He glanced at Lenna, not quite prepared to ask How am I doing? but heartened by her nod. Andra thought it sounded like a prepared speech: am I present at a viva voce? He said, ‘Everybody thought it a good idea and settled comfortably down? A place for everything and everything in its place?’
‘Not at first, Artist. Nothing human is so simple. The Sweet were no problem to the State – they knew that the Computer Culture was on its way out of history and that the Greenhouse disruption of weather and agriculture was the final blow. They knew that present comfort depended on toeing whatever line the State decreed, and the State played on their fear of poverty. The Sweet became a sort of aristocracy, graded from servitude to power.’ He added, as if it summed them up, ‘The hectic culture of decay.’
‘And the Swill?’
‘They wanted nothing to do with the Sweet. They despised them.’
‘Now that needs explaining.’
Marin shook his head. ‘I am not sure that I understand, either. Scholar?’
Lenna set down her coffee and rested her hands on an invisible lectern. ‘In a classless – at any rate, a casteless society, it seems an irrational attitude, but throughout history it has been a psychological refuge of the poor to denigrate their so-called betters, to satirize their excesses and manners and behaviour and pretend they were above such an artificial existence. The Swill thought of themselves as the real people and sublimated their envy by aping contempt. They pretended they wanted nothing to do with them and Enclave existence insured just that. In a couple of generations the Swill founded a whole new culture, based on necessity, self-preservation and lack of information.’
Andra pushed a piece of eggshell around his plate. ‘It makes no sense. There must have been envy and anger.’
‘Of course. Bitter envy and anger. The contempt was a pretence, a shelter to make poverty bearable, even honourable, and so make pride possible. It is a historical commonplace. You might check with a psychologist.’
‘No, that won’t be necessary.’ (But he would do it.) ‘But why did no leader arise to take them out of the Enclaves and sweep the Sweet out of existence? They had a human tide of numbers.’
Marin offered one of his fits of gnomic wisdom: ‘Revolutions begin in the universities; the streets breed only riots.’
‘I distrust aphorisms, lad.’
Lenna said, ‘He has a point. It is close enough to truth for the exceptions to be very noticeable. Revolutions have commonly brewed for decades before erupting – the two great revolutions of the Late Middle period, the French and Russian revolts, simmered through a century of intellectual argument before demagogues arose to begin the killing. Without intellectuals to stir them, the poor tended to accept their condition and devise philosophies to make it bearable. Occasional tensions caused outbursts of rioting which were controllable because they were mostly uncentralized and unplanned.’
‘Most controllable,’ Marin pointed out, ‘when there was a military detachment with the firepower of an army sitting on the doorstep. It was also possible to drive rioters indoors by spraying unpleasantness from the air. And the parklands made it visibly unwise for large numbers to try to cross into Sweet territory. I think they called them zones of fire.’
‘Yet you claim it was not a tyranny.’
Marin threw a plea for help to Lenna, who explained: ‘Force was rarely necessary. The decay of the State’s ability to service the towers properly caused the rise of the Tower Bosses. These were at first gangsters pure and simple, but a few men of vision gained the upper hand in some towers and established the pattern of small states within the State. The police and the Political Security executive saw the value of this and encouraged it by opening the corrupt lines of communication you read of last night. They gave the Swill a measure of contentment by letting them run their own affairs as far as possible. The other thing they did, with a nice sense of political management, was to convince the Tower Bosses that only a condition of status quo could preserve a collapsing civilization. They had a saying – don’t rock the boat. Fifty years earlier it might have been good advice but the senior men who were steering the boat knew it was already too late. One can only suppose that they persisted in the hope of a miracle.’
From the mooring in one of the delta’s confusing byways the Enclave was at first awesome, majestical to people who did not find great height a necessity of building. Eleven floors of the nearest tower remained, more or less, dog-toothed against the skyline, in two places riven clear to the ground. Looking up the slope from the powercraft it was impossible not to see this vast relic in terms of mightiness and eternity and the infinite sadness of silence.
Marin led the way up the path through weeds and low shrubs. There were signs that trees had been cleared away to allow the first overwhelming vision from below; they had been cleared, too, from the 100-meter concrete skirt surrounding the first tower and from the flanking roadways. The remainder of the Enclave had been left as the forest claimed it. Andra counted nineteen giant walls rising over the trees and there were possibly others timeworn below the level of the green. All in all, the seagirt Enclaves had fared better, their bases protected from cyclone and polluted rain.
The power of growing things confounded imagination. Little fresh topsoil had formed on this man-made clearing but the roadway had for all practical purposes vanished under weeds, shrubs, trees, native grasses. The huge concrete skirt, like a shield around the foot of the building, had been forced into humps where trees had made powerful passage to the sunlight, cut and sliced and shattered where grasses and growths as fragile as wildflowers had heaved themselves through tiny rifts to create crevasses.
Yet a ruin is a ruin, a toppled remnant, and its final statement is failure. In Andra’s effort to imagine the Enclave pristine and soaring – brilliant with sun on windows, noisy with the crush of life in the streets – it survived only a breath or two before settling into hangdog decay. It became ugly, monotonous and dead.
