If Then (34 page)

“None of this is real to me, James. It’s just terrifying.”

“Making order out of chaos is terrifying and beautiful at the same time. Hector knows what he is doing.”

“Hector is here?”

“He was changed by the war. That was the purpose of it.”

“A strange man called Omega John told me he started the war.”

“Omega John
is
John Hector. Or he was. Two corners of time have been folded together.” He mimed the bringing together of the two corners of a tablecloth. “Here,” he held up one imaginary corner, “John Hector and his fellow survivors of the 32nd Field Ambulance form the Order of the Omega to stop the war.” He held up the other imaginary corner. “Here, over a hundred years later, Omega John will die and John Hector will replace him so that the Process may continue to benefit mankind.”

“Omega John put his hand on Alex Drown. She had a fit. It almost killed her. It was horrible. The war is within him.”

She set two pancakes aside on a plate.

He grasped her hand.

“I never forgot you, Ruth. No matter how deep I went. And my memories of our life together were wonderful. It was as if we had been lovers before the war, you see. Part of history.”

“Our relationship is a memory of what it once was,” she said. “It’s only fit for remembering.”

H
e returned
to the forest at night, across the rustling Downs. The sky was young-old, with starlight smears more ancient than antiquity yet as fresh as creek water. The land curved gently downward toward the forest where the top half of the trees stirred in the night wind. A tawny owl hooted. Under the canopy of trees, it was too dark to proceed with any certainty, and so he took pleasure in the uncertainty. The flat of his bare foot abraded damp roots and scuffed through mulched heaps of wet brown leaves. Ahead, a low campfire and a silhouette beside it. He swallowed nervously and felt a familiar craving in his gut.

“You made it out of the war,” said Hector.

James walked into the firelit clearing.

“I did. Thanks to you.”

“And how can I help you in the middle of the night?” Hector’s sharp features were half-shadowed under his cowl.

“I want to know how you intend to stop the war.”

James sat cross-legged and warmed his hands around the fire. Hector reached behind himself for another log.

“How many hundreds of thousands of years do you think that man has sat around campfires?”

The two men watched the flames in silence, the deeper shadows of the wood at their backs.

“A fire makes me feel young and old at the same time. I am as new as the finely-toothed green leaves on an ash tree yet as ancient as an oak’s rutted bark. The war made us all into young-old men.”

“How long ago was the war, for you?”

Hector’s layered, unreadable gaze.

“A part of me is always there, on Suvla Bay.”

Hector reached into his jerkin and took out his identity discs and inspected them by firelight.

“You scratched a name for me on this disc: Omega John.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“That I am the last of something, I presume. Civilization perhaps. Do you remember the first days of the war? We wondered then if civilization was about to end. It seemed only a question of when the Germans would break through the Allies’ lines and we would be overrun like Belgium. In London, the streets seemed strange and ominous, the darkening clouds before a storm.”

“I don’t remember that,” said James.

“I was working as an illustrator for a company called Thomas Nelson, and was something of a prodigy. The owner of the company, Mr Buchan, called me into his office and told me that I was to attend an important meeting as his representative. I didn’t know what to say. He merely instructed me to, ‘Tell them what you believe in. That is what they need to hear.’”

The fire spread along the underside of the new log. The smoke made his lungs tighten. James had not yet recovered from the choking fires at Chocolate Hill. Time, he realized, moved at a different pace for him: he was stuck in linear time, one day after another, whereas Hector and the other members of the Omega Order had jumped forward in their history by a year or so.

“Buchan sent me to a meeting at Wellington House in Buckingham Gate. Two years ago, almost to the day. I was shown into a grand government office with a great blue conference table. It was the biggest table I had ever seen and shaped like a crescent moon. There were many men around that table. Thirty, perhaps. They were all far older than I, and here’s the thing…”

Hector leant forward to impart a confidence.

“Nearly every one of those men was a great author. I counted them off: Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, venerable and long-bearded, James Barrie, an ardent scot, Newbolt and Galsworthy, and Wells – HG Wells! I was reared on Wells, you know. The Zionist Israel Zangwill, he talked a lot. So many great authors, the giants who had imagined our age.

