If Then (30 page)

The distant peak of Imbros is gone. The destroyers also. The waves foam and slide over a pebbled shore, not a sandy one. The infinite variety of shapes and shades of pebble under the soles of his feet are familiar, as are the hunks of chalk from blasted cliffs, and further out, the rock pools in low tide. It is the same beach he came to with Ruth on his honeymoon. He is home again.

He undresses, leaving his lice-ridden dirty uniform on the beach. Naked, he wades into the water. It is so much colder than before. He dives into a wave.

He only really learnt to swim under Ruth’s instruction. Ruth taught him to balance his body in the upper water, to hold himself below the meniscus and kick back with his arms thrown forward, heels coming together, offering up the least resistance.

Before he met Ruth, he was a broad-shouldered boy, raw and suspicious. He expected no good from his fellow man. That was how he was raised in an unequal country. The state was a gothic ruin. He learnt not to call it a collapse. Words like crash, collapse, depression were merely alibis. It was the Seizure. You let them take everything or you perished like dumb animals.

The waters close over the dead. The broken ends of normal life are joined together again. For the sacrifices people made after the collapse, there was sentiment and acceptance, even pride; but the suffering was a matter for silence.

His skin adapts to the temperature of the water. The cold brings on the thrill of being alive. Every breath is an exultation. He looks back to where the breakfast fires are burning, hundreds of small campfires with their huddles of manufactured men. The firing party approach the beach, a squad of fifteen soldiers and tagging behind, the MO, Doctor Blore. Even his death will not be private. He will die alone, blindfolded. But the implant will pass on his last thoughts. It is infuriating that even his final moment will be taken, recorded, owned.

Underground is his only respite from the Process.

Underground or underwater.

He breathes quickly and rapidly, oxygenating his blood and then he dives down, kicking again and again, seeking a depth from which there will be no way back. He opens his eyes. The pressure builds in his lungs. He pushes the water away and brings his hands together at his chest, in the repetitive praying action of the stroke. He will not give in. He swims deeper and fancies he sees something at the bottom of the sea, a spotlight rising through the watery gloom and a hand reaching up to him, the hand of the armour.

24

T
wo stretcher bearers
carried Alex upstairs to her bed. Ruth laid a coarse blanket gently over her; she had a thousand yard stare, wide-eyed and oblivious, gone from this world yet longing for another. Then Ruth settled the children down in the corner of the room on sheets and blankets stripped from their parents’ bed.

On the dewy pasture surrounding the village, soldiers slept in the bell tents and on groundsheets. The evicted, dressed in what she took for Turkish uniforms, marched throughout the night; it was not their boots clumping on the road that kept her awake, but the sick unwashed smell of them that wafted in now and again through the window. A column of evicted headed out from Saddlescombe on an eastern route back toward Lewes; she imagined them continuing on the very path she had hoped to take toward Firle, then striking south into the war zone.

In the long hour before dawn, her anxiety became unbearable. Something in her chest lurched downward, and she clutched at her pulse; part of her had given James up for dead, testing if she could survive the loss of him. It seemed not. Then she drifted into dreams in which he was with her again, and they were talking in sensible terms about what would be the best course of action. Losing him would, she realized, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of negotiation and habit. That code would vanish. Her thoughts would be unobserved, her memories would be hers alone, without the heft that comes from sharing them with another. She would become insubstantial to herself.

Such thoughts were selfish. She resolved to think of him, and his pain, and his fear. In her dream, she searched for James among the crowds of soldiers; she found him, said his name, kissed him, and dragged him back to her.

She was woken by Agnes whimpering questioningly in her sleep. Ruth spoke to her, told her there was nothing to worry about, that she should rest.

If he had not had the implant, then she would have had a child with James. Not long before the collapse, a friend of hers, a lawyer called Virginia, the mother of two boys, confessed that she’d had her third child aborted: two children was the optimal number for their life chances, and to have three children in uncertain times would be irresponsible and incontinent. Virginia had stayed in London throughout the collapse and, when the Seizure followed soon after, she thrived. Virginia’s unsentimental approach to family planning was one that Ruth approved of and, at the time, shared. Of all her friends, she had always been the woman who didn’t want babies. But that was a decision she had taken when she was, what, eighteen? It had been a gesture toward an identity, like being a vegetarian or refusing to drive. Then James had the implant, and she turned thirty-five, and her hunger for a child of her own was, briefly, quite beyond reason.

The Process would be aware of this need. Her data had a growing zero at its core.

After the Process used James to commit violence, he would return home for dinner, hungry but oblivious, his cutlery scraping against her mother’s crockery while he stared fixedly ahead. These were the nights when he slept with his eyes open. The idea of having a child with him in this condition was revolting.

