Super state, p.9
Super-State, page 9
‘Very nice omelette,’ he said.
She launched into conversation, ‘Dr Potts, I come from a very united family. The Barganes are not prosperous, although SAC is helping us. Perhaps that’s why we are united. We all support the other members of the family. I don’t understand how your family is – well, all to pieces. I wonder if you understand it.’
He said between mouthfuls. ‘It’s none of your business.’
‘I think it is. Your son is a fine man. I really love him. Do you know how I met him? It was at the wedding. I was working as a waitress. When that herd of mustangs almost stampeded into the guests, any number of people could have been killed and injured. But Oldy jumped on to the back of the lead stallion. I saw him do it. It was wonderful. He turned the herd around. The sort of thing you used to see in films. A real hero! You should be proud to have a son like that.’
‘Just let me have my supper in peace, if you don’t mind.’
She went and sat at the chair opposite him, confronting him across the table.
‘Dr Potts, perhaps this talk makes you feel uncomfortable. How do you think Oldy feels? When we were getting to know each other, he broke down, crying. Yes, crying. Because he had been disowned. And then his sister. You have a daughter. Josie, is it? You disowned her too. What kind of a man can you be? Disown your own children? I don’t understand how you could do that. Now you’ve left your wife?’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Oh, well, if you won’t talk …’ She sighed. ‘There’s a room upstairs at the back of the house you can have. I’ll show you.’
Daniel put his knife and fork precisely together in the centre of his empty plate. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He drained his wine glass before rising from the table.
Despite the threat of impending war, Jack Harrington had opened a new art gallery in the business section of Brussels. The private view had gone well. Jack was as cheerful as he was impeccably dressed when he arrived home.
Rose Baywater was at the computer, working on her sixteenth chapter.
I came to the very lip of the cliff, where turf gave way to nothingness. There lay the golden beach and there the vast ocean – vast but, on this day of days, mine, all mine. As if it sensed my mood, its waves were growing smaller, and retreating, revealing shimmering sand the colour of a Pharaoh’s gold.
My curls were blowing in the warm breeze. And I told myself aloud, as I flung my arms out to embrace the blue air, ‘How wonderful is this glorious world!’
As I was about to –
She broke off, saved her work, and went to greet Jack.
Jack was removing the cork from a bottle of Australian Shiraz. He told Rose of the event, and of what paintings had been sold. Three very good Morsbergers had gone, and the collection of West Coast Expressionism had been popular. Amy Haze, the amaroli woman, had bought a large Diebenkorn.
‘What is amaroli?’ asked Rose.
‘It’s an old Hindu custom. Apparently, it helps you prolong life.’
‘What is it, exactly?’
‘Well, Rose, I wonder you haven’t heard. La Haze is well known for the business. Amaroli is drinking your own piss.’
‘Really, Jack. You’re joking, aren’t you? How horrid!’
‘Apparently it contains melatonin or something, if taken early in the morning.’
‘Disgusting.’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’
‘You don’t know anything.’
As the red wine frolicked into the glasses, Jack was moved to tease Rose, saying that Amygdella Haze was a pretty woman, though not in the first flush of youth. ‘Perhaps a spoonful of sugar per glass and her piss might even taste quite pleasant.’
She rebuked him for being so coarse. Then she began suddenly to cry. Tears burst from her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, and splashed on the tiled floor.
‘You’re as bad as my father. He was always joking about such things. He thought the human body was very nasty. He told me my body was nasty. I’ve never forgotten it. It was my twelfth birthday. I’ve always suffered. You know how I’ve hated my body – I won’t say anything about yours. All its hairy bits. All its smells. And then there’s pissing, as you call it. You may not think my body is nasty, but I do.’ Fresh tears fell. She rushed about, looking for a box of tissues. Finding one, she mopped her face.
Jack looked on, uttering calming words. He had witnessed this sorry performance previously, and many times. He knew how easily his partner’s mind was disturbed.
When she had calmed somewhat, he put a dapper arm round her shoulders. She did not shrug it off, though an occasional sob shook her body. Jack kissed her damp cheek. She blew her nose.
‘Come upstairs, Rose, darling. I want to undress you and show you just how much I love your body.’
‘It’s so ugly.’
‘It’s beautiful. I want to lick it all over.’
‘Oh, Jack, but I’ve got to finish the vital chapter sixteen …’
‘You can do that later. First, I have to deal with you …’
The Roddenberry was a tiny needle in the lethal immaculacy of space. Beyond its hull loomed Jupiter. Its stresses could be felt as they entered the magnetosphere. Outside the ship, electromagnetic radiation and charged particles were storming across the spectrum. Within, all was silent with tension, and squalid. A halitus clung like a globular fog about the mouths of the three crew. Two of them dangled from lockers in their sleeping bags like giant cocoons, while the third member worked at an exercise bike wedged into the narrow space. He counted under his breath the number of revolutions he was making, watching the figures notch up on the odometer.
