The Triple Goddess (135 page)

Scryers peered at crystal balls, and haruspices pored over the entrails of cattle. The leaves from thousands of cups of loose tea, consumed by tannin diagnosticians until they keeled over from caffeine poisoning, were examined.

In the Department of Determinations and Exactitude, Gideon Armour 0783A’s people were occupied in ascertaining the day and precise moment when Earth would cease to exist as they cared to know it. Cross-referenced calculations and recalculations were made amongst a chaos of mathematicians, physicists, chemists, geologists, astronomers, astrologers, and philosophers.

Eventually, Giddy Armour 0783A’s secretary, a former clergyman’s housekeeper called Maur Teevicker 8889T, whose number the statistical stickler Armour could never call to mind, though he knew that she was a T Class, when she brought her boss his afternoon tea with four sugars, handed it to him and drew his attention to the piece of paper tucked between cup and saucer; which, she said, someone had given her on the way in, and she had only glanced at it, but he should be sure to read it because it said when they were all going to die; in consideration of which, although he was usually a one-cupper would he like a second, and should she put five sugars in it instead of four if there was still enough room for the tea, alternatively she could go and look for a larger cup or even a mug.

Gideon Armour 0783A drank his tea, which had been steaming when it came in but was now stone cold. He declined the offer of a second cup. Then, taking up and unfolding the piece of paper, and holding one hand over an eye, he peeked between his fingers and read the fateful Date and Time at which the Curtain would Come Down on the Cosmos.

Not only was the tea cold, but it had been established that all people that on Earth did dwell, as in the hymn with words by William Kethe, would be eliminated on Friday 13th April, 2033 at 16:17:12—at one six seventeen hours and twelve seconds on the underground twenty-four hour clock, formerly otherwise known as military time, or Continental time, or railway time.

Which, given that it was now mid December, 2032, meant that the Big Lights-Out was only four months away.

There it was, to the day, the hour, the minute, the second, soon to be mentally graven in the world’s minds in three-dimensional numbers as large as the statues of former Eastern bloc dictators, or the Moai monoliths on Easter Island: the point after which there would be no more history for the books, no books in which to enter the history, and no more After.

Thanks for the notice, Bucko.

Well. Since outlaw Time was the nub of the problem, Time was what had to be knocked on the head once and for all; and that was why the Exeat Institute’s plenipotentiary, Director Hugo Bonvilian 4285D’s researches into mortality and immortality at were now even more vital than they had been. For if Time could be stilled, then so could the meteorites; in which event the exultant subjugator, CENTRAL! would use them as foundations to erect more buildings on, driving the pilings deep into their stony hearts.

Chapter Fourteen

When news of the timing got out, Central was dumbfounded by world reaction. The calming effect of certainty was extraordinary: people believed what they were told, and appeared even to welcome the prospect of annihilation. In a curious way, now their lives, their miserable protracted lives, had acquired context and meaning. The knowledge of a sudden and painless death, a commutation of misery, was comforting; per Macbeth: “…that but this blow |Might be the be-all and the end-all—here, |But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, |We’d jump [risk] the life to come.”

The populace jeered the crackpots who had now returned to the streets carrying their old signs, with a key word carroted in so that they now read, “The end of the world is
not
nigh
after all
”.

Those who suspected that the madmen might be genuine soothsayers, decided that they wished to be proved wrong.

There was a pre-order demand for 2033 diaries and calendars, so that the appointment could for tidiness’ sake be written in on the last day. To save paper they would be printed for the first four months only, with the last half of April left blank…thus eliminating [Western] Easter Sunday: presumptuous Easter Day, being a moveable feast that had been calculable for every year since 3rd April, AD
326 as falling sometime between
March 22 and April 25
in the Julian calendar, had previously taking the liberty of pencilling itself into people’s expectations for the 17th April, 2033.

The As, Bs, and Cs, who had the most to lose because of their status, were less sanguine, as they did their best to spin the situation by putting it out that salvation of a Central kind might still be possible. But regular folk, especially those registered in the lower half of the alphabet, were not swayed. They were elated at the prospect of a change for the better in their lengthy lives, which they suffered rather than led. There would be no blindfolds for them as they stood before the firing squad; none of that Sydney Carton “It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known” crap from Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities
; no drawing of weary arms across the brow with a pale Pre-Raphaelite glance heavenwards before being cast from the Delacroix precipice.

Foreknowledge was romantic, and the non-As–Bs–Cs and their less-immediate juniors did not envy the dumb beasts who knew nothing, at least most presumed that they did not, of what was going down. They were united in a common spirit of courage; and now that everyone’s existence was definitely definitively defined by finity they were prepared to side with the prosecution in Central vs T.S. Eliot, in maintaining that the world would end in a grand finale: with a bang and not a whimper, as the poet’s Hollow Men had asseverated: “
This is the way the world ends |This is the way the world ends |This is the way the world ends |Not with a bang but a whimper.”

For hoi polloi it became a point of honour, now that their mortal state had been afforded the luxury of context and meaning,
that their upper lips not quiver; and that they should so bear themselves that, even if Earth were only going to last another week, Men would say, had there been any around to echo the Churchillian phrase, “This was their finest hour.”

Accepting the karmic closeness of the end, people were looking on the bright side: being blown to bits while healthy was preferable to dying a lingering death from the cancers of old, which—after billions of dollars spent in trying to find a cure, and after the world had endured the mumblings and bumblings and ramblings of a million pompous and secretive scientists, and after the deaths of legions of mice and rats—
the disease was discovered to succumb naturally to a filthy-tasting drench of three pints a day for two weeks of a mixture of bugloss
Anchusa arvensis
, and raspberry cordial milkshake
Rubus idaeus benignus lac concussum
; after which one was advised to go either on a crash diet
, or back to square one and hook oneself up to a Jiffy-Fix machine.

