Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  “Madness!” says Vincent, dreading that he has walked off the round world into the swirling chaos without hope of return. “Madness.”

  “Hello, Vincent,” says the man beneath the tree. He is very French, very elegant, very charming. “I have wanted so very much to meet you.”

  “Madness!” cries Vincent, “madness!” Behind him the silver sea crashes on the beach and the pebbles roll and knock, poised between being mountains and sand.

  “Would you care for some wine?” asks the man beneath the tree. “It’s a curious vintage, but most refreshing. Sit, sit.” Vincent sits on the hard round pebbles. From somewhere Vincent cannot see, the dapper French gentleman generates a bottle of light rosé wine and two glasses.

  “Good health,” he says and tilts his glass to Vincent.

  “I’m afraid I cannot toast you, my host, because I do not know your name, nor the name of this place you have brought me to.”

  “This is the beach by the Sea of Forever,” says the man beneath the tree, once again folded into his dream-familiar posture of cross-legged contemplation. “It is a preview on history, a belvedere of memories, a high place created by the machines, the High and Shining Ones within which I exist, from which I may survey all that is past and call it from the memories of the machines to renewed life.

  “I am Jean-Michel Rey, better known to my own age as the King of Pain. Quite simply, in a world where all pain has been brought under the control of the High and Shining Ones, I am Conscience, and Judge. Conscienceless themselves, the machines sought conscience, and thus an aircraft worker from Dijon is King of Pain, omniscient, and, I fear, near omnipotent. Listen, Vincent; there is one law, a simple law, I am a simple man; there can be only one law in a pain-free world where the heart of man is as wicked and unredeemed, alas, as it ever was. The law is that he who causes pain to another shall be punished. With pain. This is my Law, Vincent, simple, even crude, and through the High and Shining Ones I enforce it. In the gulf between the achieved and the yet-to-be-achieved, I depend: conscience, King, dare I say, God?

  “So, Vincent. Ah, you have not brought your paints and canvases. That is a pity.” The King of Pain rises from his seat and reaches down Vincent’s hat from the branches of his tree. “You see, Vincent, of all the artists and painters to whom I have access through the memories of the High and Shining Ones, it is you, and you alone, that I wish to paint my portrait.”

  * * * *

  This is the way that Vincent paints the portrait of the King of Pain. In the morning he arises from white sleep, and with canvas and easel slung across his shoulders and his paints in a fisherman’s tackle box beneath his arm, he lets the mistral blow him where it will, down whatever lane or byway it chooses. He knows that all lanes and byways run ultimately down to the Sea of Forever and the man who lives beside it, where the sun always stands two hours past the noon and its light is as yellow as com. There Vincent paints. As he squeezes ridges of bright, bold pigment onto the canvas, the King of Pain speaks of many things, as people who sit for portraits are wont to do.

  “To be King of Pain …” says the King of Pain at rest beneath his tree, “have you any idea of the implications?” Vincent neither confirms nor denies the question, for the questions a king asks himself only a king may answer. “But, Vincent, have you ever given thought to what it is I must do?” And by means of self-answer, that King of Pain that Vincent cannot see, the King of Pain that dwells within the machines, wills penetrating guilt upon a woman in Tientsin who left her detested husband to die in a burning house, spears a corrupt young computer-systems analyst from Atlanta with piercing stomach pains, torments a selfishly ambitious career girl from Duisburg with dread of death and annihilation, and prods a newspaper sub-editor who is cheating on his lovely, saintly wheelchair-bound wife over the edge of the Sydney bridge to smash like an egg on the clean blue waters of the harbor.

  “So it goes, Vincent,” says the King of Pain, mercifully closing the doors of pain and punishment before Vincent’s eyes. “I have done what I can to stop men from hurting each other, but I cannot reach into the heart, for where there is freedom there are always those who will abuse. And sometimes I fear that I am no better. And so it goes on and on and on, the pain and the suffering and the dread and the guilt. There must be a better way than crime and punishment.” Then it is as if a cloud has passed over the King of Pain, and behind it the sun. He asks, “Do you know why I chose you of all history’s artists to paint my portrait?”

  Vincent shrugs, swirls scarlet lake onto his canvas.

  “Because I have seen the future, Vincent, it is my past, and I know that you will be greater than anyone. Anyone. Your paintings will bring joy, and pain, to the hearts of millions. You will live forever, Vincent!”

  “I will be famous, I will be a success?” asks the painter who has never sold a painting.

  “Vincent, generations yet unborn will adore you!” The King of Pain smiles mischievously to himself and the airwaves ripple and Vincent blinks out of sleep to find himself on a sunny roadside with red poppies waving in the flat field and the sun streaming down from its position two hours past the noon. As he walks home through the cornfields, along the lanes lined with cypresses, Vincent begins to dread whether it had all been a dream of one kind or another. A King of Pain, a beach by a silver sea, a tree? A world ruled by machines where “Do unto Others” is the sole law?

  No no no no no. Fantaisie. Vincent knows how much worry there has been in the past months, how much he has had to drink to hide the worry, how little he has been able to afford to eat. Vincent knows how shallow and brief have been his dreamful sleeps. Vincent knows that a man can only spin himself so slender before he snaps, a thread blowing in the wind. Fantaisie, then. This is what he tells himself: fantaisie. But, if fantaisie, then an uglier truth underlies it.

