If Then (5 page)

They left the hothouse through a covered passage and came into the high netting of an aviary.

“The beginning of my collection,” he said. A tall tree rose to the top of the aviary, its branches smooth as carbon rods, their configurations unnatural in the way they bent back toward the trunk.

“A tree router. You may remember at the beginning of the Process that we planted one of these next to the school.”

James sidled next to Alex, “Is this your work?”

“A collaboration between my employers and the Institute.”

With two strong wing beats, a large rook settled on a near branch, its black eyes registering their appearance.

“He sees you,” said Omega John. “The stripe stores that impression, and then it is carried through the router tree to the computational matter.”

“Where is that kept?”

Omega John shrugged.

“Here and there. We dispersed it to ensure redundancy. Alex is the expert on that.”

“Distributed computing. There’s no centralization in nature, either. We’re exploring correlations between the digital and biological. Some of them are merely analogous but significant findings indicate that, operationally, we can move data from one to the other. My employers tasked me with safeguarding their proprietorial algorithms in the event of failure and noise in the digital network. The Seizure was that event. I’d been tracking the work of the Institute for a long time; they always seemed close to finding a way of running algorithms on a biological substrate, but they had a number of setbacks.”

Omega John snorted humourlessly at this veiled reference.

“But it’s more than a backup. Shifting our intellectual property into the biosphere has accelerated its evolution. Biofeedback is so much more granular than user behaviour.”

The rook, having measured them with its regal gaze, gnawed briefly at the smooth rod of the branch, then flew up to a higher vantage point.

“We’ve restored the algorithm to its native habitat.” Omega John’s lips were dry, and he held an empty hand up into which an orderly placed a drink carton. “Biological processes are inherently algorithmic, designed by nature to solve computational problems across all levels of life: molecular, cellular and at the level of the organism; you, the rook, and then a group of organisms, your town.” He could not puncture the carton with the sharp end of the white straw. The orderly performed this tiny act for him. Omega John took a single sip, shook his head, and handed it back. The fluid leaked out of the corner of his mouth, and had to be dabbed away.

“Nature uses algorithms to model the cost of behaviour in terms of energy. The biological sphere of our world is designed to compute. In nature, the mass behaviour of organism is an equation designed to arrive at optimal use of resources.”

Their discussion became too technical for James; he knew it was for his benefit, that they hoped to impart some understanding of his situation so that he could perform his role within it. In all his visits to the Institute, all the way back to his convalescence when he was first fitted with the implant, he had never been to this part of the grounds. He pointed this out. Omega John sighed.

“The appearance of Hector is – as Alex used to so tiresomely say – a game changer.” His contempt for the idiom of digital business was the closest he came to humour.

Alex said, “Making soldiers is not an optimal use of resources. It’s more like a peacock’s tail, a display of redundancy to advertise fitness to potential mates.”

“Like art or war,” explained Omega John. “We need to study the Process further, to catch up, as it has exceeded the limits of our understanding. That is where you come in.”

“We want you to understand the importance of our work,” said Alex. “In terms of the future.”

He had long since lost interest in the future.

The path ended in a low white picket gate and fence, beyond which there was a single apple tree, a wicker chaise longue and a rusty hookah.

“My private garden. My sanctuary,” said Omega John. His orderlies helped him to his feet. He bent over and knocked the gate off its latch, and shuffled in his sleeping bag to the chaise longue. “My work with the Process does not afford me as much time to think as I would like. I’ve been dallying with Paracelsus, a hero of mine. He was an independent thinker, a wanderer and iconoclast. He moved through colleges, dissatisfied by them all. He served as an army surgeon. A noble position to take, the healer amidst the war.”

He beckoned to James, and then pointed out a small trowel to the bailiff.

“Dig,” he commanded. “Dig here.”

James ran his fingers across the soil, and finding earth with some give, he dug into it with the trowel, then set aside a section of soil.

“You’ll have to reach inside,” said Omega John. “Do you feel it?”

James slid his fingers into the mulch and, finding nothing other than soil and leaf matter, he set himself to lean deeper into the ground. His fingertips brushed against something smooth and dreadfully organic.