All this time, she had been waiting. Waiting for him to be restored to normal, but now she understood what the thousand-yard stare meant: he was gone from this world yet longing for another.

After dawn, she dozed fitfully. The children went downstairs and ate breakfast alongside their parents, who remained oblivious to them. Clean morning sun shone through the open window. Alex had wet the bed and needed to be bathed.

Ruth took a bucket and went to fetch water from the village well. Soldiers lolled around in the sunshine on the green, reading and writing letters. She queued among them. Jane wiped down the tables outside the estaminet. A monoplane passed overhead, a big wooden dove with a curved wingspan and tail feathers, the wings marked with the iron cross. The soldiers did not look up.

Father Huxley said hello to her. He acknowledged her whereas the others did not.

“Did you speak to the general?” he asked.

“I found the children,” she replied.

“Good.” Huxley was concerned and distracted, smoking with a reflective intensity. Were these manufactured men subject to the same diseases as real flesh, she wondered; could their cells mutate into a cancer or were they merely animated statues, solid, fixed, and not ageing?

Huxley said, “I’ve been thinking about you. About what you said. You believe we have become evil.”

“Yes.” The queue for the water advanced a step.

“The war will be unpleasant work, I have no doubt about that. But we must work upon the world. We must act, and not merely reflect. Don’t you feel that?”

“I don’t see how I can act in a way that will make things better.”

“You are troubled by the dictates of your conscience. You need not be. Your work is to look after these children, and that is a clear moral good, is it not? ‘It is the supreme human happiness to work upon the world.’ Do you know William James?”

She did not.

“The Latin for work is
operari
, as in the operation. Do you see? Work is an operation that connects us all.”

Huxley was alluding to the operations performed in the barn upon the evicted. In him, the Process was self-reflective, the surface of the brain folded in upon itself, gazing at its own image. She had been told, time and again, that the Process could not be self-aware. That it was merely algorithms. But what if thought itself was algorithmic? Watch the routines of a cat as it stalks out its territory, scratching posts, rubbing its scent upon plants and bare feet; around and around it goes, the same every day, the routine sorts the world into a form that its tiny brain can grasp. We invest the cat with will and intention, but it is really a little engine of routine and response. Could it be that, as the baron said, we are merely data beasts?

“You have such an air of wisdom,” said Huxley. “And I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Ruth. I am not wise. I just know what happens.”

“Yes. Because you live in my future? Is this future, as Wells and Kipling predict, a world without nations and a terrible war from the air? Are the streets of London thronged with autonomous mechanical devices? Is there no more labour and does every citizen enjoy a life of leisure?”

“There is no more labour, for some. Machines make just enough for us so that we can survive. But it is not a life of leisure. Every day is strange, threatening and uncertain. We are not in control of our lives.”

“That is a description of the soldier’s life. Is there war in the future?”

“There are revolts, but they are quickly suppressed.”

“When I am at the front, I experience the
esprit de corps
. Many souls combined in one mind. Sometimes, when I am giving mass, our souls seem unified in the process, and then the feelings I am part of seem to be of a higher order than any I have known as a lone individual.”

“I don’t think there is a higher order,” she said. “But there is a deeper order.”

A soldier took her bucket and filled it from the well. She carried it back to the estaminet, and Huxley walked alongside her.

“It seems to us as if our being is fragmented,” he admitted, “because we have been driven from the source, and are far from it, and must return to it. We are scattered throughout the realm. Have you read Kipling? He’s quite pantheistic. To read Kipling is to live alongside the animals, and he’s very good on machines too, airships and the like. He has an eastern soul. I visited him in Batemans and his books are marked with the Hindu symbol of the swastika.” Huxley draws it in the air with his fingertip. “Four arms, crooked like so, a wheel. The swastika is a symbol for the higher self or goodness.”

“I know what a swastika is. It has a very different meaning to me.”

“Ruth, the purpose of our journey is obscure but there
is
a purpose. Our work will mollify the brutality of creation.”

She did not want him to follow her inside. But she was curious.

“Are you afraid of dying?”

Huxley took out another cigarette.

“If I’m killed, I shall just change my state, that’s all.” He brushed his hair back with his hand.

Death was so prevalent in the village, so close at hand. Death had lost its abstraction; it had moved from some distant point to under her very feet. Her nerves trembled with death and what it delivered: irretrievable loss, a cruel ending. It was right there. A shadow on the cobbled pavement.

She turned to Huxley. “My husband is a stretcher bearer,” whispered Ruth. “His name is James. If you meet him at the front, tell him that his wife loves him, and wants him to stay safe because she will make everything right for him again.”

