Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (16 page)

And now that the MacDickinsons and their people are lording it in every village and hostelry, bullying and browbeating everybody so that no one can walk the high roads of Scotland without a kilt of their tartan, the Episcopal church chooses this moment to hurl anathema at us, the families of the upright Presbyterian faith, and to stir up our peasants and even our cooks against us. It’s clear what they’re after: an alliance with the MacDuffs or the MacCockburns, old supporters of King James Stuart, papists or very nearly, that will bring them down from their mountain castles where they have been reduced to living like bandits among the goats.

Will it be a religious war? Really there’s nobody, not even the most bigoted Episcopalian, who believes that fighting for steak-guzzling MacDickinsons capable of knocking back pints of beer even on a Sunday would amount to fighting for the faith. How do they see it, then? Perhaps they think that this is part of God’s plan, like the captivity in Egypt. But Isaac’s offspring were never asked to fight for the Pharaohs, even if God did choose to make them suffer so long in exile! If there is a war of religion, we MacFergusons will accept it as a test to strengthen our faith. But we know that on these shores the faithful of the rightful Church of Scotland are an elect minority, and that they may have been chosen by God—though God forbid!—for martyrdom. I have picked up my Bible again, which in the recent months of frequent enemy forays I had somewhat neglected, and now I leaf through the pages in the candlelight, though never losing sight of the moor down below where a rustle of wind has lifted, as always just before dawn. No, I’m at my wit’s end; if God starts getting involved in our Scottish family quarrels—and in the event of a war of religion he can hardly do otherwise—who knows where it will end; each of us has his interests and his sins, the MacDickinsons more than anybody, and the Bible is there to tell us that God’s intentions are always different from those that men imagine.

Perhaps this is where we have sinned, in always refusing to think of our wars as wars of religion, in the illusion that we would thus have greater liberty to compromise when it suited us. There is too great a spirit of appeasement in this part of Scotland, not a clan that doesn’t fight without its ulterior motives. We have never taken sufficiently seriously the question of whether our religion should be administered by the hierarchy of this or that church, or through the community of the faithful, or from the depths of our consciences.

There, down there, at the edge of the heath, I can see them, torches gathering. Our guards have seen them too: I can hear the whistle sounding the alarm from the top of the tower. How will the battle go? All of us perhaps are about to pay for our sins: we didn’t have the courage to be ourselves. The truth is that amongst all these Presbyterians Episcopalians Methodists there’s not one in this part of Scotland who believes in God: not one I say, whether noble or cleric, tenant or serf, who truly believes in that God whose name is forever on his lips. There, the clouds are paling to the east. Come on, everybody, awake! Quick, saddle me my horse!

The thing that most disturbs me as we wait—and we’re all here now, under the Senate portico, each in his place, Metellus Cimber with the petition he has to present, Casca behind him who is to strike the first blow, Brutus down there under the statue of Pompey, and it’s almost the fifth hour, he shouldn’t be long now—the thing that most disturbs me is not this cold dagger hidden under my toga here, nor any tension as to how it will go, the possibility that something unforeseen could thwart our plans, it isn’t the fear that someone has betrayed us, nor uncertainty as to what will happen afterwards: it’s just seeing that it’s a beautiful March day, a holiday like so many others, and that people are going around enjoying themselves, not giving a damn about the Republic and Caesar’s powers, families heading for the country, young folks going to the chariot races, the girls wearing a kind of tunic that falls straight down, a new more cunning way of having you guess their shape. Standing here between these columns, shamming, pretending casual conversation, I feel we must look more suspicious than ever; but who would ever guess what’s happening? The people passing by are a thousand miles from thinking of such things, it’s a beautiful day, all is calm.

