Part 25 (1/2)

Someone in the audience asked what Dreiser would do if it was found that the ring was acquiring elements of consciousness.

He stroked his little moustache thoughtfully before answering. 'If that does turn out to be the case, we'll have to rethink the whole Smudge experiment. To turn off the refrigeration would be tantamount to murder. Or, let's say, abortion ... It might also be dangerous with Chimborazo towering above us! It's a dilemma...

'The ring would no longer be a viable tool in the search for the Omega Smudge. The UN authorities, supposing they still exist, would not be happy about that. On the other hand, we would stand on the brink of another great discovery. We would be on the way to understanding what consciousness is all about - what causes it, sustains it...'

Kathi had a word to add. 'Just to respond to Charles Bondi's earlier remark. Of course, if the ring were to be kept going, there could never be any terraforming permitted...'

My thoughts were so overwhelmed by speculation that I could not sleep. I was walking down East Spider (late Dyson Street) in dim-out, when the unexpected happened. Two masked men jumped from the shadows, armed with either pick helves or baseball bats or similar weapons.

'This is for you, you b.l.o.o.d.y t.i.tox, for ruining religion and normal human life!' one shouted as they pitched into me. I managed to strike one of them in the face. The other caught me a blow across the base of my skull. I fell.

I seemed to fall for ever.

When I roused, I was in the hospital again, being wheeled along a corridor. I tried to speak but could not.

Cang Hai and Alpha were waiting for me. Alpha was sitting on the floor, watching her mother bounce a ball again and again against the wall. I saw how Cang was still something of a child, using the excuse of her daughter to play childishly. She stopped the bouncing rather guiltily, scooped Alpha up in her arms, and approached me.

'My dear little daughter,' I tried to say.

'You need rest, Tom, dear. You'll be okay and we'll be here.'

Mary Fangold came briskly along, said h.e.l.lo to Alpha and directed my carriage into a small room, talking meanwhile, ignoring Cang Hai. The room became full of tiny specks of light, towards which I seemed to float.

With an effort I roused, to see Cang Hai close by. A spark of anger showed in her eyes. She said, determinedly and loudly, 'Anyhow, as I was saying, my Other in Chengdu told me of a dream. An orchestra was playing-'

'Perhaps we'd better leave Mr. Jefferies alone just now,' said Mary, sweetly. 'He needs quiet. He will be fully restored in a day or so.'

'I'll go soon enough, thank you. You could use that symphony orchestra as a symbol of cooperative evolution. Many men and women, all with differing lives and problems, and many different instruments - they manage to sublimate their individualities to make beautiful harmony. But in this dream, they were playing in a field and eating a meal at the same time. Don't ask me how.'

'Would you like a shower, Mr. Jefferies?' Mary asked. I gestured to her to let Cang Hai rattle on for a moment.

'And you see, Tom, I thought about the first ever restaurant - no doubt it was outdoors - which opened in China centuries ago. It was a cooperative act making for happiness. You had to trust strangers enough to eat with them. And you had to eat food cooked by a cook who maybe you couldn't see, trusting that it was not poisoned ... Wasn't that restaurant a huge step forward in social evolution...?'

'Really, thank you, I think we've had enough of your dreams, dear,' said Mary Fangold.

'Who's this rude lady, Mumma?' Alpha asked.

'n.o.body really, my chick,' said Cang Hai and marched indignantly from the room.

I managed to say goodbye after she had gone. My head was clearing. Mary looked sternly down at me and said, 'You're delivered into my care again, Tom!' She suppressed a joyous laugh, pressing her fingers to her lips. 'I hope all this irrational chatter did not disturb you. Your adopted daughter seems to have the notion that she is in touch with someone in - where was it? Chengdu?'

'I too have my doubts about her phantom friend. But it makes her rather lonely life happier.'

Wheeling me forward, she tapped my name into the registry. 'Mmm, same ward as before...'

She gave me a winning smile. 'There I have to disagree with you. We must try to banish the irrational from our lives. You have fallen victim to the irrational. We need so much to be governed by reason. Most of your gallant efforts are directed towards that end.'

She wagged her finger at me. 'You really mustn't make private exceptions. That's not the right route to a perfect world.

'But there, it's not for me to lecture you!'

The attack on me had shattered a vertebra at the top of my spine. The nan.o.bots replaced it with an artificially grown bone-subst.i.tute. But a nerve had been damaged that, it appeared, was beyond repair, at least within the limited resources of our hospital.

I stayed for ten days, in that ward I had so recently left, to enjoy once more Mary's pleasant brand of physiotherapy. I lived for those hours when we were in bed together.