“That’s it,” said Omega John. “Careful now, reach in with both hands and bring it to the surface.”

He dug in with his other hand, and grasped both edges of the thing, and it sagged in the middle as he lifted it up. Brushing aside the soil, it was a large organ of some sort, too large for a human, he guessed. He passed it over to Omega John, who located a stitched seam; he untied a knot, and unlaced the catgut so that the organ parted neatly, revealing a massy bloody interior. The smell of something fetid and fungal.

“Closer, look.”

He felt thoughts reach out from his implant, the god stuff, the wisdom that came from without. Omega John was still talking about Paracelsus, how true wisdom lay in the discovery of the latent forces of Nature, but what he was showing James, what James saw wriggling in the horse’s womb was a private vision: he saw tiny white homunculi, seven of them mewling with foetal features, their feet fused in a lazy tail; nestled in blood, the sperm of Omega John growing in his garden.

4

H
ector stood naked
and at ease in the bathroom. James washed him by candlelight, dressed him in a pair of homemade pyjamas, then led Hector to the cellar and lay him down to bed. In the weeks since they took him in, Hector’s hair had grown out into dark curls, his haunted gaze relaxing into a casual tired regard.

Market day was bright and cool. The moss on the brickwork was white with frost. The stalls set up around the war monument ran along the connecting thoroughfares of Market Lane and School Hill. He stood behind his front door, at the bottom of the stairs, and listened to the town go about its business; everyone was so polite, almost reverentially so. The subtle nod of recognition that passed between the folk. A talent for forgetting is necessary to maintain civility. James stepped out of his house and into the throng, with Hector following dutifully behind.

The sounds of market day: hooves skittering cautiously upon cobblestones; the to-and-fro of barter echoing under the brickwork arches of the bell tower; the creak of burdened cart wheels. Produce was laid out on the pavement, root vegetables on upturned palettes attended to by the Dutch farmer from Welsummer. He couldn’t remember her name. She was gnomish in three layers of woollens and a blue woollen beanie, black trousers tapering to sturdy boots. Three times outsiders had squatted at Welsummer, and twice he had chased them away with appeals to their good sense, only for the squatters to return in greater numbers. When the Process selected them for a third eviction, he went back in the armour and that was that. They were outsiders and one of them died under his iron tread. The farmer did not speak to him when he passed her by; her rough hands paused in their task of sorting bundles of rosemary and her gaze, rustic in duration, followed Hector.

Not all of the stalls were useful. Some townsfolk were there just to be part of something – the old men with broken suitcases full of foraged toys and bruised apples, the grey-haired women selling the surplus of their communes: old Coke bottles of bitter cider, hand-printed pamphlets, nettle jam and circuit boards. He sought out Piper’s lad and his wares of dressed pheasant, squirrels and skinned rabbits. James bought two brace from the boy, noting his swollen fingers, bloodied from gutting, as they whiffled through the livid green notes of local currency. At the end of the transaction, James touched his heart to indicate his satisfaction and the lad did the same.

He walked the orderly line of repairmen with individual placards detailing skills offered and services required. This was residual behaviour, rendered unnecessary by the Process. Their skills and availability would be sorted algorithmically and bartered accordingly with other townspeople and their labour; that was how the Process generated the core work schedule for the town, and gave meaning to labour that had become meaningless. But the market had a role to play that was more than trade. It was a social occasion, a chance to get out, to see and be seen. The metrics of happiness required old rituals, old ways of doing things, and so time was set aside within the work schedule for the townspeople to make their own trades.

A repairman, bald and heavy, his stripe glistening with sweat, risked an ingratiating stoop before him.

“Do you have any little jobs you need doing around the place? I’m up this street next week repairing the roof of the town hall. It’d be no trouble.” And then the bald man whispered, “It’s free to the bailiff.”

James ignored the offer, and went over to where Ruth stood in line with the other seamstresses. Her samples were slung over her arm: dresses, children’s clothes, shirts and hair ribbons. He touched her hand, noting the callouses upon her fingertips, how they seemed so much older than her face; her hands were aged by all the midnights she spent at a table under the sash window, working her hand-turned sewing machine by candlelight. When the machine was hot with work, it gave off the frazzled lint and tobacco ghosts of its previous owner. She kissed him and then steered him away. His presence intimidated potential customers and she was intent upon securing a trade on market day.