“The meeting was called by a politician called Charles Masterman. He was a scruffy, odd-looking type, his loose straight hair hung down like soiled drapes and he had a gangling, indoors sort of body. Buchan told me Masterman was an expert on the crowd, and how to manipulate its spirit, and so he had been given the job of influencing international opinion concerning the war.

“Masterman explained his intent to the meeting: our aim would be to persuade the elite of each country of the justness of the British cause. Particularly the American elite. It was vital that the intellectual classes of America be persuaded by higher reason, for they would see through base manipulation of emotion. We would not be concerned with popular opinion. The best way to influence the mass was to influence the elite, that is how networks function. The more influence one has, the more influence one gains. To he who hath shall be given.

“What did the ordinary man matter? Kitchener already had two hundred thousand recruits. The nation’s blood was up. The will to fight was strong. We were to win the war of the mind, and any peace that ensured.

“I was the youngest man at the meeting by nearly twenty years, I would say. Masefield was the next youngest, and he was in his mid-thirties. The age of the authors was unignorable; they were all old men, formed by the old ways. Hardy said he would write a poem for the cause that very week. Each author had a profoundly different view of the world yet all of these views could be bent to Masterman’s will. I realized this when Chesterton, another shabby unkempt type, spoke. He admitted the faults of the British Empire, but in such a way that one still felt patriotic. He said the war would be ‘a moment of intense moral reality’. The war would not be about broken bodies – it was an affair of the mind. A debate with bullets.”

Hector’s humour was as bitter as the tarry end of his coffin nail. He picked a thread of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, cocked his head, and imitated Chesterton’s pompous obese tone: “‘The Teutonic mind does not accept the democratic concept of the citizen, which is that every citizen is a revolution, constantly and creatively altering the state.’

“The argument seemed sound enough, but when he was done speaking, his old face and unclipped whiskers fell; he knew that any rhetorical victory would, when tested by the reality of war, turn to defeat.

“The poets talked a great deal about the beauty of English fields. Of rooks over stubble after the harvest. Of cornfields and downland at twilight. They turned the land into a lyric. But with each agreement, there was an afternote of sadness. The great men were not so dull as to believe in their own fancy.

“Masterman and Wells were very much in agreement on an aristocracy of the intelligent. Someone suggested evoking patriotism and the King, but Wells dismissed it out of hand. ‘It is not the King’s war. What has he got to do with
our
war?’ he said. Both he and Zangwill saw the war as a way of achieving their progressive ideals. Of breaking up the old system to free the new.

“And then Wells turned to me and asked me what I intended to do. I explained I was of Quaker stock, and while I would not fight, I was prepared to serve. He respected this; he said that he foresaw an army of irregulars, made up of boy scouts and pacifists and invalids who would stay at home and carry the ideas of the civilization, to keep spirits up and to check any wavering courage. To set aside any who doubted and keep the community pure.”

Hector passed his pale palm over the flames, testing the heat.

“I said to the authors, ‘If a man imagines fire, fire will result. If war, then war will be the outcome. You are all great men of imagination. Could you not imagine a peace?’

“They were not there to listen to me. I had been sent to them as a difficult case to test their powers of persuasion.

“‘I will not fight,’ I repeated my belief. ‘But I will serve. I will serve this land but not your country. I will serve the people but not their rulers.’

“‘Aren’t you afraid of missing out on the Great Adventure?’ asked Conan Doyle.

“‘I’m not afraid of anything and I will not fight,’ I said.

“Not one of the great men begrudged me my arrogance.

“‘If you love peace,’” said Wells, ‘then you must appreciate how important it is that we defeat and discredit the war-like legends of Germany. The Teutonic mind is composed of blood and iron and hates freedom. Germany will exterminate the future.’

“I maintained that the Germans and the Allies are both machine civilizations. More alike than apart.

“Chesterton admitted the sins of the British Empire but put forward that each of these sins had been borrowed from Germany, that the nature of the British Empire had been corrupted by the far worse German Empire.

“‘Imagine a British Empire without Germany at its heels,’ he said. ‘You profess a love of ancient Britain. Of Merrie England. But there is no Merrie Prussia. The Teutonic mind mixes biology with history. There is no joy, and that is why there is no freedom.’

“Barrie disagreed. He was sardonic and provocative: ‘Britain is an overfed belly, timid, concerned with the past.’

