus bark, the latest in longevity treatment.

  It took him a long time to learn to want again.

  He knocked again. Alex answered the door. She had not expected him. She took him into the Round Room. The smell of Institute food mixed unappetizingly with the damp walls and distant chamber pots. Did he want something to eat? No, he did not. She ate with a plate on her lap and listened as he told the story of Eviction Night up until the point that Ruth put Agnes onto the cart.

  “So what happened next?” asked Alex Drown.

  “Hector left. I thought you should know that I’ve lost him.”

  Alex chewed her dinner and considered his dilemma.

  “So you failed to do the one thing I asked of you, and everyone in the town hates you now.”

  “Yes.”

  “You took a risk leaving Ruth on her own.”

  “The Process intended for me to die. Not her.”

  Alex finished eating and set her plate carelessly aside on the marble top of an antique table. She took a napkin from her sleeve and attended to her mouth. Clearly they were to wait for Omega John. Through the window, on the darkening lawn, the other inhabitants of the Institute took their after-dinner stroll. Sunny Wu, wearing a safari suit and glasses with transparent frames, his dark hair parted with once-fashionable asymmetry, turned back to wave at James; his hands were large and soft and intensely sensitive.

  “Why does Sunny have such big hands?” he asked
Alex.

  “It’s an experiment. The brain perceives the hands to be much bigger than they are and the same with the lips, tongue and face; more neurons are allocated to them and this results in detailed sensory information. Sunny is working on extending the range of touch, both through augmentation of the hands themselves and in the neuronal density of the parts of the brain that interpret that information. He has always been very skilled with his hands. Since the procedure, his forgeries have taken on a new quality. He forged an eggshell that, when cracked, releases albumen and yolk which react to hot oil to form a perfect round fried egg. It is only when you eat the egg that you realize it is made of paint.”

  Omega John entered the Round Room. He was much improved since their last meeting. The swelling in his skull had subsided. The alarming attenuated skin had plumped up and he seemed more sure-footed. He wore a Harris Tweed sports jacket, a red checked shirt with a brass-and-scarlet tie, soft brown moleskin trousers and no shoes or socks. His knee was swollen and he walked with the aid of a silver-tipped cane. Alex apprised him of their discussion.

  Omega John peered to the left and to the right of James.

  “Aren’t you missing something? What is it? Oh, I know. A stretcher bearer.”

  “He ran away.”

  Omega John’s smile was a lipless simper.

  “Fortunately one of our number detected Hector on the Downs and saw to his return. We’re taking a closer look at him. When you first brought him in, there was nothing within him to study. We put you two together to cook him up.”

  “He spoke,” said James.

  “Did he? He has not talked to us. But we are not solely reliant on his speech to study him. My colleague Adlan is adept at extracting information from any material and reassembling it into a coherent pattern. He can pull a dream from a sleeping dog at ten paces. Adlan has mapped the network of ideas and tensions emerging around Hector and they correspond broadly with what we know of the historical John Hector.”

  James recalled his afternoon with Hector beside the river.

  “He likes to paint birds and believes that democracy is a swizz.”

  Omega John shifted uneasily, then said, “John Hector’s role in the war is the reason the Process has recreated him. Other evidence has come to light to support this supposition. We have reports of thousands of manufactured soldiers massing at Newhaven, filling up the empty houses, waiting.”

  “Hector is not unique?”

  “He is significant,” said Alex.

  James sensed they were deliberating over how much to tell him.

  Alex said, “Hector’s story and the history of this Institute overlap. The Institute was founded by men who served alongside him in the 32nd Field Ambulance Division.”

  James asked, “Do you think the founders of the Institute and Hector knew one another?”

  “Yes. The Process is recreating the founding moment of the Institute.”

  “Why go to all the trouble of a physical recreation?”

  “You could not recreate John Hector without recreating the war that changed him,” Omega John said. “Consciousness requires biological processes but it also occupies a particular position within the network of life. Clones always die, you see, for that reason, because they have no position on the network. To reproduce a particular consciousness, you would have to recreate the instrumental network in which it arose.”

  “Is the Process broken?” James was hopeful.

  “Quite the opposite,” said Alex.

  Omega John nodded.

  “The Process continues to minimize suffering and institute optimal policies which maximize returns,” Omega John slipped into the antique, noncommittal dialect of the technocrat. “It monitors need and desire and calculates the most efficient way to allocate resources to meet those needs and gratify those desires.”

  Their rhetoric was evasive in its complexity.

  “How could war possibly be a way of minimizing suffering?” asked James. “Who desires war? Who needs it?”

  “You might as well ask those questions of history. Who desired the Great War? No nation benefitted from it. The war brought about the destruction of the Prussian Empire, stripped the British Empire of its ability to hold its colonies, slaughtered the French and starved Germany, inspired a revolution in Russia, and prepared the ground for a more terrible slaughter to come. The great powers didn’t want a war and they certainly didn’t need one. But their people wanted a war. To the surprise of the rulers across the Allies and the Central Powers, the idea of war was seized by the people of every nation, even the international brotherhood of socialists.