He poked interestedly around the ground floor of the first tower, cleared of rubble for inspection, observing the layout of stairways and corridors, liftshafts and lightwells and the various maintenance rooms. Everything was dismayingly compact. Space had not only not been wasted by the architects but made to accommodate more than such restricted spaces should – the tower interior was claustrophobic. The buildings had been strikingly self-contained; Marin identified garbage disposal, sewage treatment, air conditioning and other services from the fragments of machinery remaining.
‘Most metal was salvaged and re-smelted once the new technological era began. They took whatever could be used.’
Andra mused on history repeating. ‘Their ancestors – our ancestors tore down much of the Roman Colosseum for building blocks.’
‘That still exists. These scarcely do though there’s not much salvageable from poured concrete.’
‘You are interested in history?’
‘In some history, Artist. I plan to write the history of the Christian churches.’
Andra’s heart sank; the subject lay in wait behind the most innocent, distant remark.
Marin continued, ‘The Scholar is helping me.’
‘You are a student?’
‘In part time only.’
‘Please tell me why a very senior professor assists a part-time student.’ He had had to scratch and claw his way past obstacles to obtain her limited services; only his professional reputation, in his sphere as high as hers, had gained him a hearing.
‘Professor Wilson is my great-aunt.’
Nepotism flourishes. He said jealously, ‘You are fortunate.’
‘Yes, Artist,’ Marin said smugly, aware of privilege. ‘She does not do so very much with me because I have a regular tutor, but she locates obscure Data Bank references for me and plays me tapes from the Late Middle period. And discusses historical theory. And she let me read her novel.’
‘Hardly as Christian history, I imagine.’
They turned about and start
ed down to where the powercraft lay. Andra was pleased to have the ancient monsters behind him; the inspection had been useful but the ruined silence in the end oppressive. What further detail he might need for the creation of his play could be obtained from holograms and reconstructions.
‘I think,’ Marin said, still smug on the subject of Marin, ‘that she would subvert my faith if she could.’ As a simple fact, as if it were not a defiance of earthly powers, he declared, ‘But I know my strength.’
At any rate, Andra decided, you believe in it however little you know it. He prodded, ‘The novel?’
‘She wished me to see that virtue can exist without a religious basis.’
‘And?’
‘I perceive some virtue in her characters and remember that their actions were those of real people. Most of them in that day were nominally Christian but pagan at heart, so their virtues achieved nothing, having no firm foothold in a faith. Their virtues becames vanities, lacking humility.’
‘I haven’t observed much humility in you.’ Andra could have bitten the words off his tongue but felt better for the small release.
‘As you say, Artist.’ Carefully noncommittal.
Some silence brooded as they made their way downhill and Andra cogitated what olive branch he might offer this prickly young man.
Marin’s curiosity saved him the trouble as he asked tentatively, ‘Concerning your play, Artist?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you some definite form in mind?’
‘Not yet. No form. One thing only – Kovacs. So many facets to the man. A play needs at least one character who is wholly individual.’
After a few paces Marin said with quiet innocence, ‘I would have imagined that the Artist would realize that all people are wholly individual.’
Fair payment. Andra held back a smile: let the boy count coup. ‘I should like to play Kovacs.’
Marin, a few paces ahead, balked in his stride and half turned back to him. ‘You could hardly do that.’
Andra offered coldness to chill the air, the real ice of the expert challenged at the heart of his being. ‘And why not?’
The sound of an arrogance to match his own had its effect on Marin. ‘I mean, Artist, that – uh – how can I put it? The physical terms are different.’
Andra, seeing the trouble, unfroze a little, not much. ‘So?’
‘Kovacs was a thin man where you are broad. His face was narrow and pointed to the nose, seeking, prying. His bones showed through his flesh.’
‘Look!’ With his palms Andra clapped his ears close to his head, pulling back the skin of chin and cheeks. He dropped his shoulders and hunched them forward, taking 10 centimetres from his breadth. With eyes narrowed, face thrust forward and cheeks sucked in to elevate the bones, he misquoted in a sly, cajoling voice, ‘This Cassius hath a lean and hungry look.” ’
And so he had – in daylight, without the distance of the stage, without makeup or the false skins of illusion.
Marin muttered, ‘I apologize, Artist. You could play anything.’
‘Anything human,’ Andra told him and stubbed his toe painfully against a stone in recognition of vanity. Mann’s damned Christian God, he thought, was listening.
Through Lenna’s window a red sunset laid glamour on the campus and the city as Marin gave his version of the afternoon’s inspection. It had little reference to Andra who found it disturbing to hear young enthusiasm turn, sentence by sentence, to bigoted morality and end with, ‘It is easy to pity them but in the end they were a wicked people who brought their world to a wicked end.’
Lenna, still in tutorial grey, suggested gently that in the face of the insurmountable they had done their best.