When we leap, our daggers bared, there, on the usurper of republican freedoms, our actions must be quick as lightning, deft, yet furious too. But will we be up to it? Everything has moved so slowly recently, dragged out so long, vague and slack, the Senate surrendering its rights little by little day by day, Caesar always apparently on the point of putting the crown on his head, but in no hurry, the crucial hour always about to strike but always delayed, for another hope, another threat. Everybody’s been bogged down in this sludge, ourselves included: why did we wait till the Ides to carry out our plan? Couldn’t we have done it at the Calends of March? And now we’re here, why not wait for the Calends of April? Oh, it wasn’t this, it wasn’t this we imagined when we dreamt of fighting tyranny, we young men educated in the republican virtues: I remember evenings when some of those here with me under this portico—Trebonius, Ligarius, Decius—were studying together, reading stories about the Greeks, picturing ourselves freeing our city from tyranny: we dreamed of dramatic tense days, under glaring skies, fervid tumults, mortal struggles, everybody on one side or the other, for freedom or for the tyrant; and we, the heroes, would have the people on our side, cheering us on, saluting our victory after the swiftest of battles. But there’s none of that: perhaps future historians will tell, as always, of heaven knows what omens in stormy skies or the entrails of birds; but we know that it is a mild March, with the occasional shower of rain, yesterday evening a bit of wind that took the straw off a roof or two in the suburbs. Who would guess that we were going to kill Caesar this morning (or Caesar us, may the gods forbid)? Who would think that Rome’s history was about to change (for better or worse the dagger will decide) on a lazy day like this?

What frightens me is that, daggers pointed at Caesar’s breast, we too will begin to procrastinate, to weigh up the pros and the cons, to wait to hear what he has to say, to decide what to answer him, and meanwhile the dagger blades will begin to dangle slack as dogs’ tongues, will melt like so much butter against Caesar’s conceited breast.

But why do even we end up finding it so strange that we are here now to do our duty? All our lives haven’t we been hearing people insist that the republic’s freedoms are the most sacred thing there is? Wasn’t the whole purpose of our civic life to guard against whoever tried to usurp the powers of the Senate and the consuls? Yet now that it has come to this, everybody has begun to equivocate—the senators, the tribunes, even Pompey’s friends, even the learned men we most admired, Marcus Tullius himself for example—to say that, yes, Caesar is violating republican statutes, is gaining strength from the veterans’ bullying, is blathering on about the divine honours he supposedly deserves, yet all the same he is a man with a glorious past, a man with more authority than anyone else to negotiate a peace with the barbarians, the only one who can steer the republic through this crisis, and, in short, that amidst a sea of evils, Caesar is the lesser. Then, what do you expect, as far as the people are concerned Caesar is just fine, or rather they don’t care, after all it’s the first holiday with spring weather fine enough to bring the Roman families out into the meadows with their picnic baskets, the air is mild. Perhaps we missed our moment, we friends of Cassius and Brutus; we thought we would go down in history as the heroes of freedom, we imagined ourselves with arms raised in statuesque gestures, when in fact no gestures are possible now, our arms will freeze, hands opening in mid-air in defensive, diplomatic poses. Everything’s taking longer than it should: even Caesar is late, no one wants to do anything this morning, that’s the truth. The sky is so delicately veined with gossamery ribbons of cloud, and the first swallows are darting about the pines. From the narrow streets comes the clatter of wheels bouncing on the cobbles and screeching at the bends.

But what’s happening at that door there? Who are those people? There, I was daydreaming and Caesar is here! There’s Cimber grabbing at his toga, and Casca, Casca’s already pulling out a dagger red with blood, everybody’s on him, and oh, here’s Brutus, he’d been standing to the side as if lost in thought, but now he’s rushing forward too, and now it seems everyone’s tumbling down the steps, Caesar’s down that’s for sure, the surge pushes me on top of him, and now I get my dagger out too, I strike, and below I can see Rome’s red walls opening out in the March sun, the trees, the carts hurrying unknowingly by, there’s a woman’s voice singing at a window, a notice announcing a circus, and withdrawing my dagger I’m overcome by a sort of vertigo, a feeling of emptiness, of being alone, not here in Rome, today, but alone forever after, in the centuries to come, the fear that people won’t understand what we did here today, that they won’t be able to do it again, that they will remain distant and indifferent as this beautiful calm morning in March.