  “War was taken up as a way of dispelling fear about the war. A short conflict was anticipated, fought along nineteenth-century lines, producing a few casualties, a small sacrifice to release the tension and uncertainty produced by competing empires. Even men like Hector, who had been raised to loathe violence, signed up to serve. Unfortunately, this ancient faith in sacrifice met with very modern technology. War had become industrialized, and therefore so was sacrifice.”

  “The war was so long ago. What possible purpose could be served now by reenacting it?”

  Alex looked at Omega John. He tapped the floor thoughtfully with the tip of his cane.

  “My hypothesis is this: the Process, in projecting the most likely outcome in the near-future, has identified the need for a particular person. That person is dead yet the need for them remains. How to solve that problem? Well, recreate the conditions in which that person came to being.”

  “Who is that person?”

  “The founders of the Institute served alongside John Hector at Suvla Bay. One of them, Lewis Collinson, devised some of the early algorithms that formed the Process. Collinson specialized in applying quantitative thinking to problems outside of the traditional scope of measurement. Before the war, he was a meteorologist and pioneered the use of mathematical models to predict weather. As the war ground on, he devised a mathematical model to explain why the war started and, more importantly, how it could end. This was his equation of war.

  “The Institute was founded partly to explore the efficacy of Collinson’s predictive models. His application of differential equations and probability theory provided a software. A sufficiently powerful digital hardware to run such calculations on the mass scale required would not be invented for another forty years. Yet there is evidence that Collinson’s models were applied in the twenties. We don’t know how exactly. Our archive was destroyed during the collapse.”

  “The former management of the Institute deleted and burnt everything,” said Alex Drown.

  She was interrupted by a hand placed against the window. The hand was large and plump, and, when it was withdrawn, the outline of its perspiration flared on the glass. Sunny Wu’s smile was almost luminescent among the grainy blue silhouettes. Having caught their attention, he tapped his finger gently upon the glass and then pointed upwards.

  “He’s right,” said Omega John. “We should take another look at Hector.”

  They walked down the checkerboard corridors of the house, stepping discreetly around the chamber pots and buckets positioned to catch drips from the roof. They went up a flight of stairs. Oil paintings of dead aristocrats and busts of philosophers and landowners. Across the ceiling, a bold art deco mural depicted two men across a great blue dining table, its crescent moon shape dominating the terrace. In the distance, light played on the glassy surface of the Aegean Sea.

  “What is going on in this scene?” Omega John asked rhetorically, then gasped painfully onto another step. “The mural is a futurist rendering of an ancient myth. The theme is the sacrifice of the innocents. The man dressed in merchant’s robes is Mastusius, and the man with his back to us is his king, Demophon. A plague fell upon the city of Eleonte and the oracle told Demophon that a sacrifice was required to appease the gods. The names of the virgin daughters of the city were to be placed into an urn and then one would be drawn. Mastusius refused to let his daughter’
s name be included in the lottery.”

  Now Omega John gazed up at the mural, finding something within it that he had not previously considered.

  “But Demophon understood that no one could be spared the risk. All must be prepared to make the sacrifice. The king slew the daughter of Mastusius. Then, time passes. Demophon is invited to dine at the house of Mastusius. Here we see him about to drink a toast. What he does not know is that Mastusius has had both of Demophon’s daughters killed and mixed their blood with the wine.”

  “Demophon drank the blood of his children.”

  “Yes. And once he learned of their murder, he had Mastusius and his cup flung into the sea. The myth explains the unusual formation of the particular coastline on the southern tip of the Gelibolu peninsula – or Gallipoli, as it is known to some. To appease the gods, sacrificial virgins were buried alive in enormous clay jars.”

  Omega John put his hand to his distended skull. A blue vein took a sinuous course across a spotted plain of thin skin.

  “In the war, the obsession for fertilizing the earth with blood was gratified on an industrial scale. It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines.”

  At the top of the stairs, Alex held open a bedroom door. They went into the small room. Hector sat glumly on the edge of a tired single bed, illuminated by the gauzy light of a dusty lampshade. On a wicker chair opposite, in calm repose, sat an old and ravaged man wearing a collarless olive robe. His face was black, pinched and drawn, dried out over a lifetime of toil under the sun. Poverty had been thorough in its savagery; he had lost toenails and a finger, and his joints were arthritic. One eye was bloodshot, the other shone with a terrible clarity.

  Alex said, “This is Adlan, our observer.” Adlan gave James a cursory glance, ignored his offer of a handshake, then returned to his study of Hector.

  “What have you learnt from the stretcher bearer?” asked Omega John.

  Adlan’s voice was dry and heavily accented.