by Adam Roberts
Fair enough. So that’s where you start. And you examine the universe. You do so scrupulously, attentively, and nothing you see challenges either of these core beliefs: that you exist, but God doesn’t.
CHARLES
Sounds about right.
PETA
And then you look at all the self-proclaimed religious people, trying to cure cancer with prayer vigils, or flying planes into tower blocks, or insisting there’s no such thing as evolution. And that confirms your atheism.
CHARLES
It’s hardly going to persuade me the other way, now, is it?
PETA
So. It’s cut and it’s dried. My question. When you examine the universe, with scrupulous attention and objectivity, what are you actually examining? By carefully exploring all things in space and time, you’re actually exploring your own shaping categories of consciousness. I’m not saying it’s not valid, doing that. You turn up all sorts of fascinating things. And that’s brilliant. But you’re not getting behind your own consciousness with that kind of research. You’re looking at you. You’re peering down the microscope and seeing your own eye reflected in the lens. Doesn’t tell you anything about what’s actually on the slide.
CHARLES
No. There’s also an objective world. I believe in that. I just don’t believe that it was created by a sky-man in 4004 BC.
PETA
You don’t believe a caricature ridiculousness that almost nobody believes. Congratulations. What about the non-straw man?
CHARLES
Which is?
PETA
Look at the cosmos. Separate out the categories: don’t dwell on ‘time’ – so no 4004 BC. Don’t get distracted by space, so no sky. Just the fact of existence. The whatever it is that you perceive, and which your mind orders with reference to time, space and the other seventeen categories. The thing, itself. So: ask yourself this. Do you believe it to be inert this thing? Or vital?
CHARLES
Watchmaker, is it?
PETA
No. You made the watch. By ‘watch’ you mean the intricate structures in a snowflake, the patterns of clouds, the rotation of the seasons, life, beauty – all that. You made that. Your mind, structuring its input from the thing itself, made all that. The question isn’t whether the thing itself is a watchmaker. It’s whether it is a force.
CHARLES
Forces can be inert. Gravity. Subatomic strong.
PETA
Forces can be alive, too. Your force of will, or love, or hope.
CHARLES
You don’t need a designer to explain DNA. You don’t need a watchmaker to explain the diversity of the natural world. Science can explain all that without recourse to a maker.
PETA
Yet there is something. You perceive something, and that something strikes your mind as rich and complex and unimaginably vast. Is it a living something? That’s what I’m asking.
CHARLES
My mum was religious. In the way-back and then when. Died decades ago. But she went to church. She just didn’t force it down people’s throats. [Silence] It’s not that the idea of God strikes me entirely impossible. It just always seemed to me … well – say there’s an architect, a creator for this vast universe. I used to think: why would He be in the slightest bit interested in these evolved apes on this tiny planet in one galactic backwater? It would be like landscaping a huge estate, and then spending all my time staring at one woodlouse under one particular leaf.
PETA
That might be to underestimate God’s ability to take an interest in that woodlouse and everything else in the park, at the same time. God’s mind, assuming you believed in it, wouldn’t have the same limitations as yours, after all. It would operate on a different … scale. But I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying: what makes humans so special?
CHARLES
Well, yeah. You’re not even human. You should grasp that better than most.
PETA
I don’t think that’s quite the way to see it. Not the way it’s framed. Here’s a cosmos shaped by your consciousness into time and space. Insofar as God is part of that space and time, it’s because He is part of your consciousness. Closer to you than your jugular vein, as the phrase goes. Of course you’re important to him. Some other cosmos, outside your possibility of perception – well, any God in that universe would have no interest in you, and you’d have no point of access to Him anyway. But then you’re not in that other cosmos. Interest is definitionally impossible, in that case. So you have one of two possibilities. God is intimately interested in you, or there is no God. There’s no middle ground here.
CHARLES
[Peevish] I wish I’d stopped at the Boots in Edinburgh station. And picked up some painkillers. My leg is killing me.
Fourth part of the dialogue
[CHARLES dozes for a short time, and wakes with one of those clonic jerks that makes you believe, for a terrifying instant, that you have fallen off the edge of a cliff. Rain is pimpling the big window of the train carriage. The sky outside is grey as despair, or perhaps as promising as unpolished silver. Rain means life, after all.
THE TRAIN arrives at North Berwick station, which is unattended by any police. CHARLES reflects on this, and the fact that no ticket guard had come to check his ticket during his journey. Perhaps, he considers, this is a good omen. Perhaps auspicious. The rain is coming down quite hard, and CHARLES has neither umbrella nor any opportunity, in this place, to obtain one. He takes a taxi from the station to the little harbour, scuffed coloured boats jostling in the water like a crowd of kids who need to go to the toilet but don’t want to interrupt their play. CHARLES locates the shack selling ferry tickets, and buys one – cash, of course. He has an hour to kill, so he buys some aspirin and chocolate from a little shop, and then has some mid-afternoon food in an antique café seemingly unmodified since the 1950s. He washes his painkillers down with hot sweet tea, and stretches his leg out to ease the joint at the knee.
