The Triple Goddess (116 page)

‘Say what?’ Bonvilian sputtered to his would-be inquisitors. ‘What do woodpeckers and mistletoe have to do with the price of eggs? To hell with woodpeckers and mistletoe, and to hell with Darwin too. Were the place to exist, Hell, which of course it doesn’t, we all know that, he would be there, being punished for making such idiotic pronouncements by being made to kick himself for all eternity.’

4285N paused for effect, and the members of the panel, affected, took a moment to recall the asseverations that they had themselves made in scientific journals on the subject of retrospective Evolution, as if it mattered a damn, which of course it did not, any fool knew that, and to wonder whether what they had written and said in lectures might qualify them in due course to join Charles Darwin’s kicking class.

Fortunately, they realized with relief, their annunciations on the subject had been few, because every good scientist and academician and specialist, and they were all good here, knows that obfuscation and equivocation were essential to the gaining and winning of professional advancement and preferment, prizes, and acclaim, and in the selling of the books that they had their research assistants write for them. Only second- and third-raters stuck their necks out making the kind of assertions that could be challenged the next day by a rival with just as little proof of what he was saying as they had.

What the man Darwin should have done, of course, if he had been thinking clearly, was end his statement just repeated by this Bonvilian—words which, up to the woodpecker and mistletoe bit, had been a model of generalization—by answering his own question with another question in the approved manner. But Darwin had not been thinking clearly, that much was clear; and really, what should one have expected of the person who was notorious for dropping the anthropological clanger of all time?

The interviewers shifted uneasily in their seats, praying that mind-reading was not amongst Bonvilian’s precocious abilities, as he continued.

‘On the other hand, although I am not a mind-reader as to where people might be headed in their thinking, or in this case, a medium, I must say that I agree with Darwin...’ The panel started, and were about to rethink their thinking when they were forestalled. ‘...in his axiomatic statement that perfection is for the birds, for the woodpeckers; and that the mistletoe, a parasitic plant formerly of interest only to Druids and makers of birdlime, has adapted itself admirably…to the role of prompting the male of the species to kiss girls under it on New Year’s Eve.’

4285N blushed, and hoped that the rasp in his voice would conceal a momentary tremulousness. He had not kissed a girl on New Year’s Eve or at any other time, and it was possible, even likely, that his interviewers knew it. He had not intended to make a joke, it had just slipped out, probably because of a dream the night before that someone had invited him to an end of year party in three months and fifteen days. To think that in three months and fifteen days he might have kissed a girl!

While, to an osculatory rather than scientific end, Bonvilian was very much in favour of mistletoe, the problem was that he did not know anyone who might invite him to a party. Even if he got to go to one, he would not know how to behave at it, or what to wear for the occasion. If it were fancy dress, and he were to go as Charles Darwin, would anyone know who he was supposed to be, and would they recognize him, and would they find the disguise, and him, amusing?

If it were not fancy dress, then the only clothes he had were plaid or check shirts, a few pairs of baggy brown corduroy trousers, shiny and worn at the seat and the knees from much sitting on laboratory stools, and a second-hand shapeless green corduroy jacket, over which he always wore a white coat obtained from the scientists’ supply cupboard.

Bonvilian did not like the thought of how he would look without a white coat. Jeans would be OK, he supposed; but he did not own a pair of jeans, they seemed so…not him.

The members of the panel, grateful for the release of tension, laughed loud and long at Bonvilian’s little joke. As raw and brash as the kid was, and however much they were jealous of his intellect, and felt threatened by it, it did not matter what their private opinion of him was. Although a chess grandmaster may be beaten by a teenage prodigy, and humiliated, this was not a competition, it was an evaluation session; and Central expected of its panels that they should report what was expected of them, in this case, that Hugo Bonvilian 4285N was possessed of an awesome but as-yet unquantified genius that needed to be harnessed and put to the best possible service on behalf of the State.

‘Where is this obsession with immortality leading us,’ Bonvilian resumed in a stern voice, now that he had recovered himself, to his audience which had abruptly stopped laughing upon, hearing the dangerous double agent word “Where”, and suspecting the imminence of another of those pesky interrogative verbal marks of punctuation that, for the duration of this interview, they were supposed to have a monopoly of; unless 4285N might continue to demonstrate a rhetorical infatuation with answering his own questions on the grounds that no one else could, which was true; ‘except towards perpetuating the myth of Time?

‘Well, I’ll tell you.’ The panel released its breath. ‘Time as an enemy is a chimera of Man’s imagination, a monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. It is a sheep, a fanciful sheep clothed as the wolf of Progress. Consider how proud we are that the average age for men today is one hundred and twenty years—the same as that of the similarly mythical comedian Moses—and a hundred and thirty-five for females of the species. But such earthly yardsticks are unimportant, irrelevant, when one considers the immortal product that awaits bottling from the springs of eternity, the waters that flow over the also mythical Methuselah’s grave, and those of all the other Patriarchal loin machines, and feed the fountain of youth.

‘For Time is by definition a temporal notion, one that may without loss be done away with, and replaced with a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own. Creation, birth, life, death: we have the power to replace them with a new and stable environment in which we may thrive forever on our terms. On Central’s terms.’

Despite an all-round virginity, as the supremely ambitious person that he had become, 4285N hereby demonstrated to the approval of the panel that he had already mastered in spades the principles of political expediency.

‘To put it more simply,’—his audience nodded—‘in order to discover the ontological, or metaphysical secrets of the universe as they pertain to the nature of being,
il faut reculer pour mieux sauter
…not in the figurative sense of putting off the evil day, or delaying the day of reckoning, which if I have anything to do with it will never come for those who are to be reckoned with, and we all know who they are, but the literal one of falling back in order to jump forward better, meaning further.

