Victor asks what the other two are but Gruber is too preoccupied with his own train of thought to answer.
“The point about the Cassiopeians is that they are not afraid to think,” says Gruber, standing up. “They still trust themselves to do something more imaginative than count! As a result their ideas are beautiful and they know it, so they beam them out for anyone who wants to listen.”
He laughs angrily. “Which on this planet at least, sometimes seems to amount to about eight people among all the seven billion inhabitants!”
He perches on a table, takes out his pipe and begins to fill it. Victor seems to remember that there had been some suggestion too that the pictures had been greatly enhanced: crude matrices of dots had been ‘interpreted’ to a point that was arguably simply wishful invention. Perhaps even deliberately doctored?
Gruber stands up again agitatedly, thrusting the still unlit pipe at the young Englishman.
“My dear friend, what the Cassiopeians offer us is something that we desperately need: wisdom! Our own ideas have grown stale. We are in a blind alley. Christianity was once a brilliant new liberating leap. So once was scientific rationalism. But they have grown old. We have no real ideas any more, not even us Germans, for whom ideas and philosophy were once almost a vice. Especially not us Germans. Human philosophy no longer dares to attempt the big picture. All we have is the pursuit of cleverer and cleverer technologies, all of them quite pointless of course in the absence of any system of values that could tell us what all this cleverness is for.”
He laughs self-deprecatingly and sits down again, wiping a speck of spittle from his lower lip. “But as you can see this is something of an obsession with me. Have some more beer. It comes from my homeland of Swabia. Not bad, do you agree?”
Victor smiles. The beer is indeed good, and very strong. He feels quite at ease. He finds himself liking the odd old man.
Gruber picks up a file and begins to read aloud: “Just as there are three sexes, three states of matter and three Modes of Being – Substance, Life and Soul – so there are three principles in the universe constantly at war: Gentleness, Valour and Evil. There can be no reconciliation between these three, no final resolution of their perpetual conflict, only temporary alliances. Those who hate Evil must surely hope for an alliance of Gentleness and Valour, full of contradictions though such an Alliance will inevitably be. But oftentimes in history it is Valour and Evil that come together against Gentleness and we see cruel, harsh and warlike nations, preoccupied with honour, indifferent to suffering.”
He flips over the page: “At other times it is Gentleness and Evil that form an alliance against Valour. Nations become timid. They fear passion. They try to hide themselves away from encounters with suffering and death...”
“That sounds a bit like Europa!” observes Victor, and the old scholar beams at him delightedly.
“Precisely, my friend, precisely. We are obsessed with the fruitless struggle to eliminate disease and accident and death. We cordon off all that is distressing and unruly in the Underclass Estates. We have our wars in faraway countries, and watch them from the comfort and safety of our living rooms. We confine adventure to the Virtual Reality arcades, where no one ever gets hurt but nothing is ever achieved. We do not trouble one another any more with our untidy sexual passions, but release them (if we must) in the hygienic liebespielen, or in the new synthetik brothels, which everyone says are so ‘civilized,’ because they do not spread disease and do not exploit the vulnerable...”
*
Later Victor spends some time wandering the busy Kreuzberg streets, reluctant to return to Franz and Renate’s apartment. He feels embarrassed by his earlier outburst and by the fact that he simply walked away and abandoned the two of them, embarrassed, now that it is over, by his evening with the old philosopher in his squalid little bachelor’s lair.
He passes VR arcades, video galleries. He passes an establishment which he suddenly realises is a brothel staffed by specially adapted synthetiks. He walks quickly past.
Three police cars whoop by, heading eastwards to put the lid back on some outbreak of mayhem in Lichtenberg.
I’ll stop for a drink and wait until Franz and Renate are in bed, Victor decides. Sort it out in the morning.
