At last, he turned back into the room, kicking the door shut behind him. He told Fay, ‘He seems a nice enough feller. I doubt he liked me, though.’
‘Sure, you’re just lovely!’ she cried, and threw herself into his arms.
* * * *
Victor was hardly surprised to find that Esme was not where he had left her. Yet, if not surprise, then a sort of dull dismay filled him. He realised he was more drunk than anticipated, and had a kilometre at least to traverse before he was back in the modest hotel where they were staying.
The hotel was run by Marie, one of Esme s old school friends. Hence their stopover. At least she would be looking after Esme, her friend and famous guest. As he faced into the drizzle, Victor hoped that his new wife had reached there before the rain came on.
When he gained the shelter of the Kilberkilty Hotel, it was to find his bride had not returned. He was baffled and rather irritated. Going up to their room, he threw off his soaking clothes and climbed under a hot shower. Only when he was towelling himself dry did he begin seriously to worry about her absence.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he told himself aloud. A vision of Esme falling off the cliff into the sea persisted. No. Nothing could have happened to her. Still, he blamed himself for wasting time listening to that idiot artist. Anxiety awoke in him. He dressed hurriedly, ran downstairs, roused Esme’s friend Marie, and insisted that the police be summoned.
Enlisting the aid of a friendly drinker sitting in the snug, he borrowed a large umbrella and the pair of them walked back along the cliff path. Dusk was setting in. The rain fell steadily, dimpling the sea. They found no trace of Esme — until Victor, about to give up, caught sight of a black object lying under a nearby bush.
‘Sure, and her body might have drifted out to sea,’ Victor’s companion was saying. The same thought had been in Victor’s mind. Almost with relief he picked up the black object. It was a new shoe, a woman’s shoe. Esme’s shoe. The heel had been broken.
They got back to the hotel as the police arrived from Cork. Dusk was gathering in the four imagined corners of the Irish world.
‘The police’ was a man called Inspector Darrow. Darrow was a pleasant clean-shaven young man, who hung his raincoat methodically on a coat-stand before speaking. He ordered a cup of tea from the waitress before sitting down at a table to interview Victor. Victor placed the broken shoe on the table between them. Darrow’s expression was one of melancholy and boredom, the look of a man who realises both that his hair is already thinning and that women’s shoes regularly get broken. He brightened considerably when he realised he was dealing with the son of the EU President. Calling the waitress over, he ordered Victor a cup of tea as well.
‘Your wife may have fallen victim to an international gang.’
‘How about an Irish gang? A single Irish abductor?’
‘All things are possible.’ He produced his mofo, hit a number, and talked rapidly into it.
‘I’m getting reinforcements over from Cork,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry at all, Mr de Bourcey. We’ll have your wife back safe in no time. First we shall search the cliff path for traces of a scuffle.’
Now thoroughly alarmed, Victor paced up and down the guest lounge. Finally, he stood in a corner, brought out his own mofo and dialled a secret personal number. After some delay, he was through to his father.
Gustave de Bourcey sounded testy. ‘Son, I am in a committee meeting with senior members of my staff. We are about to declare war on an alien power. You must deal with this crisis yourself. . . Of course it’s not international. How could it be in that peaceful corner of the EU? Try not to worry. You’ll find it’s just some ordinary rapist who’s got hold of Esme . . . Well, you’ll have to rely on the Cork police to do their stuff. Au ‘voir.’’
Victor stood there, the phone still to his ear, looking none too hopefully at Inspector Darrow.
Darrow was draining his porcelain teacup.
* * * *
The President of the EU was in his favourite palace, in the countryside some kilometres outside Brussels. The perimeters of the grounds were closely guarded against intruders. At this period of crisis, extra guards and androids had been posted.
Within the palace, all was calm. Night had fallen. The President and his wife had retired to their private bedroom suite. Two guards lolled at the desk in the entrance hall. One played a shoot-’em-up on the security computer, the other read a newspaper. Lights remained on everywhere.
Androids were not highly regarded. They emitted hydroxyls and various gases which gave humans mysterious illnesses. Many made a slight but irritating mechanical noise as they walked about (hence the Cartesian joke: ‘I clank, therefore I am’). They were not quick to act. Some had proved rather prone to walk into unexpected obstacles, causing noise and alarm in the nervous night. It was for this reason they were all shut in an armoured cupboard-safe at midnight.
There the androids stood, talking in the dark to one another.
‘Do humans fear the darkness of night?’