‘Having raised the subject of myth, let me use it to illustrate my point, for myth is the starting point on the road to Truth, the truth of the world as it should be and will be for those who believe in it. I have in mind the beautiful Trojan youth Tithonus, who was beloved of the Goddess of Dawn, Aurora. Aurora gave Tithonus the gift of immortality, but forgot to include eternal youth in the package. When he was withered with age, Tithonous pleaded with Aurora to release him from life; but because she was unable to grant his request, she did the best she could, which was to turn him into a grasshopper.

‘That has become our fate, ladies and gentlemen: we are a race of grasshoppers. Tithonus is the precursor of our present-day hordes of middle-aged seniles, who, desperate to be spared what seems like an eternity of scratching their tired old legs together in a parched meadow, submit their AFDs, their Applications for Death, to the Department of Morbidity. And as you are aware, Morbidity’s Director, the esteemed Ms Sharon Sickle 9253C, although not busier than any other of Central’s uniformly dedicated and hard-working executive personnel, is equally as busy as the others, which means that she is very busy indeed.

‘While Time is still at large, those old-before-their-timers who are granted their quietus by Ms Sickle, upon receiving their termination notices, go about with a song in their hearts and a spring in their steps, listening to saccharine songs by Cappy Hamper 3018P. They plan wakes that make wedding receptions look like old-style funeral gatherings. Guests instead of mourners congratulate them, make donations to the expiring parties’ charities of choice, and contribute to funds for the education of their great-great-great-grandchildren.

‘It is pathetic, and it is unnecessary, and Ms Sickle deserves to be redeployed elsewhere in a position more befitting of her talents.’

Bonvilian was obsessed with Tithonus, he had no idea why. Sometimes when he was alone, in his private quarters, he would repeat aloud the lines of Tennyson’s poem of the same name, the lines of which had been instilled in him by his mother, who when he was a baby crooned them over his cot:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white hair’d shadow roaming like a dream

The ever-silent spaces of the East,

Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Today Bonvilian refrained from quoting from the poem: culture these days being
nekulturniy
, to do so would earn him a citation from the Department of Artistic Dismantlement. Phyllis Stein 2565C, a champion wrestler, and Hugh Gieves à Crêpe 7654C, a reformed Renaissance scholar, were most diligent in pursuing infractions; and to offend before such an august audience would be sure to be speedily reported, however impressive the rest of 4285N’s performance might have been.

‘In conclusion,’ said Bonvilian, arresting the focus of Horst Pealiker 6608B’s eye; ‘it is my desire, should your eminences be disposed to empower me so to do, in my enthusiastic endeavours on behalf of the State, now to turn my attention from Tithonus to Aurora, the Dawn. To the mythical Dawn of Creation, not of our biological origins but the beginning of everything, so that we might extract its invigorating essence and inject it into the Elect of Central, and...ahem...any others whom they in their wisdom may honour in the process of natural selection—not the
gradual, non-random Darwinian process by which traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers; but a pragmatic version of State’s own inspired devising
.’

The panellists held a brief but animated discussion in whispers, following which Pealiker dismissed Bonvilian so that he and his colleagues could draft their report for the eyes only of Herm Feingold 7930A at the Department of Operations. Notwithstanding their continuing incomprehension of what 4285N had been talking about, if indeed he had been talking about anything, the experts were expert in writing the sort of prose conveying the impression that they had got their heads around whatever it might have been. All were convinced that Bonvilian was more than capable of advancing Central’s long-term agenda, whatever that might be, at any of the number of nago departments that he might be suited for...the nagos being the Non-Autonomous Government Organizations that had replaced quangos, the former QUasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations that had all been subsumed by State.

And so the Exeat Institute was founded, with Hugo Bonvilian as its first Director. In recognition of his new status, he was inducted as the youngest ever member of the J Class, an unprecedented four-letter jump that made him the envy of everyone outside of Central who was alphanumerically senior to him, and not a few within. Already it was being mooted that, if he succeeded at whatever it was that he would be doing, or rather, succeeded in convincing State that he had succeeded in doing something important, he might be a candidate for C Class, which would entitle him to enter Central’s hallowed halls and enjoy privileges that the rest of civilization could only dream about, and participate in the sort of sanctioned frivolities at Central’s Rest-and-Relaxation resorts that would induce cardiac arrhythmia in the young man of today.

Whereupon, spurning the rats, mice, monkeys, cats, dogs, frogs, pigs, and turtles…and, of course, guinea-pigs…that he could have commanded any number of, depleting every kennel and cattery if necessary, to use in his medical experiments, and with the cooperation of Mort K. Deaver 2071C, Central’s Human Synthesizing Officer, Hugo Bonvilian set about assembling a stable of lower-echelon beings, upon whom to continue his research into the molecular, et cetera, components of life.

Director 4285J had no friends or relationships, platonic or otherwise. His emotional needs, from the moment he saw her, were satisfied and unsatisfied exclusively by his fixation upon Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M. The Exeat’s antiseptic environment was not conducive to seduction, and despite the proximity of numerous female nurses and libidinous lab technicians, Bonvilian never stooped to conquer or assert his
droit de seigneur
. The limited contact he had with his staff was cool and professional. It could have been different; but although some were attracted by his power, and aura of cruelty, and maladroit boyishness, or turned on by the idea of making a conquest of the head of the Exeat Institute, even when he understood their flirtatious signals he had no clue of how to respond to them. If charm and entertaining conversation were latent in his character, they were suppressed; and because he seemed impervious to their personal advances, women assumed that, for whatever reason, they were not his type, or despised, or he was gay.