“Zangwill replied that the past is a cradle, not a prison. And the debate went off in that direction. But it was decided. The great writers would all put their name to the cause. Wells took a moment to reassure me as we filed out: ‘The war will not last,’ he said. ‘An outbreak of common sense will ensue.’”

In the grove of tall beech trees, the heat from the campfire settled, and James felt drowsy. Hector prodded the logs with the point of his knife, releasing an upward stream of sparks.

“They failed us, James. Fat, old men in wilted collars, musty tweed and poorly-tied cravats. I know them all. I know their weaknesses and their appetites. I will go into their homes, into their sepulchral studies. I will give them the experience of Suvla Bay. It will stop their hearts.”

“But it will not stop the war.”

“I will go to Masterman himself. He feeds the lies into the bloodstream of the people. I will persuade him to stop. And then we will find a way to put the war directly into the minds of every man and woman. Once the people have experienced the war as it truly is, then an immediate peace will ensue.”

28

T
he patterned tent
billowed and snapped in the breeze. He put a questioning hand on Ruth’s hip. Yes, she was awake too. She stroked his hair, her fingers reminding herself of the scar on the back of his head.

She planned to leave that morning. They made love for the last time. He put all his remaining intensity into the act. She held him inside her as preparation for letting him go. The ends of her pleasure were twisted with sorrow.

“Come with me,” she said, as they lay side by side in the little tent, their bodies cooling.

“When I was in the war, I was underground, and for a time, cut off from the Process. I had an attack of vertigo and saw things as they were. Myself also. It was shattering. I couldn’t survive it for long.”

“Perhaps it will pass.”

“Perhaps.”

With his fingertips, he brushed order into the hairs on his chest.

“What if the Process expands its footprint? You might walk and walk and never break out of its dominion. London under the Process – can you imagine it?”

“They would never allow it.”

He sat up.

“Hector told me he was going to London to stop the war.”

“History tells us that he didn’t succeed.”

She sat up, fixed her bra and reached for her shirt.

“I must go.”

“To Saddlescombe?”

“And then on.”

She was intent upon returning to the city.

“London is closed to us,” he said.

“It’s a big city. There’s always a way in.”

“It’s not the city we left behind.”

Her tone was harsh: “What do you know about it?”

“Many of the evicted tried to get into London. I heard that they never got beyond the camps. London had its own round of evictions, using far cruder metrics than the Process.”

“I will take the long way around. I want to explore the country, take stock of what is left to us after the Seizure. Which forces can be rallied.”

“I want to protect you.”

“I know. When you went to war, I came looking for you because I thought I’d be lost without your protection. I don’t want it anymore.”

He helped her pack up the tent and Blue Raven brought out the children; Euan was thin-limbed and nervous, his sister protective of him. Jordison tethered a horse to the cart. James lifted the children onto it just as they had been lifted onto the cart during eviction. The children were almost weightless in his hands. Insubstantial. People outside of the Process were becoming like wraiths to him.

He watched Ruth lead the horse and cart away from the camp. At some point in the future he would feel entirely hollow.

H
e walked
along the high escarpment of the South Downs, the green turf suffused with sunlight reflected by the chalk bedrock. Radio masts lay broken and prone at Firle Beacon. Southward to the coast, the churning factories of the Process, the glimmer of sunlight upon the sea, the distant horizon. He went north, down a long broken tarmac road into the village of Firle, where the streets had been cored through overgrown trees and hedgerows. It was the same route that he took on that first day, when he found Hector in the barbed wire. Here was the spot where he had stopped to speak to the girl, Agnes, about the other soldiers that had been seen around the village.

From Firle, he passed across the old railway line and on through Glynde. The villagers were finishing their work in the fields and the blacksmith’s chimney smoked noisily into an overcast sky. He did not tarry. He was no longer the bailiff. He was beyond these people and this place. They belonged to the time before the war, a time of great certainties and worthy sacrifice. Now that the war was over, home felt strange, its old rituals absurd, and everywhere the oppressive silence of the guns.

The Institute was on the other side of a coppiced wood. He felt its proximity as a pressure upon his brow. He passed a broken wall overgrown with bindweed and ivy, and walked through sickly abundant gardens. The light above the lawn was heavy and sluggish, the water features stagnant and choked with lilies. The old house was a hodgepodge of different time periods, the architectural affectations of three centuries apparent in the variation in the chimney stacks.

