A History Maker

by Alasdair Gray

  MODERNISM developed when households became the largest units of government on earth and satellite co-operatives the largest off it. Once again time was split into three.

  1 – Prehistory, before people lived in cities.

  2 – History, when increasing numbers did so and city cultures shaped family life everywhere.

  3 – Modernity, when the open intelligence network and powerplants made cities, nations, money and industrial power obsolete.

  The simplicity of our modern divisions misled many into treating history as a painful interval between prehistoric tribal communities and modern co-operative ones. Others wanted to lump the historic and prehistoric eras together with a new calendar dated from the start of modernity, but disagreed about where to place the first year. Open intelligence gurus said the new era opened when the United States government let an early open intelligence network take over the Montana state education service in the 1980s. Others put it in the twenty-first century when the first modern powerplant synthesized a bowl of rice, a Samurai sword and a perfect Hokusai print on a Japanese peninsula — others when the first self-sustaining powerplant community took root in an Israeli kibbutz or in Salt Lake City or in the Vatican — others when the Islamic league began distributing powerplants to every Mohammedan nation on earth — others when the open intelligence network announced an accord with Japan through which it would sell any sixty people in the world their own powerplant if they owned an area of land able to support one.

  I will end this far too lengthy note by quoting Pat O’Rafferty, a guru unknown to the open intelligence since he only speaks into the ears of friends: Modern housekeeping and modern gangrelling grew from more than two thousand years of decent people struggling to live as Jesus advised — struggling to do as they would be done by, not as lords and government officials did with them. The fact that Buddha (a former hereditary lord) and Confucius (an ex-government official) said the same centuries before Jesus proves they too were God’s excellent sons. Calendars were invented to help us keep appointments with each other. Using them to cut us off from a host of the dead is like using fire to burn a library instead of keeping it warm.

  Page 147.

  The public eye presenters and telecom gurus and commanders broadcasting just now seem part of her conspiracy, but so do I.

  The epidemic of military enthusiasm following the Ettrick–Northumbria draw was a worldwide male reaction to the omnicompetence of women who only needed them as inseminators. It is impossible to know what damage this epidemic would have done had it not been interrupted by another. The military threat had not been contrived by the conspirators. They merely tried to take advantage of it, fortunately for humanity.

  Page 151.

  About great-grandmothers: Their gossip has been the only government and police the world has needed for more than a century. Among modern folk the very calm healthy intelligences of old women had most leisure to ponder and exchange news about their families: families whose total sum (if the gangrels are ignored) was humanity. Even loving families bred people who could only bear life by changing their world or finding another. A poet called this state divine discontent because good new things are made or discovered by those who tholed it. In historic times, however, neglect steered many potential makers and discoverers into crime, insanity or that legal compromise between the two, remorseless competition for power and property. In modern time the great-grandmothers ensured nobody was neglected by distributing among their daughters and grand-daughters news and suggestions which brought friends and opportunities to the most lonely and despairing. This news only reached men through remarks made by aunts, sisters or lovers, so like Wat most fighting men did not notice the power of the grandmothers.

  When Wat had been carried off to the circus Kittock ran at once to Dryhope house and told the great-grannies why she thought this might have dangerous results. As he shook hands with folk from six continents in a Selkirk meadow the old women began a worldwide enquiry which spread through the solar system. Starting with grannies and mothers it came to involve everyone who knew anything about Meg Mountbenger and her colleagues. It lasted fifteen hours, those who directed it dozing in relays.

  Meanwhile Wat, with a mixture of boredom and perplexity, saw a creative evolutionary opera called Homage to Ettrick. The overture was a firework display representing the explosion which created the universe and the origin of species. Glancing at the programme Wat saw four acts would follow depicting the heroic, religious, industrial and modern periods. He fell asleep halfway through the heroic period and was nudged awake by General Shafto near the end of the modern. Lulu Dancy was projecting a mirage of his last battle onto the dawn sky. In a pause after a crescendo of organ, trumpet and bagpipe blasts a Russian Orthodox church choir chanted “Do you surrender?” and Wat saw a mile-high coloured shadow of himself sing a splendid “No!” stab another shadow and dive down into the globe of the rising sun, preceded by a shining golden eagle pulling after it a banner like the tail of a meteor.

  Then came the breakfast banquet served in a vast marquee with more speeches, back-slapping, kisses from visiting soldiers’ wives, congratulatory speeches and toasts. Beside him in the place of honour sat Meg-Delilah-Lulu in a silk dress as scarlet as her lipstick. It seemed impossible to talk with her but she kept filling his glass with champagne and giving him such lovingly mischievous glances that he gazed at her in puzzled wonder and hardly saw anyone else. Shortly before the breakfast ended she whispered, “I’ll be back soon,” slipped away and never returned. She was never seen again by anyone who admitted to knowing her. An hour later the foreign guests flew home while Wat, drunk for the first time in his life, raved and threatened violence through the circus caravans in a search for Meg Mountbenger. He was overpowered and carried to Ettrick Warrior house by Archie Crook Cot and the Boys’ Brigade. He arrived there unconscious.