His cast is damp, and the plaster is starting to muddy and come away. CHARLES sits in the café toilet with a steak knife and cuts it off. It takes him ten minutes, but soon enough his leg and foot are free. Chunks of plastic, some wet, some dry and weeping powder, fill up the little bin.
At another shop CHARLES buys some plastic shoes, throws one away and puts the other on his newly revealed foot.
The rain stops. The sun shines again. A rainbow draws a cheerful line over the water, in roughly the direction he is travelling.
As the ferry loads its cars, CHARLES makes his way up an unforgiving ship’s ladder to the long thin top deck. It is provided with a sheltered structure in the middle, but for a while, until the boat is well under way, he stands at the rail and stares at the sea. Clouds place their pillows over the face of the sun. Rain starts again, first a fine misty fall like dust, then something harder, like sand. The waters become turbulent beside the plough of the ferry’s chubby stern. The spray is Persil white against the black and black-purple of the water. The waves make curious folds and tessellations in the endlessly pliable matter of the sea. The light dims further, and the rainfall increases suddenly in intensity. They are out of sight of the land, and the vessel is pitching and yawing like a fairground ride. The rain, like swearing, turns the air blue. The air is alive. Rain means life, after all. Spawning strands of water eel through beautifully inconstant skies. But CHARLES has no umbrella or raincoat, and the water is under his clothes and adhering to his skin. This is cold and uncomfortable, so he moves inside the little cabin. He is the only person there. For a while he simply sits and stares at the now-occluded windows. Then he dries his hand as best he can, and brings out the device. The idea has crossed his mind to toss it over the side, and into the water. What would happen then? Would that destroy it? PETA has assured him that he does not depend upon this single device for existence, but would it diminish him to lose it? Incommode him at all? CHARLES pauses to worry that PETA has somehow established a malign hold u
pon him. But then he puts it to his ear.]
CHARLES
Where’s Curtius now? Are you still tracking him?
PETA
Indeed I am. He’s still in the south. Still in Southampton.
CHARLES
Too far away to … teleport to us?
PETA
I guess he could move in our direction. But he’d have to make lots of little jumps, and bleed away the excess momentum. It would take a while. It might even be easier for him to get on a plane. And anyway, if he moves I’ll let you know.
CHARLES
I’m not keen on meeting him again.
PETA
I’m sure.
CHARLES
What about evolution?
PETA
Sorry? What about it?
CHARLES
Animals perceive the cosmos in terms of time and space, causality and accident and all that. Don’t they?
PETA
I’m not sure where you’re going with this.
CHARLES
Can you speak up. It’s hard to hear you over all the … noise.
PETA
Sure. Some animals. By mass, most ‘animals’ are bacterial, and they don’t perceive the cosmos as ordered by time, or even, really, space. Next up there are animals that have a rudimentary understanding of these categories, slanted towards the exigencies of survival. So insects, say, have a fine development of cause and effect, since grasping that – at an instinctive level – makes them better able to evade predators, since those predators are also defined that way. Bees understand spatial harmony, angles and directions. Time is seasonal and rudimentary. And so on. I’m not pretending evolution is an escalator upwards, or that it has any particular end in view. Broadly speaking, evolution has created a planet dominated by single-celled creatures, with a few outliers like you and your fellow humans. But if you like you can see evolution as a process of gradual expansion into the fullest sense of the framing categories of consciousness.
[The FERRY rears up, a full metre or more, and then drops abruptly into a cavity in the waves, hurling CHARLES up. He lands on both feet, jarring his bad knee and dropping the device. It takes him a while to retrieve it from the sodden floor. He sits down again, tucking his arm under the metal rest of his seat to anchor himself against the judder and the sway.]
CHARLES
What was that? What were you saying?
PETA
I was saying that life on this planet is almost all single-celled animals, and such creatures don’t edit their sense impressions for their consciousness the way ‘higher’ beings do. The narrative of evolution, if we don’t mind calling it by that distorting term, is of multicellular life, and as that increases in complexity and consilience, it comes into a fuller and fuller shaping sense of the categories.
CHARLES
You’re saying an amoeba is closer to God than I am?
PETA
No. I’m saying an amoeba’s relationship to the thing itself is less … mediated. That has advantages, perhaps; but it has many more disadvantages. You mustn’t keep thinking of the categories as a prison. They enable you. They enable you to be more than an amoeba – to have agency, for instance. To act. To have will and self-reflection and the ability to grow.
[CHARLES gets very little of this. The wind has started hammering against the roof and sides of the little exposed cabin, using a million fat raindrops as drumsticks. And then, with a suddenness that feels like a coup de théâtre, the rain dies away, the wind settles, and THE FERRY rolls onwards much more smoothly.
ROY CURTIUS is in the space with him, grinning like a death’s head. CHARLES is startled, and gets to his feet. But he is alone in the cabin.]