The gas lanterns were on in the Round Room.

He opened the tall wooden doors and stepped into the hallway. It was a house on the eve of mourning, quiet and careful so as not to disturb death at work. In the Round Room, Alex Drown sat on an armchair in her managerial skirt and blouse next to an occasional table with a quarter-full cut-glass carafe and an upturned glass. She balanced her own tumbler of whisky upon her knee, and suggested he help himself to a drink. He righted the empty glass, poured himself two fingers’ worth and sat forward on the edge of a damp chaise longue.

“Omega John is very close to death,” she said.

“I want to speak to him.”

She waved the cut-glass tumbler at the mural covering the west wall of the Round Room, portraits of the various personalities who had dwelt in the house across the centuries. He had often considered it on previous visits, but only now did he recognize some of the individuals it depicted: Trevenen Huxley, long-faced, in a flowing ceremonial gown and bearing a censer of incense; Lewis Collinson in round spectacles and unkempt brows, with compasses and wind gauge; Doctor Blore with a scalpel that James, on previous visits to the Round Room, had mistaken for a pen. Even the yeoman Jordison was among the portraits, stocky and shirtless and clutching a hoe.

“You recognize anyone?” she asked.

“They were my friends in the war.”

“Your implant is running hot, James. I can feel it.” She adjusted her short black fringe. “It’s going to be hard for you to come back to us.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I was in the war also. As a nurse. I had hoped to be spared the fighting. Omega John showed me what I was missing.”

“Ruth told me.”

“Did she get the children out?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad. It was the right thing to do. You mustn’t take goodness lightly. Not in this world. Omega John was once a good man. Many talented people were gathered by the Institute but he was the first and the best of them.”

Her insistence on this point made her seem drunk.

“Omega John sentenced me to death,” said James.

“Yes, he almost killed me too.”

Alex took a moment to consider her thought.

She said, “My mother was an alcoholic.” She winced at her glass of whisky. “Her anger and selfishness got worse the closer she came to death. Drink was killing her so she drank more, to bring it on. But she was still my mother. That’s how I feel about Omega John.”

“What will happen when he dies?”

“That remains to be seen. Is John Hector with you?”

“No.”

“He’ll come. He has to come, after all our sacrifices. Without Omega John, the implants will degrade. What this means for us I could not say.” She counted off the possibilities on her fingers. “Madness. Death. Maybe nothing. The brain can route around damage. Over time, new networks form. You may get back some of what you have lost.”

Ruth.

“Or you may starve to death because you lack the basic will to survive.”

“What will you do next?”

“If we live? I’ll get another job. Find another challenging client, send some money home. Survival is not included in the terms of my employment.”

She refilled her glass and offered him the carafe. He demurred.

“The Institute will persist too. In its history, the Institute has been through many incarnations; after the war it was Omega House then, briefly, the Institute of the Unfolding Dialectic; in the thirties it was the Institute of the New Accelerant, or Iona, then after the Second World War, there was a substantial new intake working on the Omega Project; by the sixties it was known informally among its inmates as the Institute of Artists and Murderers. In the eighties, it was a respectable thinktank called the Knowlands Group. Graduates of Knowlands went on to remake society in their own image. But dominion was never John’s aim. He always stayed behind.”

“So what went wrong?”

“In many ways, nothing.”

“The Process killed thousands of the evicted.”

“Precisely. Because they were the evicted, their needs were not a mission critical metric.”

“They were people.”

“Once they were placed outside of the Process, placed there by you, they became a low-value resource to be used for the benefit of the high-value resource – Omega John and the remaining Lewesians – within the Process. We are all resources of one sort or another.”

“It seems wrong.”

She shrugged.

“It’s how the line has been drawn. Choose which side of the line you stand, and then live with the consequences of your choice. I hope you don’t intend bothering Omega John with these moral qualms.”

“John Hector told me he was going to stop the war. I want to know why that didn’t happen.”

The door to the Round Room opened. Sunny Wu entered in soft slippers, his enlarged hands covered in silk gloves. He whispered to Alex. She nodded and drained her glass.

“He’s ready to speak to you,” she said.