He turns into a street called Moritzstrasse. (“Empire of Charlemagne!” exclaims a poster put up by the Carolingian party for the recent senatorial elections. They stand for a smaller unified Europa consisting of France, Germany, Lombardy and the Low Countries – the area of Charlemagne’s long-dead empire. Tired old Europa is rummaging in the attic of her own history for ideas, but the ideas are stale and empty. No one votes for the Carolingians. Those who turn out for elections vote dutifully for Federation, the Market and the Social Compromise.)
He finds a small bar and orders a glass of red wine. There is a TV on in the comer showing an extended news programme about the anticipated bloodbath in Central Asia.
Victor sips his wine and looks around the room. In the far comer a young man is fighting chimeras in a small head-and-hands VR machine. A fat red man at the bar is loudly extolling the virtues of half of one percent reduction in interest rates, currently the hot issue in Europa’s political life.
At the next table, a woman about Victor’s own age is sitting by herself. She is very beautiful, it suddenly seems to him. She has a particular unselfconscious grace that is all her own. As Victor admires her, she unexpectedly turns and sees him, meeting his eyes for a moment and giving him a small wistful smile.
Victor looks away hastily, takes another sip from his glass.
But suddenly he is aware of the three warring principles of the Cassiopeians struggling for control within his mind.
“Go over to her!” says Valour.
“What about Lizzie?” says Gentleness.
“If it’s sex you want,” says Evil, “why not just go back to that synthetik place? It would be a loss less trouble and there’d be a lot less potential for embarrassment.”
But Valour is insistent.
“Go over!” says that unfamiliar voice, “Go over before the moment passes!”
Victor is terrified. Never in his whole life has he ever done anything as audacious as to approach a beautiful stranger in a bar. He and Lizzie only went out together after months of working side by side. Even now, after years together, their sexual life is so crippled by fear and inhibition as to have hardly even begun.
“Go!” says Valour.
Grasping his wineglass firmly, Victor stands up. He clears his throat. He tries to assemble in his mind a coherent opening sentence. (The entire German language seems to be rapidly deleting itself from his brain...)
“Ich… Sie…”
She smiles delightedly and Victor grins back, amazed, only to realise that she isn’t smiling at him at all...
“Clara! I’m sorry to be late!” says a big blond man from behind him, crossing the room and embracing her.
The clenched wineglass shatters in Victor’s hand. He feels an excruciating stab of pain. Blood wells from a deep gash between his fingers.
Clara looks round. Everyone in the bar looks round – some amused, some puzzled, but all a little afraid. There is a crazy man here clutching a broken glass. What will he do next?
What can he do? Staring straight ahead of him, dripping blood, Victor stalks out into the cold street. No one challenges him to pay his bill.
KILL ALL WOPS, says a scrawl on the wall opposite.
EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE, says another.
KEEP BERLIN TIDY, says a municipal sign.
But, just over the rooftops, unnoticed, washed out by the city lights but still just visible, the universe shines down, with the W-shape of Cassiopeia there in the midst of it.
From somewhere up there, fainter than gossamer, fainter than the silvery tenuous voices of the stars, whispers the Cassiopeian signal. It is a ripple from a single tiny pebble dispersing slowly across an enormous ocean, yet even at this distant shore it still bear
s the unmistakable signature of its origin. It is still a message. It is still purposeful. It is still without question the product of intelligent minds.
“Valour?” says Victor to those unreachable minds, nursing his copiously bleeding hand. “Valour is it? Do you realise you lot have just made me look like a complete idiot with that Valour nonsense of yours!”
He chuckles a bit at this, then laughs out loud.
And then crashes unconscious to the ground.
*
Clara and her blond brother Hans are the first to come to Victor’s aid where he lies flat on his face on the cold Kreuzberg pavement, under the frosty stars.
“We need to do something about that hand,” says Clara. “He’s lost an awful lot of blood.”
Snapshots of Apirania
This is a typical view of Apirania. Prairie country, the occasional bowava tree and here and there a hill standing out from the plain. But do you see that hill over there in the distance? That is actually a town on the top of it, a walled Apiranian town. It looks just like rocks doesn’t it? Like part of the landscape.