Here’s why I called for you, Müller. Now that my resignation has been accepted, you are to be my successor: your appointment as director is imminent. Please don’t pretend this is such a big surprise: the rumour has been doing the rounds for some time and I’m sure you will have heard it yourself. Then, there’s no doubt that of the young élite in our organization, you are the most competent, the one who knows, you could say, all the secrets of our work. Or so at least it would seem. Allow me to explain: I am not speaking to you on my own initiative, I was told to do so by our superiors. There are only one or two things you don’t yet know, Müller, and the time has come to fill you in. You imagine, as does everybody else for that matter, that our organization has for many years been preparing the greatest document centre ever conceived, an archive that will bring together and catalogue everything that is known about every person, animal and thing, by way of a general inventory not only of the present but of the past too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short a general and simultaneous history of everything, or rather a catalogue of everything moment by moment. And that is indeed what we are working on and we can feel satisfied that the project is well advanced: not only have we already put the contents of the most important libraries of the world, and likewise the archives and museums and newspaper annals of every nation, on our punch cards, but also a great deal of documentation gathered
ad hoc
, person by person, place by place. And all this material is being put through a reduction process that brings it down to the essential, condensed, miniaturized minimum, a process whose limits have yet to be established; just as all existing and possible images are being filed in minute spools of microfilm, while microscopic bobbins of magnetic tape hold all sounds that have ever been and ever can be recorded. What we are planning to build is a centralized archive of human kind, and we are attempting to store it in the smallest possible space, along the lines of the individual memories in our brains.

But it’s hardly worth my while repeating this to someone who won admission to our organization with a project entitled, ‘The British Museum in a Nutshell’. Relatively speaking, you have only been with us a few years, but by now you are as familiar with the workings of our laboratories as I myself, who am or was the foundation’s director. I would never have left this job, I assure you, if I still felt I had the energy. But since my wife’s mysterious disappearance, I have sunk into a depression from which I still have not recovered. It is only right that our superiors—accepting what are anyway my own wishes—should decide to replace me. Hence it falls to me to inform you of those official secrets which have so far been kept from you.

What you are not aware of is the true purpose of our work. It has to do with the end of the world, Müller. We are working in expectation of an imminent disappearance of life on Earth. We are working so that all may not have been in vain, so that we can transmit all we know to others, even though we don’t know who they are or what they know.

May I offer you a cigar? Forecasts that the Earth will not be able to support life, or at least human life, for much longer should not distress us unduly. We have all been aware for some time that the sun is halfway through its lifespan: however well things went, in four or five billion years everything would be over. That is, in a short while the problem would have presented itself anyway; what is new is that the deadline is now very much nearer, we have no time to lose, that’s all. Obviously the extinction of our species is not a happy prospect, but crying about it offers only the same empty consolation as when we mourn the death of an individual. (I’m still thinking of my dear Angela, do forgive my emotion.) There are doubtless millions of planets supporting life forms similar to our own; it hardly matters whether our image lives on in them or whether it be their descendants rather than our own who carry on where we left off. What does matter is that we give them our memory, the general memory put together by the organization of which you, Müller, are about to be made director.

No need to be overawed; the scope of your work will remain as it is at present. The system for communicating our memory to other planets is being designed by another sector of the organization; we already have our work cut out, we needn’t even concern ourselves whether they decide on optical or acoustic media. It may even be that it’s not a question of transmitting information at all, but of putting it in a safe place, beneath the earth’s crust: wandering through space the remains of our planet may one day be found and explored by extra-galactic archaeologists. Nor do we even have to worry about what code or codes will be chosen: there’s a sector exclusively dedicated to looking for a way of making our stock of information intelligible whatever linguistic system the others may use. For you, now that you know, I can assure you that nothing has changed, except the responsibility that rests on your shoulders. That’s what I wanted to talk over with you a little.