S
he heated
two pans of water on the stove, bathed Alex, and then went to the well for more water to wash the children. The morning passed in the pleasing servitude of parenting. At noon, there was shouting at the barn, a voice that was uncontrolled, desperate and terrified. Hearing it also, Christopher Von Pallandt emerged from the doorway of a cottage, still in his nightshirt. He looked at her as if to ask:
should we do something
?

She lowered her head and continued with her task. He put on some trousers as a prelude to action, but then the shouting stopped, which he interpreted as a sign that the disturbance was over. He stepped back into the cottage and closed the door.

Later, Christopher came into the estaminet for lunch. Jane served him egg and chips. Ruth pulled a stool up to his table.

“What do you think the shouting was about, this morning?”

He looked carefully down into his food.

Ruth said, “Do you know what is happening in the barn?”

“They are putting in implants,” he admitted. “It’s the same operation that I went through. That your husband went through.”

“He chose it. So did you.”

Christopher had high aristocratic cheekbones. His hair was growing back, with a severe isosceles triangle carefully trimmed at the base of his skull to expose the implant. The lower half of his front teeth folded over one another; an aberration that, in the past, would have been fixed.

“Are you going to ask me to do the right thing?” he asked, continuing to eat.

“Why does the Process need a person in the armour?” she said. “Have you ever asked yourself that?”

Christopher chewed and considered.

“Is it symbolic?”

“The Process needs our minds and bodies to function,” she said. “It can make thousands of soldiers that look and talk like people, but it requires our desires, our needs. Our souls, perhaps.”

“You’ve been speaking to Huxley,” said Christopher. He had learnt his drawl from his father; his vocal cords had not been as thoroughly smoked as those of the baron, and the high note at the end of his question betrayed his youthful enthusiasm. “Have you read Huxley’s books? There is a room dedicated to him in the library at the Institute. He helped create the Institute, you know, before he lost his faith. He hung himself from an oak tree in the garden. It still grows there.”

More soldiers filed in for lunch, swearing and grumbling.

“I seem to be invisible to the soldiers,” she said.

“You are in a different network to them. There are a few people who connect the various networks. Huxley is one. He was very important to Omega John: as an archaeologist, he understood science and evolution, but it was his mystical beliefs that helped conceptualize what came next.”

Christopher liked to exhibit his learning, and this was not offensive to her.

“The Institute was founded after the war by old soldiers. Omega John was given his particular nickname by Huxley. The priest saw him as a harbinger of a revolution in consciousness: an end of one way of being, and the beginning of another. Such a revolution was necessary to prevent war from recurring.”

Already, Christopher understood more about the Process than James. He had the confident freedom of intellect that came with never experiencing defeat. No one had taken him aside and demonstrated the risks entailed in conviction.

“Huxley wrote that life is a network that must be advanced at one and the same time. Not merely in sequence, but from every point in space. Evolution progresses toward complexity. But the more complex the network, the more advanced the being, the greater the capacity for suffering. Huxley was a Catholic priest, after all. Increasing the connectivity between networks increases the capacity for consciousness to consider itself, to know that it knows, to become the object of its own reflection, and from that realization come the abstractions of reason, art, ideas, and an undertow of great sorrow.”

She did not know what it meant to be merely a node in a network; put simply,
what could you do?
As Christopher spoke, the soldiers on the next table listened to him, and muttered sardonic asides: his theories were grand, but they could not stand up to reality. He did not want to look at the soldiers, and so he put his right hand over his right eye.

“Interconnected consciousness is as complex as nature gets. This is what the Institute was founded to explore.”

“What does that mean in the real world?” she asked.

He was exasperated and excited. He did not look at her but spoke down at the table, as if verifying the version of the world he was describing.

“Huxley asserts that the basic fact of being human is that each of us is bound by every physical and spiritual strand of our being to that which surrounds us. We are a point in the network of life. ‘We are neither the spider nor the fly; we are the dew that settles upon the web at night and evaporates by noon.’”

She noticed the young black hairs on the back of his right hand half-covering his face, the fingers thoughtfully needling his scalp.

“The Institute was exploiting network effects long before the internet. With the advent of the internet and dispersed digital entry points, a generation offered up private data in return for the attention of the network. Consciousness has a weakness for attention, for witnesses and self-regard. This data was sorted to predict the future state of the network. The predictions of future behaviour by the Process advanced. The bailiff does not merely punish those who have transgressed; he removes the people that the data indicates will be the nexus of disturbances in the future. The ability of the Process to model behaviour also makes for convincing simulations of the past. It knows why we will do what we will do, and why we did what we did. When the free and open digital networks were compromised, the Institute already had a head start on replacing them: they would move the monitoring of the network and algorithmic searching of its data onto a biological substrate developed from the brain tissue of Omega John.”