‘Strength without virtue! It wasn’t good enough, was it?’ He glanced out of the window, threw history overboard and exclaimed that the day was nearly over and maintenance remained to be done on the powercraft. ‘Goodbye, Aunt Lenna,’ To Andra’s surprise he kissed her. ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again, Artist.’ And he was gone, running, to beat the sundown.
Andra said, ‘That is the first time I have heard him address you familiarly.’
‘Sometimes he forgets his reserve. Mostly he is terrified that others will think he gets his tuition by my favour.’
‘Does he?’
‘Not altogether – he is a very good student. I admit I help.’
‘Sooner or later he will have to choose between morality and reality.’
She laughed. ‘That’s easily said, but which is which? Should I brew tea?’
‘Please do. I was wondering this afternoon if God allows your nephew to chase girls.’
She laughed ‘Most busily.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it. No conflict there between morality and reality?’
Busy with pot and hot water, she said, ‘I don’t ask what goes on in the powercraft by night. I shouldn’t want to be the cause of a holy schizophrenia.’
Down below, the foreshortened figure of Marin jog-trotted to the Escalator head; otherwise the campus, busy when they had come up from the river, was almost deserted; the evening gale was not dangerously powerful, but powerful enough to discourage unnecessary exposure – the city retired indoors for its unruly half-hour. As Andra watched, its approach was heralded by a dimming like a light veil over the distant sea; outside the window the branches bent in their first gentle swing.
‘And I,’ he said, ‘would rather have his moral dilemmas than those of the two graceless sons of Alison Conway. Did those desertions actually happen?’
‘Yes. She kept a diary which was preserved in one of the time capsules.’
‘A nasty pair.’
‘You may change your mind about that – they were products of their time. Family bonds had been loosening for three generations before they were born, there is plenty of evidence of that.’
‘Love disappearing in a pragmatic culture?’
‘Not at all.’ She set out cups and small biscuits. ‘Changing its meaning, perhaps. Love was always a word that covered too much territory, from loving a spouse to loving a hobby or abstract justice, and the emotion-mongers of popular entertainment portrayed it as everlasting and exclusive. In a culture under stress the truth could not be concealed by sentimental fluff. The Greenhouse people learned to appreciate love without glorifying it.’ She paused, eyes searching the table distractedly for something elusive. ‘Sugar, of course! Your poison.’ Andra thanked fortune that his life was not dominated by God or diet. With love and stress he was on better terms.
‘There’s a stress missing from your novel, one which anyone as self-centered as Francis would have felt strongly – the threat of nuclear war.’
Scooping tea into the pot, Lenna said, ‘Nobody seriously believed in that by the time the towers were built.’
‘Is that your thesis or accepted historical wisdom?’
‘Accepted. Our popular drama and literature make much of it but in fact it dropped out of the contemporary forms early in the third millennium.’
‘Yet one imagines it as a shadow over the world right to the end.’
‘It was always a possibility but not a major terror. The mass of people simply stopped thinking about it. We do that, don’t we? We suppress the consciousness of sin, the awareness of a limited morality, the possibility of accident, the discomfort of tomorrow’s unknowns.’
‘A fatalistic philosophy?’
‘More like complacency. The major nuclear powers, America and Russia, recognized an inherent stability in their standoff as custodians of a power that raised greater problems than it could ever solve. They conducted a century-long quarrel about each other’s motives and it appears in retrospect that both recognized that while they talked, however strong the language, they and the planet were reasonably safe. Without formal agreement they frowned on small states and terrorist groups that had access to nuclear arms and kept them more or less in order by divisive intrigue and financial threat.’
‘Only more or less?’<
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‘More than less. There were attempts to use fission bombs for terrorism and blackmail. The users were eliminated. Quite ruthlessly. They dwindled to one-day excitements on the newscasts. Nuclear weaponry became a technique of postponement, as good a solution as any in a basically neurotic culture. Nuclear physics would not go away but it was kept on the top shelf, out of the reach of the children. The world got on with the business of starvation and selfishness.’
Andra complained that she made it too simple.
‘Why isn’t a simple answer good enough? The nuclear threat was never absent from international dealings but it ceased to be news. It dropped further from sight when the space programs ceased for sheer lack of finance. They reached the level of expertise where the cost of minute advances becomes astronomical. The satellite threat decayed and vanished.’
‘But there must have been an underlying awareness—’
She became brusque. ‘Of course there was. They simply became used to it. Do you worry about the Long Winter?’
Surprised by the change of direction he reacted without proper thought. ‘Should I? It’s a long way off.’
‘And therefore unimportant? And is it so far off? There’s no agreement on that and no solid knowledge. Our evening gale may be the first sign, who knows? Some say the Winter can come very suddenly – a series of cold snaps and it is here to stay.’
‘That’s all could-be, could-be. There are planning bodies—’
‘At government level?’ She sounded angry with him. ‘It’s somebody else’s business, so why be concerned? Is that it?’
‘What would my concern achieve? I’m no scientist.’ He observed himself ill-temperedly waving his half-full teacup at her, an actor fallen out of his role and improvising at second-rate level. He set it down quietly and turned the game back to her. ‘What do you suggest my attitude should be?’
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