At the war memorial, he pulled Hector to him so that they could read the names of local casualties of sundry wars. The longest entry was from the First World War.

“Here are the names of the dead, from your time.”

Hector’s pale grey eyes gazed obediently at the lettering and the numbers.

“Do you remember the war?”

Hector was close to finding his voice, his throat and mouth worked in anticipation of speaking.

“Do you remember anything? Why are you here?”

No answers to his questions, not yet.

They were interrupted by a woman in stout boots and a long brightly-coloured felt coat, of similar stature to James and therefore considerably taller than the stretcher bearer. This was Councillor Edith Von Pallandt.

“Is this him?” asked Edith, putting her hand upon Hector’s clavicle so that she could appraise him. She gestured to her husband to come out of the crowd so that he too could examine the manufactured man. Baron Von Pallandt had shaved his grey hair close to the scalp to accentuate the raised central ridge of his stripe.

“What is your opinion of the stretcher bearer?” she asked her husband rhetorically.

“Not good, Edith.”

“We need to talk about your soldier,” she announced.

“He does not belong to me,” said James.

“He lives in your house. He eats your food. He does eat, doesn’t he?” For a vegetarian, her smile was distinctly carnivorous. “You are responsible for him. We live in a very delicate state of balance.” Edith held both hands out palms flat, weighing out invisible forces. “When you consider who we have lost, we must be very careful as to who we gain. Have you found more of these soldiers on your patrols?”

“I have not been out since. The Institute told me to monitor Hector so I keep him with me at all times. I am afraid that if I take him back to the Downs, the Process will come on too quickly and we will lose him without learning anything.”

“What do you hope to learn?”

“I am only doing as the Institute requested.”

“Their request makes sense. You are our most qualified individual when it comes to the inhuman.”

She didn’t expect him to respond to her sarcasm and instead put her hand upon his arm by way of coercion.

“We are due another list of evictions.” Her fingers pinched at her necklace for comfort.

“Already?”

“Yes. We thought we had reached a stable state but it seems not.”

“We believe your soldier is the cause,” said the Baron. “He is the new element.”

The market day crowd pushed between them and against them. Edith put her hand up to indicate that they would speak no more of it in public, and he agreed to visit the council soon.

All the people of Lewes came into town for allocation day, keen to discover what the Process had in mind for their future. Would there be a box allocated to Hector too? If there was, did that mean the Process had intended all along for him to become a member of the folk? If Edith was right, and Hector was the cause of the increase in the number of evictions, then surely reason would dictate that Hector’s name would be on the next eviction list. He shivered at the prospect of receiving the list; as Edith hinted, the dictation of the list was one of those moments when he was inhuman.

As noon approached, the people gathered down School Hill. James found Ruth among them. She shared her gains with him – a gallon of barley wine in exchange for two smocks, an agreement to unblock the waste pipe in return for running repairs to a family’s clothes – and then, anxious for the allocation, they fell in step with the quickly moving crowd. Hector walked between them and Ruth took the soldier’s hand.

“How has he been?”

“Something in him wants to speak,” said James. Edith’s remark, her hint that he was inhuman continued to nag at him. It was the way she did not expect him to respond; either she considered him slow-witted or perhaps she did not believe his feelings were of any concern.

“Was I ever like Hector?”

“When?”

“In the months after the implant.” He remembered his room at the Institute, how Ruth had knitted a pair of gloves at his bedside throughout his convalescence. Every turn of the needle brought another part of him back into the pattern of his self.

“You were scattered. It took a while for you to come back. I was knitting you a pair of gloves and they were ready before you were.”

“I remember the feel of the gloves on my hands and Alex explaining to me that the gloves were not part of me. Did I give up too much to become the bailiff?”

“Change is part of life.”

“Edith said there will be more evictions.”

Ruth looked at the ground. “It’s so hard to know what is right.”

“She said that I was inhuman.” He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You will tell me, won’t you, if I stop being me? You promised.”

Her eyes quickly brimmed with tears, and she nodded quickly and wiped them away at the same time.