  By noon the old women had informed the open intelligence of the following. Meg Mountbenger and two public eye people and three biologists in the lunar Clavius laboratory were the K20 clique who had killed Haldane. They were still morally stupid, having kept in close touch with each other while pretending not to. By using vast amounts of public energy, then drugging him, they had infected Wat Dryhope with a harmless-seeming, highly contagious virus which could spread to all who talked with him. This virus must be a host to something more sinister since there could be no good reason for spreading it.

  As a result of this information Wat was visited by a team of scientists who took him to a quickly improvised quarantine hospital and laboratory on top of Ben Nevis. Before they isolated the nanomechanism, however, its target became obvious. In Dryhope house the powerplant started gulping and wheezing, the stem grew grey and blotchy, lost its transparency and power to synthesize anything, and finally began crumbling into powder from the summit down. A few hours later this plague struck homes of nearly all who had been close to Wat or close to people close to him. All over the world centres of light, heat, and nourishment died. Knowledge unique to these districts — music, stories and local records — only survived now in memories of the living and a few old books that were mainly read by gangrels. Meanwhile biologists discovered that, though quarantine would reduce the speed of the plague’s spread, it could never be finally eliminated. Animals could carry the virus, and windblown dust from withering powerplants.

  Yet the worldwide panic and collapse into barbarism expected by the plotters never came, partly because wrist communicators did not depend on local power supplies so everyone stayed in the intelligence network. No military action to quarantine homes was suggested or needed. Infected families quarantined themselves. The uninfected raised their powerplant food production to a maximum while reducing what they ate to the minimum, leaving a surplus which was airlifted and dropped to deprived families. Since this could only be a temporary measure while the virus spread further, and since some time would pass before a plague resistant powerplant could be bred, men put their military discipline i
nto planting crops, building wind and watermills to provide local energy supplies, building and manning fishing fleets — luckily the oceans were as throng with life as in prehistoric times, since for over a century only sportsmen had fished them. The enthusiasm with which men turned to such work looked like thankfulness for a world where women required their labour. The Council for War Regulation in Geneva had extended its moratorium on war games for the foreseeable future, pointing out that folk who enjoyed these had plenty of recordings to watch, yet public eye replays of these records were no longer popular.

  “Warfare now seems a fatuous way of passing the time,” said the former commander of the East Anglian Alliance who now commanded a North Sea trawler, “Obviously our lives were so valueless then that we wanted to lose them. I’m glad the biology mandarins are developing a plague-resistant powerplant but in future I think women should use it as an auxiliary source of necessities — enough to keep them independent of us, not enough to make us dependent on them. I don’t know how family life will be reshaped by the present emergency — I hear that monogamous crofting communities of husbands and wives have started in Ireland and the Scottish west. It may not be a bad thing. Whatever the future holds it looks like containing less killing. I suspect that what some gurus now call the early modern period was just another bit of bloody history which spared the women and children. It’s a funny thing, but since the plague erupted nobody has died except of old age and unforeseeable accident. Those plotters deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  When Meg Mountbenger’s fellow plotters were shown proof of their guilt they readily admitted it. One said, “We dislike modern life so wanted to make it exciting. We thought this required killing a lot of people, but everyone who has swatted a fly or poisoned a rat knows it is no crime to destroy inconvenient lives. You find us inconvenient — make your own lives exciting by having us gassed, electrocuted, guillotined, garrotted or hanged. Or revive the old English punishment for treason. Hang us by the neck, cut us down while still alive, rip out our intestines, burn them in front of our eyes, hack off our limbs and genitals. Tapes of the event will be replayed for centuries.”

  They refused to be accepted singly into families or co-operative satellites where they would receive the friendly, careful attention due to the immature. They asked for a habitat of their own and were given a station on Titan where they could only maintain their lives by working so co-operatively that their children (should they have any) could not be corrupted by antisocial examples. Through years during which the effects of the plague were being mastered this station remained a stubbornly silent part of the intelligence network, receiving information from it but returning none. Then one day they suddenly entered a music channel as a song group called The Plagues. In harsh discordant voices they mocked every aspect of modern life they thought stale, smug and stupid. They were popular with children. Adults thought their broadcasts were signs of returning sanity. If Napoleon’s poetic ambitions or Hitler’s artistic ones had been attended to and encouraged they would have done less damage.

  So, the old ladies’ speedy discovery of the Puddock Plot probably stopped mankind reverting to historic barbarism.

  Page 152.

  There was hatred in what she did with me last night but nothing calculating, nothing political. It’s a miracle that she’s needed me all these years.