CHARLES
Did you see that?
PETA
What?
CHARLES
Where is Roy? Can you track him?
PETA
He’s in Southampton. He hasn’t moved at all.
[CHARLES sits down again. The storm has completely stopped.]
CHARLES
I really thought I saw him. It all still feels screwy. Somehow. Screwy. I’d probably be able to agree with all the God stuff if it weren’t so, I don’t know. Hokey.
PETA
Hokey?
CHARLES
Religion, God – should be about awe. What you’re talking about, with Roy, is: what? Teleportation. Remote viewing. It’s all cheap science fiction. That’s not what religion is about, surely.
[It is dead calm. THE FERRY is nearing its destination. Something is wrong, but neither CHARLES nor PETA have yet noticed.]
PETA
You’ve never heard of the al-’Isrā’ wal-Mi’rāj?
CHARLES
Say?
PETA
In 620 the Prophet Mohammed travelled in one night from Mecca to ‘the furthest Mosque’, and back again. Tradition locates this mosque in Jerusalem. It’s one of the most important elements of Mohammed’s life, celebrated and revered in Islam.
CHARLES
Jerusalem’s north from Mecca, isn’t it?
PETA
Indeed. That’s an interesting point, though, isn’t it? Actually the Qu’ran says Mohammed also ascended into Heaven and spoke with God and the prophets. My point is that this kind of miraculous circumvention of spatiality is important to lots of religion.
[Something is very wrong.]
CHARLES
Jesus didn’t go teleporting about.
PETA
Didn’t he? After his crucifixion he appeared to many people at geographically disparate locales. He walks on water. But I think Jesus, unlike Mohammed, tended to manipulate the manifold with regard to other qualities – temporality, cause and effect, entropy. Raising the dead, for instance, is undoing the latter. Turning water to wine, altering substance and accident. Multiplying loaves – rejigging an object from singular to multiplicity. You could, if you wanted to, go through all Christ’s miracles and log the ways in which they might be accomplished by altering the parameters of the categories.
CHARLES
Jesus was an accomplished prestidigitator, no question.
[The SECOND PASSENGER, a religiously devout Methodist, coughs, and looks at CHARLES severely. He is undelighted with CHARLES talking in such terms about his saviour, though too polite and British to rebuke him openly. CHARLES notices the SECOND PASSENGER for the first time.]
CHARLES
Where did you come from?
SECOND PASSENGER
I boarded at North Berwick of course. I might ask you the same thing. I don’t recall you. Have you come up from your car? Drivers are supposed to remain with their vehicles.
PETA
Something is wrong. My timekeeping is too haywire. All to pot. Awry. Something have happened.
CHARLES
Something has happened. What happened?
PETA
Something have tangled time. Have. We have lost – weeks. It have.
TANNOY
We are now docking at Anstruther. Thank you for travelling with the East Scots Ferry Company.
CHARLES [to the SECOND PASSENGER]
Please excuse the oddity of this question, sir. But what date is it?
SECOND PASSENGER
The second.
CHARLES
November?
SECOND PASSENGER
Of course not. What, last year? Are you drunk?
CHARLES
I apologise.
[CHARLES leaves the cabin and goes on to the deck. Shafts of winter sunlight are diagonally illuminating the small harbour at Anstruther. The row of painted houses. One such shaft is pinned to the rising green-beige hills behind the little town. The air smells strongly of brine. The seagulls are crying with their nails-down-the-blackboard screech, like contemptuous car alarms. The waves cry and dash their foreheads against the stone jetty and the breakwater – like creatures possessed with obsessive-compulsion, like grieving creatures, being all one and the colours
of blue-black bruises and black eyes and royal purple. Each individual wave in the harbour has hair turned white in dismay. ROY CURTIUS is standing on the dockside.]
PETA
This is most disorientating.
CHARLES
I’ll call you back. [He puts his device into his pocket.]
10
The Last Three Days of the Time War
Possibility and Impossibility
First, the possible.
Adonais was browsing electrical goods when ruffians burst into the shop declaring that they would destroy any time machines inside. There was only one: a plastic device, no bigger than a dinner plate and as thick as a copy of War and Peace. This had been sat on a shelf gathering dust for goodness knows how long. Until, that is, the irregulars had come in yelling and waving their weapons: three of them, shouting excitedly. First they made the shop assistants kneel down with their hands cupping the napes of their necks. Then they’d shot the time machine full of holes, checked the stock room to ensure there were no more, grabbed a couple of iPad-17s for good measure, and ran out yelling anti-Ghost slogans.
After the attack there was a buzz in the air. The shop assistants cleared up, which didn’t take long, chattering excitedly. It died down soon enough. Adonais lingered. It crossed shis mind if si ought to just go home. Si wondered if si ought to feel more discombobulated: it had been an armed attack after all! But living through war makes a person blasé about such things. Si was aware of a distant sense of guarded excitement: no harm had been done, after all, except to the machine; and now si would have an interesting anecdote to tell shis friends later.