If Then (9 page)

“Does the Process tell the people what to make?”

“The Process chooses the totem and machines make it.”

“Why don’t we have machines to make our costumes and our banners too?”

“Because by making things ourselves we are made into better people.”

The children did not understand. They waited patiently for her to explain.

“Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.”

“How does the Process choose what it makes and what we have to make for ourselves?”

“Well, there are lots of things it can’t make. It can’t make petrol or food – at least, not food that is nice to eat. Equally, it can make things that would be impossible for us because its machines build in layers of atoms rather than having to carve a shape out of wood or stone.”

“My dad says the Process gives us what we need. But I never get what I need.”

“It’s not Father Christmas, Alexander. It must balance all our wants and all our needs. The smartest children are the ones who can control their needs. If I was to put a plate of cookies here, and tell you all that you could have one cookie now, or two cookies later – which would you choose?”

The children conferred and laughed. Two cookies later, of course.

“But if they were real cookies, freshly baked and right
there
, then I know that some of you would not be able to wait. Waiting is a skill you have to learn. The children who can’t wait are the children who fail. You must control desire. Making things yourself, understanding how much time and effort goes into everything we have, is part of that control.”

“Miss, if it is so important for us to make things ourselves, why do we let the Process make us anything at all?”

“That’s a good question, Sylvia.” Ruth sat on the edge of her desk. “The answer is that we’re still becoming who we are going to be. When I was your age, no one really had to make anything much because other people who lived far away made everything for us. To go suddenly from not making anything to making everything would be too much. People would be unable to cope. The Process helps us make that change to a different way of life.”

Alexander asked why the name of Agnes Bowles had not been read out on the register. Ruth was blindsided by the casual mention of the child’s name, and the insoluble problem of her eviction. Her body experienced the dilemma as a precipice, nervous flutters in her fingers and toes, predatory shadows swimming through her day.

Sensing the upset of her teacher, Sylvia chastised Alexander.

“You shouldn’t talk about the evicted. The bailiff is teacher’s husband.”

The boy realized that he had a mistake, and afraid that he too might be taken from his home and his class, he started crying. Ruth put her hand on his head to reassure him; his stripe was warm to the touch, the nodules seething with distress. And she was the cause of it.

James had said that they were not the cause of anything but that was no comfort. She had wanted to make a difference at the library, in the early days of the Seizure, and had been slapped down. From one point of view, she had been taught a lesson in powerlessness. But it was really a lesson in brutality – and it taught her nothing that she did not already know. Hopelessness was safer, she had allowed herself to give in to the ease of being irrelevant.

Agnes’ name on the eviction list presented her with an impossible choice; damned by either path, she had become listless. The way a mouse tortured by a cat gives up, and lies still, its furry back shaking with the violence of its heartbeat.

Ruth reassured the children. She told them that the evicted always found new homes, but the sound of her own voice was as absurd to her as it was to them, and fear spread among the class. Alexander sat on his own with his head between his knees, weeping, and could not be brought round. As she moved from one emotional child to the next, Ruth glanced out across the playing fields and there, under the kiss-kiss tree, Hector was meditating, eyes closed, head tipped back, his legs crossed and palms resting upward on his thighs, as if straining to hear a distant music.

James said that he had spoken with Hector, chatted with him about his upbringing. All winter they had harboured the stretcher bearer in their home, yet he had never spoken to her, nor to anyone else, as far as she knew. It was impossible to make a decision if you tried to reason it all out. You just had to act according to your conviction. She asked Sylvia to look after the class. Ruth told them to write down words associated with eviction, on the promise they would talk about it afterwards, and then she was through the fire doors and outside, running across the school field.

The sight of Hector sitting under the tree was strange because adults so rarely went near it. She stopped a few yards short, bent over to catch her breath. He did not respond to her. It was unnerving, because he so closely resembled a person and yet lacked the palpable charge of human presence.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

She chewed her lip, giving him an opportunity to answer. His silence angered her.

“Wake up and be a fucking human being!”

Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child. The heat of the kiss-kiss tree was in her stripe: the smell of charred hair and scorched grass.

“You spoke to my husband. So speak to me. Or do you not speak to women?”

He was wearing a singlet and canvas short trousers; eyes closed, his chest rising and falling with meditative breathing, his flesh so pale as to be not quite human, his skin a fabric sealed in one section over his body like a laminate shell, or stitched together like a coat. Made from a similar fabric as her stripe, although without the dense packing of neural cells. Hector was a thing made from a pattern; so, she wondered, from where did the Process get that pattern? A random page from human history or something meaningful, something chosen? She strode forward, took his hand in hers.

“Are you the Process? Were you sent here to communicate directly to us?”

He did not attempt to free his hand from her, but nothing in his expression gave an indication that he was aware of her touch.

“Or are you just an error message?”

Hector lowered his head: a mass of black curls, no stripe because he was all stripe, bio-engineered cells flickering with data – the data of what people said or did around him and even what they suppressed; what they chose not to say, that too could be inferred. A spy in their midst, like the fox she had encountered on the corrugated roof beside the ruined twitten. She had accepted the stripe because people like her had no choice: that was the lesson of the Seizure. That was why they called it the Seizure – it was the moment when meaningful choice was taken away from the majority of people, as their labour lost its value, and they could no longer sell their time, so they had to sell emotions, relationships, access to their bodies. It had felt like the end of the world, but it wasn’t. Her humiliation was familiar to the men and women who came into her library, first or second generation immigrants fleeing variations of the Seizure in their own country. The Seizure was not an apocalypse but the moment an advancing front had finally caught up with her.