  Meg Mountbenger had a rare, quick, energetic nature, slow to develop and held back from emotional maturity by a childhood sense of unattractive loneliness, maybe because her mother had weaned her too soon, maybe because her dad was a gangrel. Only aunts and grandmothers knew who her father was, but it may have influenced them into treating her like the outsider she became. When five years old she grew so devoted to a girl friend from Mountbenger that she insisted on going to live there, perhaps thinking she would be more popular than at Dryhope. Her later furtive visits to Dryhope suggest she was disappointed. Always on the edge of family life she recognized Wat as one of the same sort. Unluckily Wat, like most males, wanted girls who were his opposite and treated her with the disdain he had learned from Kittock.

  Like all intelligence networks the grannies could make mistakes. Before Haldane died too many old ladies thought talented malcontents were best occupied turning remote space stations into worlds of their own. From the age of twelve Meg Mountbenger had wished to work in a cloud circus. Instead the grannies deflected her to K20, making that unhealthy concentration of egoists even less stable.

  Like all those working on K20 she was immediately enrolled as an immortal. At that time the damaging effects of rejuvenation on the young was only suspected and Haldane, oscillating between a boyish fifty-eight and sixty-five, looked forward to an eternity of exploiting bright young people. For them work with the great satellite designer seemed heaven, at first. They worshipped him as young Italian artists worshipped Michelangelo, imitated him as young German Protestants imitated Luther.

  Meg’s work and membership of Haldane’s harem may have made her happy until rejuvenation restored her adolescence. Losing seven years of sensory experience causes an emotional void in old and young alike, but hurts the young most because they have poignant memories of a recent-seeming but remote past. Meg’s obsession with Wat returned. It was worse for being with a man who had forgotten her, grew worse still after her second rejuvenation. She was thirty now and the awkward young lad she remembered rejecting her three years earlier (seventeen years in communal time) was now a famous hero in a world more intricate and beautifully varied than any Isaiah Haldane could create, a world which still housed the greatest number of people in the universe.

  By this time most of Haldane’s team were sick of him and life on K20. Someone smashed his head in a way which made repairs impractical; the rest refused to inform on the killer. More grief would have followed if humanity had not dispensed with elaborate laws and police forces. The open intelligence network knew Haldane had been a brilliant but selfish man who had made good things in his hundred and six years but had begun to repeat himself so could only impress the young. His former colleagues were advised to let twenty-one years pass before they rejuvenated again; this would make them less impatient with the elderly. All but five found work on other satellites or the moon. Meg and four others asked the Global and Interplanetary Council for Age Regulation Sitting in Lhasa for permission to work on earth. This was granted when they promised to stop rejuvenating. It was a promise they gave but meant to break.

  For at least six years before Haldane’s murder the group of five had planned to combine eternal life with earthly power. They meant to grasp it by putting mankind into a state of competitive anarchy, breaking up the open intelligence network and restoring government by minorities. They planned an alliance with a military élite amidst the chaos of a worldwide food and energy famine. That is why Meg, their chief agent, got work with a circus which specialized in celebrating military triumphs. So Meg Mountbenger’s seduction of Wat Dryhope was both personal and political. She hoped to seduce him into her plot. Failing that she infected him against his will.

  When Wat Dryhope returned from his Ben Nevis quarantine to Ettrick he worked hard at planting, hoeing, mill building et cetera between fierce bouts of drunkenness. Women stopped liking him and he seemed to have lost interest in them. He worked less frantically in the second year when the effects of plague were obviously being mastered. He boozed more but wrote A History Maker. Having given it to his mother he said, “Now I’m going for Meg.” His mother told him the open intelligence had found no news of Meg Mountbenger so she was most likely dead, probably by suicide. He said, “Meg is too brave and too competent to end that way. She’s done what I would do if I were her — turned gangrel. I’ll track her down, Kittock. I’ll kill her for what she did to me, then I’ll kill myself.”

  He left Dryhope house and has never been seen since by any who admit knowing him.

  Page 153.

  But Meg Mountbenger is another kind of woman altogether. She’s also your … The
unspoken word, of course, was sister.

  POSTSCRIPT

  BY A STUDENT OF FOLKLORE

  WHEN FEDOR HAKAGAWA WAS recording folksongs of the Irish vagrants in Donegal several years ago he encountered the following rhyme:

  O Wat was a nasty old tinker,

  And Meg was his nasty old wife,

  They hated none more than each other,

  They lived in contention and strife.

  He battered her when he was sober,

  She kickit him when he was drunk,

  The broken-nosed toothless old gangrels

  Yelled, fought, fornicated and stunk.

  He glowered at each look that she gave him,

  She spat at each word that he uttered,

  Each hated the other so hotly,

  They didnae think other folk mattered.

  Hakagawa noticed that rhythm, diction and sentiments were more Scottish than Irish and was told it commemorated a couple of travellers who had lived in dens and sea caves round the northern shores of Scotland and Ireland, drifting with the currents across the strait between Kintyre and Antrim in borrowed or stolen boats. They were noted for almost total silence when forced into the company of others by hunger, foul weather or accident. They were also noted for being violently quarrelsome when they thought they were alone.