An expression of philosophical acceptance settled on the face of the Earth, as for the Time-Being life went on. In dingy halls and church basements formerly occupied by the coffee-guzzling ghosts of twelve-step programmers, sober crowds gathered to share their acceptance of the one great thing that they were powerless to change.

Oh, how wonderful it was to be relieved of worry about money and the job and health care and school fees and inadequate retirement savings, and who was going to take care of one in one’s dotage! Macbeth’s tragic cousin Hamlet was right:

  To die: to sleep;

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished.

People dedicated themselves to living, instead of dreaming, the impossible dream, and scrambled to fulfil long-deferred ambitions; to experiencing life more intensely than they ever had, or would have done had they been spared. Now there was nothing to be afraid of but fear itself, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first Inaugural Address; nothing but rosebuds to be gathered, and golf handicaps to be improved. They laughed at the Judgement Day cartoons in the newspapers. Students who failed their exams, instead of buckling down with a bad grace to swotting for retakes, flipped their tutors the bird—as in gave them the finger, rather than demonstrated an avian 90° rotation—or made the old palm-inward V-sign, and went to the pub.

The Optimists, and members of the Gay Abandon Society, did not put on brave faces, because there was nothing to be brave about, and no reason for them to be less happy, or gay, than they already were. Instead they smiled Mona Lisa smiles, as if they knew something that the rest of the world did not, about what was really going to happen.

They said how considerate it was of the meteorites—each optimist and corybanter adopted one and gave it a name, like Dastardly Dudley, or Fast Freddy, or Happy Hannah, or Flintstone, or Frolic, or Rocky—to defer their arrival until just after a quarter past four in the afternoon, on the thirteenth of April; when people would have had their tea, and their cucumber sandwiches, and sponge fingers, as they always had while poet Browning’s lark was on the wing, and the snail was on the thorn, and the poet’s god was in his heaven, and all was right with the world (now that everything was deducted at source from income, there were no financial returns to be filed for the fifteenth of April, as the pre- Central State Tax Man in Great Britain used to propose); and where, in fellow poetizer Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester, in d
eep meadows yet one might forget the lies, and truths, and pain; and where stood yet (as it always did), the Church clock at ten to three (eighty-odd minutes earlier), and there was honey still for tea.

When they went on their long weekends, the one that might be their last, upon arriving at their Optimists’ Guide-recommended hotel, guesthouse, or B&B, they found that the booking had not been lost, as it always had been in the past; the first room they were shown was the one they were happy to remain in, the shower worked, and the mattress was comfortable. The food was delicious, the wine was not rot-gut, the hotel staff was not surly, the rates were reasonable, and the weather was perfect.

Perhaps one was just imagining it, but, per Reginald Heber, every prospect pleased, and one’s fellow guests, instead of being vile, turned out to be such good company that all parties said, and meant, that they wanted to stay in touch for the Duration.

In America, where families had recently gathered from near and far on the last Thursday of November for the festival of Thanksgiving–Black Friday, instead of everyone expecting the soon-upcoming Christmas to be the same ill-tempered gathering of incompatible relatives slagging each other off over the turkey, newly converted Optimist families were already looking forward to a vastly enjoyable traditional celebration amongst the same people.

“Cheer up, it may never happen!”, the Optimists said to each other, convinced that it would; and, “It can’t be all bad!”, knowing that it wasn’t.

The only thing that the Optimists and the Pessimists were agreed upon was that gallows humour was
out
, as in not in or on.

The Pessimists were torn between delight, anger at their delight, and annoyance that the Optimists, given the incontrovertible evidence, were not sharing their gloom. As James Branch Cabell said, attempting to ruff the previously quoted Voltairism, “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”

Being depressed was not fun any more, and now that they had been deprived of the joy of quitting the world on their own terms, many Pessimists snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by committing ingenious
felones de se
. Hordes of lemmings in the Arctic circle, scampering to cliff edges traditionally favoured by lemmings a-leaping, were forced aside and watched in astonishment as waves of bipeds rushed past them and swallow-dived into the airy depths, with cries of “Geronimo!”.

Proud Pessimists sat in their favourite chairs with mass-produced Swords of Damocles dangling from frayed thread or Glide dental floss—despite the manufacturer’s claim, it snapped more easily than the regular kind—above their heads. They held Russian Roulette parties; friends shook hands with friends and shot each other on the count of three; actors played their final scenes in
Romeo and Juliet
, and
Antony and Cleopatra
, using real poison, too many sleeping pills, genuine weapons, and live Egyptian cobras, or asps,
Naja haje
; bungee jumpers “forgot” their bungees; and lumberjacks were paid handsomely for felling trees onto Pessimist houses.

Self-service guillotines with automatic hydraulic returns appeared in every square for five thousand-Universo coins (just under ten old pounds sterling) in the slot per chop. Penthouse suites with scenic views were overbooked for “Champagne Suicide Breakfasts”, clean-up included. Instead of settling down with a four-month supply of potato chips, beer, and cigarettes to watch
M*A*S*H
,
Seinfeld
,
Cheers
,
Friends
,
Frasier
, and
Law and Order
reruns on television. Pessimists tightened nooses round their necks and kicked away the chairs they were standing on, and swallowed pistol barrels, and drank paraquat and arsenic cocktails, and eviscerated themselves on oriental rugs, and dropped the hairdryer on the high setting into their baths.