Perhaps all ideas of Utopia were based on that sort of closeness. In the dark I thought of George Orwell's dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell set forth there his idea of Utopia: a shabby room, in which he could be alone with a girl... Orwell set forth there his idea of Utopia: a shabby room, in which he could be alone with a girl...

Mary looked seriously at me. 'When your a.s.sailants are captured, I have drugs in my pharmaceutical armoury that will ensure they never do anything thuggish again...' She nodded rea.s.suringly. 'As we agree, we want no prisons here. As my captive, you naturally want me to keep you happy.'

'Pa.s.sionately I want it,' I said. We kissed then, pa.s.sionately.

I practised walking with my arm on a nurse's arm. My balance was always to be uncertain; from then on, I found it convenient to walk with a stick.

I rested one further day in hospital. As I was leaving its doors, Mary bid me farewell. 'Go and continue your excellent work, my dear Tom. Do not trouble your mind by seeking revenge on those who attacked you. Their reason failed them. They must fear a rational society; but their kind are already becoming obsolete.'

'I'm not so sure of that, Mary. What kind are we?'

Laughing, she clucked in a motherly way and squeezed my arm. She was her professional self, and on duty.

Suddenly she embraced me. 'I love you, Tom! Forgive me. You're our prophet! We shall soon live,' she said, 'into an epoch of pure reason.'

I thought, as I hobbled back to Cang Hai with my stick, of that wonderful satire of Jonathan Swift's, popularly known as Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver's Travels, and of the fourth book where Gulliver journeys among the cold, uninteresting, indifferent children of reason, the Houyhnhnms. and of the fourth book where Gulliver journeys among the cold, uninteresting, indifferent children of reason, the Houyhnhnms.

If our carefully planned new way of life bred such a species, we would be entering on chilly and sunless territory.

Where would Mary's love be in those days?

Yet would not that rather bloodless life of reason be better than the world of the bludgeon, the old unregenerate world, continually ravaged by war and its degradations in one region or another? My father, whose altruism I had inherited, had left his home country to serve as a doctor in the eastern Adriatic, among the poor in the coastal town of Splon. There he set up a clinic. In that clinic, he treated all alike, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant.

My father believed that the West, with its spirit of enquiry, was moving towards an age of reason, however faltering was its progress.

In Splon I pa.s.sed many years of my boyhood, unaffected by the poverty surrounding us, ranging free in the mountains behind the town. My elder sister, Patricia, was my great friend and ally, a big-hearted girl with an insatiable curiosity about nature. We used to swim through the currents of our stretch of sea to gain a small island called Isplan. Here Pat and I used to pretend to be s.h.i.+pwrecked, as if in prodromoic rehearsal for being stranded on another planet.

Civil war broke out in the country when I was nine years old, in 2024. My father and mother refused to leave with other foreign nationals. They were blind to danger, seeing it as their duty to stay and serve the innocent people of Splon. However, they sent Pat away to safety, to live with an aunt. For a while, I missed her greatly.

Civil war is a cancer. The innocent people of Splon took sides and began to kill and torture each other. Their pretext was that they were being treated unfairly and demanded only social justice, but behind this veneer of reasonable argument, calculated to dull their consciences and win them sympathy abroad, lay a mindless cruelty, a wish to destroy those whose religious beliefs they did not share.

They set about destroying not merely the vulnerable living bodies of their former neighbours, the new enemies, but their enemies' homes as well, together with anything of historic or aesthetic worth.

The bridge over the River Splo was one of the few examples of local architecture worthy of preservation. Built by the Ottomans five centuries earlier, it had featured on the holiday brochures distributed by the tourist office. People came from all over the world to enjoy the graceful parabola of Splon's old bridge.

As tanks gathered in the mountains behind the town, as an ancient wars.h.i.+p appeared offsh.o.r.e, as mortars and artillery were dug in along the road to town, that famous Splo Bridge was available for target practice. It fell soon, its rubble and dust cascading into the Splo.

The enemy made no attempt to enter the town. Their soldiers loitered smoking and boozing some metres down the road. They laid cowardly siege to Splon, setting about destroying it, not for any strategic purpose but merely because they had hatred and sh.e.l.ls to spare.

Anyone trying to escape from Splon was liable to capture. As prisoners, they suffered barbaric torture. Women were raped and mutilated. Children were raped and used as target practice.

Occasionally, one such captive, broken, was allowed to crawl back to Splon to give a report on these barbarities, in order that the fear and tension of the starving inhabitants might be increased. Often such survivors died in my father's little surgery, beyond his aid.

The great organisations of the Western world stood back and watched dismayed at the slaughter on their TV screens. In truth they were puzzled as to how to quell civil war, where the will to fight and die was so strong and the reason for the struggle so hard to comprehend.