If Then (12 page)

The carts are brought down for the wounded and for the evicted. He senses Hector again, the stretcher bearer working with the town doctor, to dress wounds and administer pain relief. The godstuff swarms and coos around Hector.

The guns are new. He opens up the colloid to inspect one, the barrel, handle and trigger guard assembled from one smooth grey piece of hard resin. The barrel was cracked, good for only one round. Process made. A new addition to the ritual. His attention shifts to the black box, asks it
What are you doing in there?

He crosses the river at the Pells, his hooting and clanking echoing in the timber yards on its banks. His long shadow falls over Malling Field. He must cross the fire site to perform the final eviction. A crowd of thousands wait on his approach, hushing one another so that, apart from the eerie crackling of the bonfire, the field is quiet. And then a mischief man lets off a string of rookies, and James flinches, thinking it gunfire. He turns his enormous blank-faced horned head toward them and there, deep in the crowd, is Ruth, data tags whipping in her wake like kite-tails.

His memories of her are indivisible from the patterns she has made in the Process: her comforting hand placed upon the head of children, the satisfaction her dresses gave her customers, quantifiable through admiring smoothing gestures over ironed linen. The townswomen knew that she was conflicted, afraid of what her husband had become yet needing his protection, a bargain familiar to the people alive after England’s fall.

The armour arrives at the fire site. It is the signal to unveil the totem. Smugglers on tall ladders either side of the giant structure cast the rigging aside and the night wind lifts the tarpaulin away.

James presses his face to the colloid, and it shimmers itself clean so that he can get a better view.

The totem is a colossal cube of earth fifty feet tall and twenty feet wide containing a half-buried head, the prominent features of nose, brows, cheekbones and chin breaking through the top soil. A man’s face. Skin pores dry with earth, the lips pale and chapped, as if the face had been thrust forcefully into the ground and then slowly turned over. A dead man. A dead face.
His
face? Hard to tell from this distance. Smugglers hammer iron pegs into the great cheekbones and through the scalp and into the skull, threading rope through the pegs. Heave! A great pull, a great straining, and then the face slips out of the earth in sections, landing in the bonfire and scattering a swarm of fireflies up into the night. Charnel smoke chugs from it, black and foul, blue flames leaping through eye sockets and out of the nasal bone. The totem was a prophecy, the node at the end of all possible outcomes:
death
.

He turns away from the bonfire, under the iron conviction that it is time for the final eviction. He will remove the Bowles family from their house. He sets off across the field at a steady pace, a misty drizzle coming in off the Downs, the shadows of a crowd parting before him.

The godstuff seethes with calculation, and if he puts his ear to the black box he can just about hear the chuntering of old code. An equation from the deep past. The symbols are dusty and smell of professorial self-assurance: Let F stand for the freely willed vigour to war, H the highly motivated vigour to war, let T stand for tender emotion or pity, let Z stand for anger, and having exhausted the modern Latin alphabet, we must turn to the Greek: let lambda (λ) stand for vengefulness, let mu (μ) represent pain, and omega (ω) stand for fear. The black box expands, a slanted rhombus of shadowy silken quagmire. The blackness is not a void but dense code overlapping in three dimensions until all white space is covered. Equations of human behaviour are unsatisfactory because free will is indeterminate, its magnitude will have to lie within a limited range. How to symbolize the indeterminacy of whether a person tries to perform the eviction, or actively resists the eviction, or makes no effort at all?

How to reduce the indeterminacy of free will.

The fire site crowds run to keep up with him. News of armed resistance at Landport spreads among the people and one of the guns is held aloft as proof that the Process wants them to resist the bailiff.

The godstuff settles around a modest terraced house, a steep garden, and a man standing in the doorway, Tom Bowles, father and husband, the carpenter with new tools in his belt. They had spoken at the lido together, James remembered that now. How Tom coaxed his young son Euan into the cold water. The boy was so proud of his own courage. James did not resent Tom’s fertility, even though the Institute sterilized him when they put in the implant. Alex explained that fatherhood would bias the bailiff, and eviction required total impartiality if it was to remain plausible to the townspeople. It was also Alex who instructed him in the iconography created by his implant during eviction: the decision tree and its symbols – the iron ring, the black box and so on. The implant did not control him; when it was active, he and the Process were one consciousness. We are networks, that was how Alex put it.