They walked through the decrepitude of the great house, the paint sloughing off the walls in silvered skins, the tiled floor gritty and loose. On the staircase, he paused to consider the second substantial mural of the Institute; a rendition of the tale of Demophon and Mastusius, two robed men seated at a blue crescent moon table drinking from goblets, the Aegean sea in the distance. The king unknowingly drinks the heady blood of his own children. On discovering that he has been grievously deceived, he throws his cup into the sea, and it cuts the coastline in a distinctive shape of a crescent moon.

“The shape of Suvla Bay,” said James.

Alex gazed up at the mural. “It dates from the late sixties, when the house was known as the Institute of Artists and Murderers.”

“Omega John painted it,” said James.

“How do you know?” asked Alex.

“The blue crescent moon table. John Hector told me about a meeting he once attended in which many great men sat around that table.”

Sunny Wu was keen for them to move on. James asked for a moment longer. Omega John had told him that the theme of the mural was the sacrifice of the innocents. Virgin daughters were a high value resource, as Alex had put it, and the gods could not be bought off with anything less. Demophon and Mastusius, their cold, layered expressions utterly modern in their self-mastery, knew that sacrifice was futile, but still they pandered to the people’s need for blood to be spilt, because to repudiate sacrifice, to admit that the plague was beyond their power to control, was to lose standing in society. In serving the wine, Mastusius did not merely avenge himself – he repudiated the worth of a ruling class that exploited such a primitive rite.

Sunny Wu showed them into the master bedroom. Omega John’s long body lay under a thin sheet. He turned his head to gaze at James. Father Huxley, in priestly garb, knelt beside the dying man and adjusted his pillow. Doctor Blore was there also, and he acknowledged James with a silent meaningful bow. Alex joined the remaining inmates of the Institute on a row of chairs beside the death bed: Adlan the Observer, great Jamsu, little Neha, the stony countenance of Yoruban Ken.

The room smelt of incense.

James sat close to Omega John.

“I was just admiring your mural. The blue table across which Mastusius and Demophon dine is Charles Masterman’s table.”

Omega John’s thin lips parted; it was an effort to remain above the pain.

“You’ve spoken with John Hector. He should be here. Not you.”

“He went to stop the war.”

Omega John coughed violently, the laughter of a dying man.

“The confrontation with Masterman. I remember it well. Are the Order of the Omega camping up on the Downs?”

“Yes.”

“I would so like to camp with them again. To be fit, and in the open air and ready to face the world.”

His attenuated skin, liver-spotted in parts, hung in loose folds under his arms. The palms of his hands were smooth and plump but their backs were a landscape of dried ridges; under his thin scalp, a long blue vein meandered.

“Don’t get old,” he said. “Especially not this old.”

His hand searched the bedside table and tapped open a velvet case of syringes. Father Huxley loaded a syringe and applied the longevity fluid directly into the back of Omega John’s head. The young-old man sighed, his eyes lost their focus, and then he looked questioningly at James.

“You’re supposed to be dead, bailiff. Why are you still alive?”

“John Hector saved me.”

“How?”

“He sent me the armour.”

Omega John was surprised.

“Are you certain that it was his doing?”

“He promised to find a way of getting me out of the war.”

“Then our plan succeeded, but, as with all plans, the results are quite different from what was anticipated.”

“Tell me what happened when you returned to London.”

Omega John’s eyes widened at this show of will from the bailiff.

“This is really not the time for your questions,” said Huxley.

“It is the only time,” said James.

“The benefit of the injection will not last long, and we cannot administer many more without lethal effect.”

James said, “Tell me about Masterman, please. I want to understand how all this began.”

The dying man bared his teeth at some deep inner pain, then gasped.

“Give me a cigarette, Huxley,” said Omega John. “I know you have them. Your shirt is sour with nicotine.”

The priest lit a cigarette and held it out to Omega John. Two drags were sufficient to set his heart racing. The smoke made its own way from his mouth.

“We were all in a very bad way after Suvla,” he said. “Our nerves were so shot that we believed the collapse of civilization was imminent and it was best to prepare for it like good boy scouts. I retreated to my caravan camp in Friston Forest and the others camped nearby. We spent months around the campfire devising a plan for the new age. There are always plans. They provide alibis for our secret desires. I wanted only to pass on the experience of the war, to make others suffer as we had suffered.