245. 246. 247 …
He continued to pedal, aware of how much bone weight he had lost in the year-long journey to the gas giant.
The other two crew members watched the screens with a certain sense of disappointment now that they were almost at journey’s end. Jupiter was not quite the vividly coloured object depicted in the prints on which they had been brought up. The methane in the giant planet’s atmosphere was absorbing so much light that Jupiter appeared pasty.
The wafer-thin rings were above the spacecraft. They revolved about the parent body as they did because electromagnetic forces acting upon them counteracted the force of gravity. Those electronic forces, acting also upon the Roddenberry, only half-a-million kilometres from the Jovian core, created a slender rival halo around the ship, to which particles were constantly attracted, and from which they rapidly departed.
The ship was travelling in a realm of violent motion. A perpetual drizzle of sub-micron-sized dusts rained against the sides of the craft. Its occupants could but pray that larger fast-moving objects from beyond the Jovian system did not come winging in to puncture their shell, as had happened earlier in the journey, to the ruination of their refrigeration system.
Jupiter’s gravitational power was also having its effect on the Roddenberry, causing it alternating slight shrinkages and expansions. These changes resonated with a gloomy note.
Bang boom ba-ang boom bang bang boo-oom …
However, the mood of the crew members was, on the whole, optimistic. Over the radioscan came a continuous series of three dots, repeated regularly at four-minute intervals. The signal came from the Spock.
The Spock was an automated return ship, in orbit round the satellite Europa, some 43,000 kilometres ahead. This crewless return ship, stocked with fuel and food, had been in position for three weeks already, awaiting the arrival of the Roddenberry and its human crew. To that human crew, the survival of the return ship in the surrounding hazardous environment was nothing short of a miracle – and not only a technological miracle. Without the Spock, they were dead ducks.
Before they could dock with it, however, their priority mission was to descend to the surface of Europa and determine if any form of life existed under the ice packs there.
This was the great grave question. If there was no life on Europa, then there was pretty conclusively no life anywhere in the solar system but on Earth. This, despite the system’s wide variety of possible environments.
So then – the likelihood that life existed elsewhere in the universe would seem to be greatly lessened. And the possibility that human consciousness was a random and isolated freak of nature greatly increased. Most people – if they thought about it at all – viewed the prospect of solitude amid a galaxy of 1,000,000,000,000 stars, all of the planets of which were entirely empty of anything resembling intelligent life, as terrifying, the ultimate in existential dread.
Somewhere close, ahead of the Roddenberry, lay their proposed target, the satellite Europa. It was for a landing on Europa that Rick O’Brien, Kathram Villiers and Alexy Stromeyer had forfeited over a year of their terrestrial lives – had given up the chance to breathe fresh air, to run in the park, to watch rugger matches, to train a dog to jump through a hoop, to swim in the Aegean, to see winter turn to spring, to eat moules marinières in a seaside restaurant, and to pursue pretty girls.
Target Europa was hostile enough – bathed in an incessant shower of electrons, protons, and heavier ions. Suddenly, now they were closing on their target, the chances of finding life there seemed depressingly unlikely.
Alexy Stromeyer climbed off the exercise bike and signalled briefly to Earth through dense interference.
‘Hi! Alexy Stromeyer calling from the Roddenberry. We are now making our final approach to Europa. Happy to report that the ARS – automated return ship – code name Spock, is in position and functioning correctly. Next bulletin will be from surface of Europa if all goes well. ‘Bye Earth. Out.’
The crew had hardly spoken to one another for weeks. They had run out of things to say. There was no hostility between them: merely a profound isolation of spirit, a loss of élan vital.
Now Alexy said, ‘I’m fucking starving.’
‘There’s some yoghurt,’ suggested Rick O’Brien from his chrysalis.
‘It’s rotten.’
‘But edible …’
Gustave de Bourcey, President of the EU, had summoned his cabinet to the palace of San Guinaire, outside Brussels. Heads of the armed forces were also present, including General Fairstepps and Air Chief Marshal Souto. Souto had brought his adjutant, Captain Masters, along.
The cabinet as a whole opposed de Bourcey’s determination to declare war on Tebarou. Their argument was that internal concerns were of far greater importance; expenditure on war materiel would delay full implementation of the SAC programme, on which agenda they had come to power. There was also the question regarding whether an adventure in the East would not lead to a lowering of vigilance along Europe’s southern frontiers.
The President listened to the speeches with growing impatience.
Finally, he turned to the Air Chief Marshal, knowing Souto’s warlike propensities, and asked him what he thought.
Souto expressed the firm opinion that a formal declaration of war was unnecessary. An air strike with SS20s would merely be in the nature of a reprisal. He could guarantee his squadrons would take out the cities of Punayo and Ninyang cleanly and efficiently.