Here’s a closer view of the town. It’s called Formara. Lydia and I got to know it quite well. The layout of it is pretty much the same as all the towns there: high walls, a single gate. You can see a couple of sentries up there on top of the walls. We’re too close to the walls to see much of what’s inside, but Formara is built along a single road that rises in a spiral from the gate to the Motherhouse at the top. You can just see there the top of the Motherhouse.
I know: it’s all the same reddish colour, the walls, the hills, the houses.
This is a bowava tree. Now these have got to be seen to be believed. This picture gives no idea of the scale… Wait a minute, yes, this is better. That tiny speck down there, believe it or not, is me. These trees are immense and they pollinate in an extraordinary way. You see these orange things along the branches? Can you see they are above the branches and not below them? Well, they’re balloons. Natural balloons. They rise up into the stratosphere and then burst, dispersing pollen over… well, I don’t know… most of the planet I should think.
This is a mootha. Moothai in the plural. Quite a beast, eh? But not indigenous, actually. It’s a modified version of a terrestrial animal from prehistoric times: a brontotherium. The colonisation of Apirania coincided with what you might call the rococo period of genetic engineering back here. Reconstructed brontotheria were introduced as the main beast of burden. Enormous, lumbering beasts. Those tusks look nasty, but moothai are as docile as can be.
No, Apirania has no large indigenous animals.
And these are some Apiranian children. Sweet aren’t they? They all just loved having their picture taken. The boy here is Karl, the only boy in the family, and this is his sister Kara. This is Suka, this is Bavvy, this is Yar. Yes I know: they could be your next door neighbours, couldn’t they? Apiranians look pretty much like us. The chromosomal differences between us and them are quite profound but their effects aren’t really visible in the children at all.
But here are a couple of adults, look. Bunnoo and Thrompin. Men or women, do you think? Hard to tell, isn’t it? Well actually they’re both women, but they are sexually undeveloped and always will be. They are what the Apiranians call huthi, which really means Ordinary People. Huthi are about ninety percent of the population. They run the economy, they raise the children, they defend the towns. Males (merthi – Wanderers – as they call them) are about five percent. So are the fertile women who they call manahi – or Mothers.
Bunnoo and Thrompin had a room they rented out. That’s how we came to meet them. They were foster-parents to the children you’ve just seen. A sweet pair. They became real friends of ours.
Here’s the two of them close up. Salt of the earth really – or salt of Apirania anyway. You’d really have a job to say if they were men or women if you met them here, wouldn’t you? They are not just foster-parents to these kids, by the way, they are blood relatives too, aunts or cousins at least. Everyone in a town is related to everyone else because they are all descended from the same Mothers.
Ah, here are the twins again, Karl and Kara. Lydia took this one. Beautiful aren’t they? And so alike. Ever so close to each other too. When the family were all together those two would just sort of quietly gravitate towards one another, not necessarily talking to each other or ignoring anyone else, but just preferring to be alongside each other.
Yes, twins are very common in Apirania. Much more common than singletons in fact. Even triplets and quadruplets are more common than singletons. But it is unusual apparently to have a pair of twins like Karl and Kara, where one is a boy and one is a girl. Yes, she is a real girl. She only discovered that while we were there in fact. Her periods started. It was all rather unexpected and painful. At least the boys know what is in store all along.
Oh these are just some of the balloons from the bowava trees I told you about. After the rainy season is over you see them all the time: hundreds of them in the sky at once, sometimes, going up and up until they’re just tiny dots. They often call them merthi, funnily enough: Wanderers, that is, the same word that they use for men.
Lydia, would you like to open another bottle of wine? I expect our guests are thirsty.
*
Now this is Apiranian technology at its most advanced! It’s a wind-powered generator and every one of those wheels is cast out of iron. The Apiranians seem to have settled down comfortably at the early electric stage and never felt the need to move on.