The carpenter has to shout to make himself heard over his gobbling diesel engine, “We’re not leaving!” The rest of the Bowles family watch him through the dark downstairs windows of the house; Jane Bowles clutches her son to her, while Agnes’ serious young face is set apart, watching him intently.

The day at the lido with the Bowles family. He went to get popcorn for everyone and Agnes came along to help as he had a distracted air suggestive of someone who might struggle with the sweet or salty options of a popcorn order. While they waited to be served, he talked to Agnes as if she were an adult because he didn’t how to talk to children.

She was curious about his implant. Was it different from her stripe? He knelt down and parted his hair so that she could see the scar. Then she shook her ponytail aside so that he could see the particular pattern of her stripe.

“Your stripe only goes one way,” he said. “It outputs your feelings and wellbeing. Whereas the implant goes both ways. Input and output.”

She considered this with a serious expression.

“So you can feel what other people are feeling?”

“Yes and no,” he said. “The input shows me what they are feeling but only after those emotions have been turned into data by the Process. So I don’t feel it.”

“So the Process tells you what to do?”

“More than that. When the implant is running, there is no gap between me and the Process.”

“Do you like it?”

A good question.

“I prefer it.”

“You prefer it to being you?”

“Yes, but that’s our secret.”

He understood, then, that children do not belong to the parents. They are not possessions. They belong to everyone and everyone belongs to them.

James gestures for the cart to be brought up. Two smugglers in harness haul it through the crowd, grim-faced in anticipation of the dissent of their fellow townspeople. A communal
hiss
and a single shout of “shame!” The rain swirls over their heads. He wants to identify the troublemakers, haul them out, make an example. The way the gangster police had dealt with Ruth during the library protest. If you raise the stakes involved in resistance then the majority of dissenters will fall away. It’s a cruel urge. He wonders at its origin: did that thought originate within the white square of human instincts or the iron ring of machine logic?

His voice is the voice of God run through a filter, a glaring command as terrifyingly out of proportion to the human voice as the armour is to the human body, distorting in both the high and bottom end. The Bowles’ house is a matchbox to him, he just wants to open it up and give it a shake. Tom Bowles turns around and commands his family to stay where they are, to not give into the fear. The carpenter can barely be heard above the armour because he is one measly single human voice.

James commands the Bowles family to come out into the street, and places his claw lightly against the arbitrary divisions in space that constitute their house. Tom mutely shakes his head. But from the back of the house comes Jane Bowles, with her two children, making the pragmatic choice, striding head down across the lawn. Their pain flares up and is absorbed into the black box.

The iron ring seethes. The code within the black box is reconfigured by new input. Free will within a limited range. He makes a decision. The colloid peels away, his limbs are released, the headpiece clicks back, he unhooks his harness, and puts his feet deliberately upon the ladder taking him out of the armour. The implant begins the long cycle down.

He gets out of the armour. The crowd is obscure to him. He can’t remember their names. He retains faint echoes of insight, the patterns that a moment ago were so clear to him. Then he remembers to look for Ruth.
When you get to the Bowles’ house, look for me
.

She is standing beside the cart. He puts his hand out to her, a gesture that both acknowledges her and warns her to keep her distance. The story of their relationship. She looks at him with such sadness. She has never looked at him like that before. Her expression makes him hesitate. He does not know what it means.

“Why did you get out of the armour, bailiff?” Tom has something inside the door frame, the edge of his left foot is pressing against it for reassurance. A cudgel of some sort.

“I didn’t want to pick your children up with my claws,” says James. “I thought this way I could–”

“You thought? You don’t
think
.”

Tom shakes his head to convey how foolish the bailiff has been, how unwise to give up the advantage of the armour.

“Please,” says James. “Please get into the cart.”