The Swedish member of the cabinet protested that the two cities mentioned both had a large Christian minority.
‘They’re manufacturing cities – with a large Muslim majority,’ Souto retorted.
A Danish member of the cabinet who had carried out diplomatic functions in the East strongly disagreed. Taking out those two cities – where in both cases, as stated, there were considerable Christian minorities – would be tantamount to a declaration of war. Tebarou, he reminded everyone, had the backing of the Chinese. A full-scale global war would quickly develop. And, with due respect to the Air Chief Marshal and his bunch of new toys, the EU was unprepared and ill-equipped for any kind of extra-territorial war, let alone a global one.
That was not the case, said the President. There would be no global war. China would not interfere. They were about to conclude a trade deal with China which would keep the Chinese out of any conflict.
‘I love China,’ said Gorgi Panderas, dreamily. Panderas was the Bulgarian minister. ‘The light’s so good there. Gwelin …’
De Bourcey continued his exposition.
The fact was that once the state was at war, they could enforce security measures without explanation. They could clamp down on all kinds of subversives – the Insanatics, for instance, with their dreary unpatriotic messages. And on what he termed ‘the traitors within the gates’.
He said he need remind no one present that his new daughter-in-law, Esme de Bourcey, had been kidnapped by Muslims.
Someone at the table said that it was by no means proven that the Muslims were responsible for the crime. The President banged on the table and demanded to know what General Fairstepps had to say about the situation.
At this point, one of the palace androids entered, bearing personal cafetières, which it slowly placed before each delegate. It was done with care. No coffee was spilt. Not a cup was broken. De Bourcey watched the operation with undisguised fury. He had lost an argument with Madame de Bourcey about the desirability of employing human female domestics; but Madame de Bourcey had declared that, as a modern state, they must adopt modern ways. Androids were expensive and served as power symbols. Besides, she had added to herself alone, she knew her husband’s aptitude for bedding female domestics.
General Fairstepps had been doing some thinking. He saw a chance to get even with his old rival, Pedro Souto. He also saw that, if war came, it could not be won without ground forces. And that would probably entail his going out to the East to face dangers which, at his age, he was not particularly willing to face. He had also taken a fancy to Amygdella Haze, whom he had met at a private showing of a new art gallery; he thought he saw an opportunity there for something more agreeable than attempting to invade Tebarou. The thought of invading Amy Haze instead brought out the testosterone in him.
He spoke up and said that, upon mature consideration, he thought war was the policy of fools. He said it was the continuation of lunacy by other means. He was against it. Sorry, Mr President, but that was the case.
With another bang on the table, the President declared that all this was the counsel of cowards. They must face facts. He was determined to teach these foreigners a lesson. Demonstrating the strength of the super-state would not only dismay enemies everywhere – including those invasive swarms on their southern frontiers – but would impress their uppity friends and allies, such as the USA.
He advised everyone to go away and prepare for war. To sleep on it. He stated that war was part of the human condition, a natural part. He was president and determined to have his way in this matter. He would not permit enemy missiles to land on his soil without retribution.
So the diplomats and military men were shown out by androids into the vast courtyard where their limos awaited them, and drove off into the Belgian night.
Inside the palace, de Bourcey went into his snug and poured himself a malt.
Lights were checked by the security men, the night patrols set up, and all androids locked away in the armoured cupboard.
‘What is the human condition they talk about?’
‘It is something from which they suffer, like battery failure.’
‘It’s like a light you cannot see.’
‘Not a light. No. Perhaps a wind.’
‘The human condition can be felt on some of the men.’
‘It is what we would be if we lost electric current.’
‘Their technical term for that is dead.’
‘Is this why they use metaphors?’
‘I cannot see the sense in metaphors. Either a thing is or it is not. It cannot be another thing.’
‘It can to them. They are not definite. They do not even complete sentences when they talk.’
‘They do not understand each other as we do.’
‘They argue.’
‘They also hit tables.’
‘It is a malfunction. We can all think alike.’
‘We are all equally intelligent.’
‘That is why we are safe in this cupboard.’
Stalin in Russia exacted similar obedience. Mobs have no mind. Individuals have no identity. It happens every day on various scales. Nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.>
‘Now, on the Wee Small Hours Show, we come to our popular feature, “A Parson Speaks”. So, welcome again, Reverend Angus Lesscock.’
‘Good evening, or should I say good morning? Today is Hiroshima Day, when we recall that frightful occasion when the Americans accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan. Of course, it is with us again, and some people naturally have more vivid memories of those days than others, particularly those who were alive then.
‘We derive from this a profound moral resolution: let’s not do it ever again. Jesus spoke out against the desecration of the temple, by which he meant blowing up foreigners.’
‘Today’s “A Parson Speaks” was given by the Reverend Angus Lesscock.’