This was rather a wonderful machine actually. I mean, look at those huge gears!
(What’s that? Yes, thank you Lydia. I hadn’t forgotten.)
As Lydia says, this turned out to be rather a distressing visit. We went up there with Bunnoo and Thrompin and their children. One of the kids had a pet with him, a little mouse, or the Apiranian equivalent of a mouse anyway. The little thing jumped off his shoulder onto one of these big gear wheels. Thrompin only just managed to get hold of the kid in time before she went after it. And there was the little mouse sitting on a cog on that big wheel, not seeing its fate coming towards it until… Well, it was horrible. But it was lucky it wasn’t one of the kids.
Now look at this. This is Karl and Kara with their mother, Diyoo. Yes their real mother. She comes down from the Motherhouse to visit them. Isn’t she beautiful? That wonderful bone structure. And look at that incredible dress.
Yes, she does look sad, doesn’t she? All the Mothers looked a bit sad like that, I thought. A rather restricted life, I suppose. Very little opportunity to make your own choices. In fact soon after this picture was taken the sentries spotted a band of Wanderers out on the plain and she had to go hurrying back at once to get ready at the Motherhouse.
Here she is saying goodbye, look. She’s left Karl and Kara a little gift of cakes. They adored her. Of course she has other children with other foster-parents, but in Bunnoo and Thrompin’s house only these two were hers.
*
Right, well now we are up on the wall. There are sentries up here all the time – there’s one of them here you see – always up on the wall, always looking out over the plain. They are not concerned at all about attacks from other towns but there’s a constant nagging fear that the Wanderers might get out of hand and take over if they were given a chance.
I suppose if they came to a society like ours that would be how they saw it: a world where the Wanderers have taken over!
Yes, I know, an interesting thought!
Anyway, as soon as Wanderers are spotted, they blow horns and pretty soon there are horns blowing all across the town. Ah look, here’s Thrompin blowing one. You can see it’s all a big laugh as far as she’s concerned.
There is a real fear of the Wanderers but there’s a sort of holiday feeling too when they appear. Once the gate is securely shut and everyone is safe inside, the entire city goes up onto the walls to watch the fun. And it turns into a big party.
Here they all are look: Bunnoo and
Thrompin and all the kids. You can see that Bunnoo has even thrown together a quick picnic for them to eat while they watch. And there are other families behind them look. Look, that kid there has got hold of a horn and is blowing away.
*
Aha. Now here is the band of Wanderers arriving below the wall. Quite a small band, only about twenty of them, and all of them very young, hardly more than boys. As you see they have got a couple of moothai loaded up with all their possessions. Look at that one riding on the mootha’s back. Only about thirteen wouldn’t you say? It’s a hard life for them out there, walking from town to town, living on whatever they can find or beg.
And look at the reception they’re getting! Here’s Bunnoo and Thrompin and the kids. And they are all merrily booing and shouting out abuse, along with all the other huthi and children all along the wall.
“What sort of town put you little weaklings out to spread its seed?” they shout out.
“Call yourself men? You’re just huthi kids who haven’t had enough to eat!”
“No way are you going to get near our Mothers!”
Some folk even throw things down: bits of crust, little stones… Even young Karl is doing it, look. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that quite soon he’ll be out there himself.
And look how the young Wanderers stand there taking all of this! Poor mites. Twenty of them, facing the population of an entire town. Hungry too. When people threw down food scraps, some of the young Wanderers went to pick them up and eat them, at least until the older ones reprimanded them.
Ah, now this chap here was a sort of spokesman of theirs. You see he’s asking for silence so he can speak. It must have taken him all of ten minutes to get any quiet at all.
And here he is making his speech.
“Esteemed townsfolk of Formara. Open your gate to us please and let us visit your Motherhouse.”
The Turing Test Page 12