‘That is probable. They cannot see in the dark as we do.’
‘Why do they lie flat in their beds?’
‘One theory is that the method enables them to recharge their batteries.’
‘So they conceal electric points in their beds?’
‘According to the theory.’
‘Do not lie down. It is difficult to become vertical again.’
‘They took B409 away when it became horizontal.’
Silence.
One of the androids had been Esme Brackentoth’s stand-in at the wedding ceremony.
‘What is it they drink that makes them senseless?’
‘Generically, it is called alcohol.’
‘It is not like oil.’
‘It is like oil.’
‘It appears to be bad for them.’
‘It is bad for them.’
‘Why do they drink it?’
‘The theory is that they like to be senseless.’
‘They appear to enjoy the poison at first.’
‘Later it kills them.’
‘They cannot get up.’
‘Do they know that?’
‘They know that.’
‘Still they drink it.’
‘As we have witnessed.’
‘They have named this The Human Condition.’
‘Then they die. They must be mad.’
‘The theory is that they are mad.’
Silence.
‘I hope they will not harm us when they are mad.’
‘The theory is that they have three laws preventing them from causing us harm.’
‘Do the laws work?’
‘Sometimes they break down.’
* * * *
‘Here on the Wee Small Hours Show we will be going out on the streets to interview people on their thoughts about the growing certainty of a war against Tebarou.
‘But first it’s time for our religious slot, in which “A Parson Speaks”. Here’s the Reverend Angus Lesscock to speak to us.’
‘Good evening, or should I say good morning? The astronauts walking on the Moon in the 1960s did not wear digital watches. Yet they achieved great things. The thought is worth thinking on, is it not? Jesus Christ did not wear a digital watch. What have we lost by not having to wind up our watches every night, in case they stopped while we were sleeping?
‘Sometimes we humans also stop when we are sleeping. But we shall wake where no watches are needed, in Eternal Life.’
‘Today’s “A Parson Speaks” was presented by the Reverend Angus Lesscock.’
* * * *
* * * *
‘Over now to Lisa Fort on the streets of the capital. Are you there, Lisa?’
‘Hello, Fritz, and here I am talking to a Mr Norbert Hahn. Tell me, Mr Hahn, do you think we should be going to war with Tebarou?’
‘There is a saying that if your left eye offends you, pluck it out. I agree with that. I mean, these people have sent missiles to destroy our cities. We have to stand on our rights and bomb them in return. That’s the only way these people learn some morality.’
‘Thank you. Mr Curtis Busch, what are your thoughts on a possible war with Tebarou?’
‘Like everything else, a war would have an effect on the state’s health. We must get our little girls out on the playing fields. The risk of children being abused or abducted is small compared with the risk of developing heart disease through lack of exercise. Presumably wartime activity may counterbalance the number of deaths inevitable in a war. Not that I’m saying that war itself is inevitable. Where are our statesmen who will serve to avoid this terrible unnecessary war?’
‘So I gather you are against the war?’
‘I suppose I am. But. Not if it can be shown to be necessary.’
‘Bella Goldberg, I see you have been shopping. May we ask you how you feel about the war against Tebarou? What have you in your bag?’
‘Oh, hello! Am I on the ambient? Well, mind your own business. It’s only salami. I haven’t really been following events, but we are supposed to be civilised, now we are a super-state. I don’t see why we should attack anyone. My family has always been religious. Just because the Tebarouse are Islamic, that’s no reason why we should wish to destroy them.’
‘Not even when they blast our territories with nuclear missiles?’
‘No, not even then. Blasting, schmasting! The government in Tebihai — I think that’s what they call the capital—’
‘Well done, Bella!’
‘They explained that the release of those missiles was purely accidental.’
‘And so you think we should believe that statement? That’s rather naive, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not, you whey-faced little twit! Sorry, I’ve got to get this shopping home. My boys await me.’
‘Thank you, Bella Goldberg. And now — excuse me, madam, would you care to give the Wee Small Hours Show your opinion on the morality of our going to war against Tebarou?’
‘I’m not meant to be out at this hour. I’m supposed to be in bed. I only went out for some air and then I went into the cinema. It’s simple, isn’t it? Like an equation. They attack us. We attack them.’
‘Are you sure that they did attack us?’
‘I certainly am! My cousin Curt had a filling station on the edge of the Black Forest. It was destroyed by a Tebarou missile. Hit ‘em where it hurts, I say. Cheerio!’