“When will the evictions stop?” shouts the carpenter. The crowd shift at this appeal to their self-interest.

“Eviction works,” says James. “It’s the only way that works.”

“It doesn’t work anymore.”

“We’ve all lost somebody,” says James.

The carpenter has a bitter, disbelieving expression.

“You’re trying to persuade me to accept the eviction of my family by appealing to my sense of community? You’ve all lost your minds.” The carpenter reaches for the object concealed by the door frame. It is a gun, James notes, one of the new guns. Tom brings the barrel up to waist height.

“The Process wants you to die.”

The gun fires a single shot, it has a distinctive sound, a concussive hoot, like an enormous blowpipe. The bullet hits him all over the chest, and then he’s on the floor. He explores the impact with a tentative dithering hand, and discovers the shattered tiles of his private armour, damage radiating outward from a central strike, the force dispersed across his entire torso by the collagen ribbing.

The carpenter flips the rifle and cracks the butt of it against James’ head. His helmet takes the brunt, he sprawls on the rain-wet path. The carpenter turns to the townspeople and beckons them forward to deliver their own portion of retribution. Hesitation in the ranks. The carpenter removes a scratch awl from his belt, grey-handled, another tool of the Process. He kneels on James and uses the point of the awl to dig around the shattered section of the armour. The underlayers of fibre are resistant, but his face is exposed. Tom slaps James, and disturbed by his own violence, he steps back and beckons the crowd onto the bailiff.

“The Process wants us to kill,” he says. “We’ve killed before.”

James gets up, makes it onto his haunches. Tom bolts forward and pushes him to the ground then stabs at James with the awl, who gets his arms in the way. The white square of survival instinct is a faint afterglow. Ruth screams.

She hoped for resistance to eviction but not like this. Ruth has been too simplistic in her interpretation of Hector. The stretcher bearer stands on the cart, repeating his assertion that he will not fight but he will serve. Only Ruth notices him. She is so scared that she can’t master her thoughts. It’s unbearable to see all these good people set against one another. What did Hector mean,
to serve
? That he would bear witness to the war, join its general suffering but not fight, not contribute to its vigour.

She sees it in Tom’s eyes, a pure moment of fear and hatred. No calculation of consequences, his hand holding the awl, a hand he keeps out of James’ reach, poised to stab, and then he jabs hard into her husband’s side, and at his wrists, and when James tries to defend those vulnerabilities, then Tom goes for the face again.

Ruth turns to Jane Bowles, grabs her hands, pleads with her to see reason.

“We don’t want you to go but if this carries on someone is going to die.”

Jane shakes her head, says numbly, “We’re staying.”

Tom looks at his wife. He looks to Jane for permission to murder. Ruth knows that feeling of desperation, to stand with a kitchen knife ready to make a futile violent gesture.

“I’m going to make this easier for you,” says Ruth. And then she walks over to the children, takes Agnes up into her arms, a child she has taught in class, a child shivering in the rain and the night, kisses her on the cheek fiercely, and then lifts her up and places her onto the eviction cart.

Tom hesitates. In his fear and hatred, he has left the children exposed.

This hesitation is all the time James needs. He levers Tom off him. The carpenter bolts for his children, toward Ruth, grabs her by the throat but he can’t do it, he had not prepared himself to strike this woman. James pulls the carpenter aside and throws him into the crowd. The townspeople try to restrain Tom but he pushes them away and comes at James, yet he’s so obvious and old-fashioned and the bailiff is ready this time.

James strikes the carpenter hard on the solar plexus, and he stumbles backward and lands heavily on his backside, breathing in shocked whooping gasps.

Agnes cries to see her father winded and humbled. In her distress, she cries and clutches her shirt because she feels the ripping in her heart. Witnessing her daughter’s distress, Jane climbs onto the cart without a second thought, and takes Agnes into her arms, then looks back to her other child, and Ruth is already with him, lifting up the son Euan to place him on the cart too. Agnes reaches over to her brother and brings him into the sobbing huddle of the family.