The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  The DSS was deeply sceptical about the Council’s ability to produce counsellors of sufficient quality and training to make much difference to the problem. A computer that could offer consistent, monitorable advice of a high quality and that could analyse the data it had itself collected struck the DSS as well worth exploring, despite Anne’s warning that it might be a long time before it would be capable of the things they hoped for. Yet again she found it almost impossible to restrain this overwhelming desire of otherwise hard-headed people to invest impossibly premature hopes in her impressive but unmysterious machines.

  Outside, sitting in his car, Steven Grlscz watched her flat for another ten minutes before driving away.

  ‘How did you get here?’ asked Hendrix. It was six o’clock and he was in his office with Eddy Haynes and the hypnotised Winnicott, lying on the recliner with his eyes closed, was talking in the warmly feminine tones of Jean Smith. Smith was still claiming to be from another world.

  ‘It’s very important that I say nothing that might give you any clues as to our technology. Again, you couldn’t possibly verify it so there’s no point in any case. I know you think that Winnicott is some kind of lunatic who thinks he’s a little green woman. You’re wrong but you’ll just have to take my word for it.’

  ‘Very well. Why are you here?’

  Smith paused as if weighing up whether or not she was going to answer. ‘There are fifteen civilisations in the known universe. They are remarkably similar in many respects. Most of them are about the same age, a recorded history of about a million years or so. Technologically speaking, they are all at a broadly similar level. No one can account for this uniformity, though, believe me, a great deal of effort and huge amounts of my government’s money have been spent trying to unlock this particular secret. There are only two societies that have developed in any significantly different way. One is extinct, but because their true name is awkward to pronounce, and because I can’t think of anything better at the moment, I’ll call them the Vanguard. Most civilisations are clustered around a comparatively small island of cosmic intelligence. The Vanguard is a much older civilisation and their planet is very far from this island, which is why it took so long to find them. They have a recorded history of nearly two million years. Their existence was discovered five hundred years ago by . . .’ she searched for a suitable name, ‘let’s call them the Illyrians. They kept their discovery a secret from the rest of us because the Vanguard had left behind a record of their history and science in a code form that proved impossible to crack. Or at least impossible to crack for two hundred years. When they finally did so, they discovered that the Vanguard had deliberately left their secrets in such an elaborate code because they were concerned that a less technologically advanced society than theirs would be massively destabilised by discovering so much new information. The Vanguard reasoned that only a sophisticated society could uncover the code in which all this information was stored, and that cracking it was a form of proof that they had obtained the necessary level of scientific attainment for the information to be of little value in a practical sense.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hendrix, finding it increasingly difficult to hide his surprise at what he was hearing. ‘I don’t follow you exactly.’

  ‘The Vanguard wanted to leave a record of themselves, of what they’d achieved – but they didn’t want to leave it just lying about in case the race who discovered it didn’t have the means of absorbing such enormous amounts of information. The purpose of the code was to ensure that whoever was intelligent enough to crack it was advanced enough to be at a similar level of technological sophistication. It was meant to be an historical record – no, more than that – they didn’t want everything they had been, everything they were, all they had known and felt and discovered just to vanish as if they had never existed. I don’t know . . . an obituary, perhaps.’ She stopped. ‘At any rate it wasn’t supposed to be a source of economic and technological power.’

  ‘That seems very sensible.’

  Smith sighed irritably. ‘It would have been but for the fact that the premise was completely wrong. It ensured that the Illyrians were close enough to understand most of the science they found but unable to absorb the social and economic changes they brought about. It was as if the early Italian Renaissance had discovered a way of gaining access to the second Industrial Revolution. Vanguard science and culture descended on the Illyrians like a disease, disrupting it at every level, whether it was in making vast numbers redundant from their jobs or altering entirely their way of relating to sex. Within a hundred years, the Illyrians had collapsed into barbarism. When the rest of us finally found out what was going on . . . in violation of every known agreement on matters of this kind,’ she added indignantly, ‘we sealed off their planet as if it were a medieval plague village.’

  Haynes was writing furiously. Smith paused for him to catch up.

  Hendrix felt that he was no longer in control of events. Somehow he had allowed the patient to run things. The patient was giving him information to enlighten him rather than for him to make a diagnosis which would help the patient. He wondered if this unease was due to a proper concern that the patient’s unconscious creation was running away with not one but two analysts, or simply hurt vanity that this was a matter of immense importance in the understanding of mental breakdown and which, he suspected, he lacked the intellectual weight to comprehend adequately. He did not feel in control because he was not in control.

  Smith sighed. ‘I’m feeling very tired. I can only talk to you a little longer.’

  ‘What caused the Vanguard to become extinct?’

  Smith laughed, again a pleasant and even musical sound. ‘That’s a very good question. In fact it’s really the most important question of all. When we went to their planet we found that although they were massively different in many ways from every civilisation we have so far encountered, they were also very similar in that they were obsessed by the same question that had been on our minds as well: how do civilisations come to an end?’