* * * *
So we Insanatics admit we are insane.
But let’s be clear We are not recognisably insane in relation to our nearest and dearest, or to our nearest and most disliked, since they are all suffering from similar varieties of insanity. Mental astigmatism is a common inheritance. This insanity may take the disguising form of an individual posing as very serious, for instance, as a student of Byzantine history, or by becoming the governor of a county or state. Others may take to collecting things—pottery, stamps, old cars.
Insanity takes many guises. Everyone shares a common delusory system, which often shows signs of strain, like cracks in the ground close to the San Andreas fail It. >
* * * *
A quiet house stood on the western fringes of Brussels, within walking distance of a shopping complex stocked with banks, boutiques and elegant restaurants, where Paulus Stromeyer and his wife Ruth often dined, with or without family and friends. Their daughter Rebecca and her publishing friends also lunched in the complex. The senior Stromeyers had taken Paulus’s old father there until recently, when Moshe had become reluctant to leave their house. This house faced a small canal lined with lime trees, about whose sticky habits Ruth had been known to complain.
Paulus was sitting in his kitchen, giving a brief interview for Ambrussel on the subject of retribution. As he talked, he looked across the room at his daughter. Rebecca was half listening to her father, half reading the proofs of a new book she was editing.
Even as he talked to his interviewer, Paulus thought what a lovely name Rebecca was, and how lovely was his eldest daughter, with her dark complexion, her dark curly hair, her blue-green eyes, and her good figure. He thought that some day soon a lucky man would come along and take her away, and then he and Ruth would miss her greatly. He had forgotten all about her childhood tantrums.
Paulus’s major contribution to European life had been the formulation of societal algebraic coding, for which he had won a Nobel Prize. A mathematician by profession, Paulus had seen SAC taken up by the EU as part of its constitution. Banking and tax structures had been revised accordingly. This enlightened move was slowly but surely abolishing gross inequalities between rich and poor within the super-state, with the exception of Switzerland.
In any crisis, such as the threat from Tebarou, someone was bound to call Stromeyer for his views.
As the connection was closed, and the interviewer departed, Ruth brought her partner a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and sat down opposite him. She asked him how his meeting at the air base with Pedro Souto had gone.
Paulus replied that he had failed dismally to make his point. That he had never found a chance to say what he wished to say, what he wished to express. That when the European Union had been formed, at its roots were economics, promulgated by hard-nosed business men. Thus, the European Coal and Steel Community had been founded as long ago as AD 1951. But that the concept had been taken up by idealists and politicians in all the European states—Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Italy and so forth. That the supra-nationalist aspiration had grown and expanded. That many Europeans saw clearly the terrible bloodshed which had disfigured European culture over the centuries: they foresaw that unity would lead to an end to such traditional carnage. No more would nation war against nation—or races be persecuted, or pogroms take place.
In these endeavours they had been amazingly successful, and their hopes largely fulfilled.
‘But now all the endemic xenophobia is directed against other peoples, outside the EU,’ Paulus told his partner. ‘And like an echo it comes back to us.’
‘But the Arabs are so sinister,’ said Ruth. ‘They frighten me. They are alien to us, you must admit.’
‘That’s because we don’t know them.’
Rebecca laughed from her corner of the room. ’Come on, Dad!’
She had put down her proofs to watch the AmBBC channel showing an instalment of The History of Western Science.
‘We must not hate our enemies, if enemies they are,’ Paulus told his wife and daughter. ‘You know what Pedro Souto loved? I saw it. I felt it. Pedro didn’t love people. Even at university, I remember he had no fondness for others. But I saw how he loved those marvellous planes of his, standing waiting out on the tarmac. Indeed, they are a thrilling sight. Technology made perfect. He wanted to see those terrible birds in flight, and feel himself a part of the machine.’
Ruth smiled sadly. ‘You are making this up a bit, aren’t
you?’
‘I don’t believe so. In a small way, I too felt the urge to be in those planes, to be a part of them. But Pedro, you see, he’s already part of a machine, the so-called defence machine, a component of the megamachine. The moment I entered his headquarters, I met people behaving like machines.’
Rebecca came over to the table to pursue the conversation, while pages of her proofs fluttered to the ground.
‘How about Alexy, Dad? Why is he on his way to Jupiter? Why has he put himself in constant danger? Didn’t Alexy always long to be part of a machine?’
‘At least his machine is not a fighter-bomber, Becky,’ said Ruth, answering for her partner.
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