At the bottom of School Hill, the market day crowd merged with the men and women trooping in from the outlying estates and villages, their particular district denoted by the patterns upon their baggy knitted jumpers: yellow and black for Nevill, the black and white of Cliffe, the red and black of Southover, the purple and black of Glynde, and so on, as far afield as the blue and white of Isfield. Children rode on the back of empty carts, the whites of their eyes shining in lean dirty faces. Ruth’s hand tightened around his. They found their place among the people and walked over the bridge and to the allocation point.

Outside the old supermarket, peeling posters showed bleached photographs of bygone normality, goods and prices, smiling faces, times of plenty, the strangeness of the lost everyday. Even the markings of the car park – sigils depicting family units and disability – evoked a peculiar nostalgia. The building was a low single-storey warehouse, shuttered and silent. The people at the front of the crowd settled at the entrance, and the rest fell into an easy dawdle. He tried to remember what it used to be like here but he had almost no specific memories of shopping, just so many dreams of unthinking gliding automation.

The shutters rattled up. The aisles were organized according to district and then, within that scheme, alphabetical order of family name. Stacked upon the shelves, the transparent boxes holding each citizen’s allocation from the Process. The marshals supervised the people as they filed in and took what had been provided for them. The boxes were transparent so that each person could see what another had been given. The boxes contained some local currency, with the rest of the contents specific to each citizen, usually raw materials for their work – new tools, medicines, ammunition, and, in Ruth’s case, yards of cloth and cotton thread. The Process aggregated the needs and desires of the townspeople for clothes, scored them alongside Ruth’s requirements, and arranged barter of goods and services accordingly. The town’s currency was for discretionary goods, a sop to the lost pleasures of shopping. In addition to barter, the workload also included tasks involved in the upkeep of the town: which repairs to perform or supervise, repairs to old buildings and new ones, water supply and sewage, fences and security posts. Every man and woman had their allocation of tasks in maintaining the infrastructure of Lewes. Then there were envelopes holding private communications from the Process. These were two or three lines of typescript offering solace or advice on personal matters, consisting mostly of quotations of commonplace sentiment with the occasional aberrant glitchy phrase.

Ruth showed him the cloth that she had been allocated, white linen for the gowns of lamentation, and yards of black crepe, black silk and black lace.

“Were there instructions?”

She nodded. Her mouth was small and set. He asked her what the instructions were. She shook her head.

He looked for Hector’s allocation, scanning through the shelves set aside for his district. There was no sign of a box for the stretcher bearer; he did not require much by way of food but his presence did upset the fine balance of their allocation. The shelves were mostly empty and a few townsfolk, dissatisfied with their lot, wandered the aisles in memory of the days when there was a manager they could complain or appeal to. He liked to collect his box last so that any curious townsperson could check what he had been given and know that the bailiff did not receive any special treatment. Perhaps Hector’s box had been put with his allocation.

He was connected to the stretcher bearer in a way that he hadn’t considered before. He could be blithe in that way, too quick to adapt to the new normal. The stretcher bearer had been lying on the wire when he found him. On his patrol route. His planned patrol route. The Process knew he would be there. Knew he would find the stretcher bearer. The Institute had asked him to look after the stretcher bearer so that he could be studied, but perhaps he’d already been given those very orders. Hector’s presence in his life suggested that a change in his workload lay ahead, perhaps even a revision of the role of bailiff itself. He had thoroughly adapted to being the bailiff – no, more than that, he had given up so much of himself to live this role that change could only be negative judgement on his performance.

The townspeople assumed the role of bailiff was a position of power and responsibility. They were half right. He was certainly responsible. Patrol was easy, being tall and strong and brooding protectively around the town. But Eviction Night took an increasing toll on him, the kind of losses only he would notice, numb patches in conversation where he simply didn’t know what to say. Some memories had been amputated, their experiential content mussed up and obscure, but their emotional content remaining as a sharp and persistent pain like a phantom limb. And he noticed that he wasn’t funny anymore. He used to make Ruth laugh and could always bring her back to him with his sad funny blue eyes. The implant affected his sleep patterns and he had aged dreadfully around the eyes, the skin around his ocular sockets shadow-stained and wrinkled.