  ‘And did they have an answer?’

  ‘If they’d had an answer then presumably they wouldn’t have become extinct.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ replied Hendrix, feeling a measure of control seep back. ‘It’s entirely possible to understand the nature of a problem but not be able to do anything about it.’

  Smith laughed again. ‘I stand corrected. But they didn’t know, and this implied something very worrying for us. If a civilisation as far advanced as the Vanguard had been helpless to understand the forces of decline it didn’t bode too well for our own, believe me, concerted efforts to understand how societies decline and fall. Sociology is a much derided field on Earth, but to us the sociologist is,’ she smiled, teasing, ‘next to the economist, the most highly regarded of all the specialists. We believed that it was only by understanding great social change that we could prevent catastrophe. You must remember that all the civilisations we knew about, with the exception of the Vanguard – and one other – were at roughly the same level of development. And we had one other thing in common – we realised that we were going into an apparently irreversible decline, and had no idea why.’ There was a long pause.

  ‘You said there was one other civilisation that was entirely different.’

  Smith smiled. ‘Surely you’ve guessed, Mr Hendrix.’ And with that she began to breathe more and more deeply.

  Winnicott opened his eyes and looked at the two men watching him. ‘I feel bloody awful. Could I have a glass of water?’

  The Glass Case

  There has been a gradual demotion of mankind since the Renaissance. We are no longer at the centre of things, literally or figuratively. We live in the light of a minor star in an obscure galaxy in a backwater of the universe. We are merely animals which share 99% of our DNA with a creature that gibbers, eats bananas and spends its days in the trees. In the great scheme we are insignificant. But what if this is wrong? What if there is no life amo
ng the stars but here? What if in the unimportant variations that make up the difference between a genius and a dunce, there lies the very summit of everything?

  Our every deed, no matter how squalid, would make the cosmos hold its breath.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  On the first and second Friday of every month, Trevor Hat opened the bookshop half an hour later than usual for what he described as staff training. This consisted of ten minutes of bollockings for whatever blasphemies had been committed against his philosophy and which had not been discovered at the time they had been committed. Sometimes this was followed by a few minutes of praise for anything he considered had strayed out of the cretinous norm usually his lot to have to tolerate.

  ‘I believe in the carrot and stick approach, Jane . . . a small carrot and a fucking big stick. It’s the bollockings that make this place pay. Bollockings have paid for my house and a flat in Spain and an off-roader the size of a fucking cathedral.’

  Whatever time remained was devoted to Trevor’s outlining of his philosophy of life. A mixture of vanity publishing and public service announcement, Trevor enjoyed explaining his convictions to his staff while at the same time attempting to inspire them with the belief that by following his philosophy and having the courage to accept the bollockings they, too, could have a detached house, a flat in Spain and an off-roader the size of a cathedral. ‘I used my brain and worked hard . . . so I got somewhere. You’ve got to have intelligence; if you don’t have intelligence you’re a fucking non-runner. But you’ve got to work hard. If you don’t put any effort in, you get fuck all out . . .’

  The basement was deserted because the training sessions were conducted upstairs where there was more room. It felt empty in the way that a football stadium without an imminent game felt empty. The arena lacked atmosphere in direct proportion to the intensity of its weekly epiphany. Whenever there were customers here, and it was nearly always full, there was a palpable tension. First there was the excitement attached to any crowded selling place: a market, a bazaar; second the mixture of desire and shame, of furtiveness, hope and curiosity. And there was another quality Jane couldn’t place, a kind of frenzy.

  She started to look through the magazines. Within ten minutes she had examined twelve or thirteen. Within each there was hardly any variation. The girls of Escort (Liza, Samantha, Paula, Jane) were bright and perky and cheerfully unashamed, pretty variations of the girl-next-door. The girls of Penthouse (Astrid, Janine, Patricia, Jo) were softly focused unreachables who looked away into the distance as if they dreamed of men as unreal as themselves. In Rustler they were lewd, pretty girls-next-door willing to display their inner genitalia; in Model Girls they were as unreachably beautiful as the girls of Penthouse but just as lewd as the girls in Rustler. The girls of Mayfair were not lewd, but were more unreachable than the girls of Escort, although not as unreachable as the girls of Penthouse. In turn the girls of Playboy were so unattainable, so curved and narrow, so enigmatic in their secret knowledge of what they knew, so impossible to sully with ordinary lust, that they seemed to belong to another species from the models in Groupies whose lack of reticence extended to the fact that they seemed determined to introduce you to their uterus, liver and lungs. They were like sects, these magazines: there were pornographic Shakers, obscene Adventists, indecent Catholics, smutty Huguenots, debauched Episcopalians and lascivious Copts. There were the same alliances of view, the same disdains, the same tiny but essential disagreements on a point of faith. Blue Book had stories of ecstatic lust, orgies, lesbianism and zipless fucks; Playboy had fiction by the great and good, by Borges, Cheever, Updike, Kundera.