Hector took up his backpack. From it he removed books: a copy of the Koran, the Bible,
The Golden Bough
, Blavatsky’s
The Secret Doctrine
and pamphlets about Rosicrucianism. She picked up a novel called
With the Adepts
; the frontispiece indicated it had been printed in 1910, and the binding and paper were undoubtedly old and aged. Unlike the fabric of his uniform or tins of bully beef, the books had not been recently manufactured. Hector had acquired them from somewhere, perhaps from within the town. Or they had been given to him.

“I will not fight,” said Hector.

She dropped the book in shock. The stretcher bearer looked up, not at her, but at some invisible interlocutor.

“I will serve,” he said. “But I will not fight.”

Serve but not fight; it was some kind of message to her, a way of refusing. The aura of her uncertainty passed into the kiss-kiss tree. Sorrow became data, individual suffering a value in the great ongoing algorithm, a negative value to be corrected through the thing that gave her pleasure or by removing the source of her anguish altogether. The Process was responsive. Could a sufficiently large reaction against the eviction of Agnes prevent it?

There was still time. A couple of hours until the parades began. Edith was the closest the town had to a leader. Ruth left Hector sitting under the kiss-kiss tree with his books, and ran to the bottom of Keere Street and Southover Road. Edith lived over by the lido but she was more likely to be on her rounds, fulfilling her role as councillor. Ruth headed up the steep cobbled Keere Street. The houses were strung with district colours, elderly residents in their gardens, curious at her agitated state. They all knew the names on the eviction list, but had put the matter aside as the responsibility of the bailiff. He would perform the necessary but unacceptable act, and bear the consequences. She wanted to shout out to them as she ran by:
we can stop this
. Gaining the top of Keere Street, she ran out into the high street, gasping, searching for any sign of Edith. The townspeople passing by regarded her with faint alarm, and one older woman asked her if she had lost her child.

“Have you seen Edith?” Ruth asked her.

“Is Edith your child?” The old woman had the tick and whirr of a damaged mechanism, her scalp yellow and stripeless through the wispy aura of her white hair. Severe curvature of the spine. Too needy to include in the Process, yet not evicted. It made no sense.

The shops were boarded up in preparation for Eviction Night. People were keen to get ready for it. Late afternoon, school would soon be over. She was breaking her promise to the class. But Hector had spoken to her, and therefore the Process had spoken to her. Suggested a way of resisting. Jane Bowles was her friend yet she had not seen her since the eviction list was announced. Because it was easier to let the waters close over them. If she cared so much, then why had she not visited the Bowles family, to commiserate but also to ask of them:
what can I do?

There, coming out of the town hall, she recognized Baron Von Pallandt, directing the caretaker to secure a tribute of produce to the mantel of the building. She composed herself, and walked briskly over to him, inquired as calmly as she could as to the whereabouts of his wife, Edith.

He was jaunty with her, a tone she found patronizing.

“Is your husband armoured up yet?” asked the baron. He seemed amused at the prospect.

“I don’t know. I make myself scarce during eviction.”

“Why on earth do you do that?”

“The implant makes him crave the armour. The hours beforehand are agony for him. It’s nothing I can help him with.”

“You should make an effort to say goodbye to him.”

She shook her head. That was not their arrangement, there was no need for goodbyes.

“Have you been down to Cliffe?” he asked.

She admitted that she had not. The baron and Terry shared a meaningful look that they were not about to explain to her.

“Edith is visiting Blue Raven,” he said, “to discuss the recording of this eviction in the Kinlog. You’ll find her there, if you hurry.”

The residence allocated to Blue Raven was on Cuilfail, an estate of large houses situated on the hillside overlooking the heart of the town. She had to pass through Cliffe. The ombudsman had sealed off the narrow street with the traditional anti-bailiff banners: no eviction, we stand as one. The very sentiment she wished to inspire. She interrupted the work of the ombudsman to ask if he really meant it, this resistance. He ushered her away, and when she pressed him on the point, grabbing a handful of his black-and-white hooped jumper to shake some truth out of him, he admitted flat out that he would not speak to her, the wife of the bailiff, not on Eviction Day. His gaze wandered from her; she turned and saw three smugglers hauling a banner from the back of a cart. It was new. One she hadn’t seen before. It showed the armour in silhouette, the horned head, its enormous tracks, the iron pincers, all on fire, and overhead a legend embroidered in copperplate script:
Put death in your diary
.

She hiked up the steep winding road into Cuilfail. The houses were sat back in private groves; unique architect builds, sprawling bungalows, burrows glistening with solar cells. She came to a gatepost topped with a carved blue raven, its eye a golden star. It was an artist’s garden. Nature bloomed within the shells of old technology: washing machines in which roses poured out of the porthole, a flatpack desk with vintage monitor and keyboard, Anglepoise lamp and printer set up on decking and overlooking the town; the malty smoke from the brewery that was slow to shift in the valley; the high castle and its webbed trees; the surrounding puzzle of narrow streets and twittens.

She knocked on the door and was met by a friend of the artist, an androgynous woman with boyish blonde crop, sensuous lips and an angry flat gaze. Ruth asked if Edith was there, and so she was led through the house. Large hardback art books on low tables and art itself; on one wall, the torsos of four different women sculpted from transparent cellotape. The patterned carpet rendered the lost artefacts of digital glitches in its coloured weave: pixellation, buffer wheels, error messages. Pre-Seizure art, a mixing of authentic craft materials with digital immateriality, and newer pieces gathered from the Process: functional grey moulded chairs and storage units displaying malformed objects that had appeared in the allocation, grey figurines in which the head and feet were joined in a loop, a jacket in which the back was covered with hard plumage, a glass apple with grey resin core.

The androgynous woman stated the nature of these objects.

“Errors.”

Ruth did not know how to respond, she suspected that anything she said would only confirm the woman’s low opinion of her. She tried introducing herself.