  The men arranged about the room, facing the shelves with the others waiting for their turn behind, reminded Jane of worshippers: apostate Buddhists and Jesuits and Ashkenazim at a wailing wall, after a strange and unsatisfactory god. Their frenzy was the frenzy of the Golden Calf.

  ‘ ’Scuse me.’

  Jane looked up from her copy of Real Wives. ‘I was just looking,’ she said and was pleased at how little embarrassment she felt.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d approve,’ said Trevor Hat.

  ‘What makes you think I do?’

  ‘It pays your wages,’ he said, unconcerned.

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ Her flat admission caught him out and he couldn’t think of a reply. She went back to flicking through the magazine. ‘Do you like this kind of thing?’ she asked after a brief pause during which he began to put cash in the till.

  He stopped and considered for a moment, refusing to be guilty.

  ‘It’s all right, I suppose. It’s like working in a sweet shop – only instead of Mars Bars and Twixes and Crunchies and Bounties and all that, it’s big tits, small tits, solos, duos – they sound like chocolates don’t they, Duos? – rubber, leather, readers’ wives . . .’

  She interrupted. ‘Why do you think they do it, these readers’ wives?’

  ‘They like the idea of all those men tossing off over them, I suppose. I’ll tell you,’ he said, with greater enthusiasm now that he had the chance to change the topic to business. ‘We can’t get enough of ’em. The wives, any home-made stuff – it practically walks out of the shop. That mag up there – Over 40 – out the door in thirty-six hours, the lot. Nobody wants to buy Playboy any more – it barely earns its place on the shelves.’

  She looked up at a magazine with a picture of a heavily endowed half-naked woman on the cover.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘magazines with big breasts are the most popular.’

  Trevor looked at her, mystified. Then he realised her mistake. ‘Oh, no, it’s not over forty inches, it’s over forty . . . y’know . . . over forty years of age.’

  A stab of grief passed through her as she reached up and took one from the top shelf. Again there was the endless variety: plump, tall, short, large bums and small breasts, happy smiles, lewd poses on beds from MFI or John Lewis; women who looked thirty and immaculate; women who would not see fifty-five again.

  ‘Do you think they’d publish my photograph in here?’ she said in a flat, cold tone that in his astonishment he did not pick up. He said nothing then looked at her suspiciously. ‘You’re winding me up.’

  ‘Why do the customers buy them and not Playboy?’

  Trevor looked up from the till and smiled knowingly at her. She felt suddenly that she didn’t want to hear the answer. ‘Search me,’ he said, and went back to counting out his float.

  She put back the magazine. ‘I’d better get on with my work.’ She walked into the office, and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Trevor!’ shouted Gordon, from the top of the stairs.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Minogue’s on the phone.’

  ‘Tell him to fuck off,’ he said calmly, and carried on filling the till.

  Later the same day, just before six, Jane sat in the office worrying about the meeting the following day with the Fraud Secretariat. Despite her preoccupation, she was conscious of Neil, who was supposed to be cashing up, nervously looking at her legs. She wondered whether this had been done to her by lots of men, but more skilfully, or whether her recent experience with the Superbra had simply made her more aware that, by and large, men were perpetually going through an endless optical grazing of the women around them. It followed that many women (most women, all women?) were constantly striving to be grazed upon in turn. If not, then why lipstick, underwired bras and sheer tights? Why not the scrubbed face and a pair of loose trousers? Why not a chador? What were mini-skirts for?

  Neil was certainly thinking about it, though not in any hidden way. The awkward fashion in which he dropped things and picked them up, or craned his neck unnecessarily to reach for things easily within his grasp brought a childish quality to his attempts to ogle her. What was it that was reducing him to this? She felt amused, bewildered, and then a sensation both warm and not exactly pleasant started to spread inside her stomach. A frightening, even sickening, daring seized her.
She shifted in her seat, pushing herself forward and crossed her legs so that her skirt rose almost halfway up her thighs.

  For the next ten minutes she hardly moved except to push her skirt higher. All the time she was acutely conscious of the young man’s gaze. During that time he only looked directly at her legs on five or six occasions, and then only for a few seconds, ten at most. But she could feel throughout that he was thinking of nothing else. After a few minutes the warmth in her stomach had spread to the middle of her chest. She looked at him only once during the ten minutes. His eyes moved away quickly.

  She inched forward once more taking her skirt so high along her thighs so that he could see the change in colour of her tights to the deeper black at the top of her legs. A sudden belief in her absolute power took hold of her, a mixture of revenge and mischief. ‘All right, Neil. If you have to keep looking up my skirt, let’s get it over with.’ She stood up. He looked at her, startled, as she took two steps back, reached down for the hem of her skirt and in one swift move pulled it up around her waist.

  He went white then red, and stood up as if he had been struck. Close to tears he turned and left. She was shaken, for all the cool she displayed to the boy, by an uncanny mixture of malice, daring, meanness, power, and pity for the look of terror on his face.