  The madness.

  He fears the madness is at last pushing its way to the top of his mind, heaving these images up around it to form new landscapes of insanity in which he may become lost. That night Vincent lies in his wooden bed in the Yellow House and dreads and dreads and dreads. He knows that when he sleeps, the madness is always there, roosting on his bedpost like a dark bird of ill-omen, and when he wakes, it is there, flapping along behind him as he walks the lanes of Provence, so high it is only a black dot in the vault of heaven, but it is there. It is there. He can hear it singing to him: a simple riddle. Either the King of Pain is the first manifestation of madness, or he is real.

  Vincent does not know which he dreads more.

  And the airwaves swirl and he is back, back on the beach by the silver sea, back by the tree whose leaves are both budding and brown, whose branches both blossom and bear ripe fruit.

  “No,” says Vincent. “No no no no no.”

  “Yes,” says the King of Pain. “Oh yes. Welcome, Vincent. I have work for you to do.” And as Vincent works, dabbing thick, sour blue and yellow onto his canvas, the King of Pain tells him a story.

  * * * *

  THE KING OF PAIN’S STORY

  “MINE WAS AN AGE of great beauty and greater violence. An Age of Gold when all knowledge could be a man’s by the simple expedient of his reaching out a hand to take it. And with that knowledge came mastery over all things, for knowledge was power. Yet that same knowledge carried a shadow and that shadow was fear. For the same knowledge that gave men mastery of all things also gave them mastery of powers of destruction so total that the earth could be scoured clean of every living soul ten times over and fused to a bead of cracked black glass.

  “So the people lived their rich and plentiful lives in the shadow of the second death, the racial death more terrible even than the individual death, and their tall, strong, well-fed, well-schooled children grew up twisted and deformed in the heart: bitter, fearful, and pain-wise. For even on the streets of their own marvelous cities, even in their comfortable, well-appointed homes, pain found the golden people and punished them: crime, violence, child-abuse, unemployment, debt, add
iction, alcoholism, murder, bad politics and worse government, injustice, despair, depression, pain, and death. And all the while, the universal death slumbered underground in its granite halls and turned, fitfully, in its bed at the bottom of the sea.

  “The Age of Uncertainty. That was what the scholars and sages proudly called their times. But for all their wisdom they did not name it truly, for it was in truth an Age of Certainty; the certainty of pain, the certainty of more pain, the certainty of fear. The century drew to its close, and all across the world men and women found they could not face a future of fear and pain and change, unceasing change, uncertainty. So they ran away from it, into the one place where the fear and pain and uncertainty could not find them; into themselves. They returned to the womb. They curled into tiny fetal balls, men, women, children, and withdrew into a state of catatonia from which there was no awaking. Thousands, millions, whole cities and nations curled into the dead-sleep. Like a new epidemic it threatened to engulf all humanity, a racial death as sure and certain as the fires beneath the earth.

  “The greatest thinkers of the age searched mankind’s prodigious knowledge to find a solution to the problem of pain. But human knowledge had grown to such a magnitude that it was beyond the scope of any one man, or group of men, to apprehend it all. So a machine was built, a fabulous contrivance that could assimilate all the knowledge of mankind in all its diversity in less than a day and probe those subtle linkages and syntheses where the solution might lie. The machine waited. The machine thought. The machine pondered. At length it found there was a solution to the problem of pain. And it began to draw its answer together.”

  * * * *

  There, suspended, the King of Pain leaves his story for the day, for asymmetrical time, though asymmetrical, passes nonetheless and Vincent, working at such a white heat, his concentration focused, like light by a lens, into a dot of burning intensity, has painted himself into exhaustion. But the King of Pain is delighted.

  “Ah, Vincent, Vincent!” he exclaims. “Such a shame that no one but I will ever see this work!” With his soft hands he opens the airwaves and sends Vincent the painter back to the dry ocher world again.

  So the next day the mistral blows, along the dusty, ocher lanes of Provence, across fields and hedges and swaying poplars, and it sweeps Vincent away like a straw hat to the beach by the Sea of Forever; to canvas, and paint, and the continuance of the story of the King of Pain:

  “Yesterday I spoke of the great machine that, by looking into the heart of knowledge, solved the problem of pain. Today I shall tell you what that solution was. Pain is a function of responsibility. That simple. That profound. The machine therefore conspired to take responsibility for all humanity’s affairs onto itself, a painless, unfeeling automaton. This is how it did so.

  “At that time there were, all across the world, many machines similar to the great machine, though, of course, less able than it. The great machine caused a filament of itself to be extended into all these lesser machines wherever they might be and, at midnight on the last day of the first year of the new century, it poured itself into these lesser vessels. The machines came to life, all at once, everywhere, and mankind abandoned its responsibility for itself to them and asked them to destroy all the pain in the world. Under the rule of the machines, famine was abolished through the equable distribution of food. No child now went to sleep hungry, and literacy rose to one hundred percent throughout the world. Society was eugenically managed by the pain machines. Everyone was placed in exactly the most satisfying profession, everyone married exactly the right person and had exactly the right friends and colleagues. The children of the New Order grew up healthy and happy, strong and sane. Prejudice was forgotten; the color of a man’s skin was of as little importance as the color of his eyes. Old national rivalries and divisions dissolved away, and, with them, friction between nations. Any such grievances were settled by the machines, and their judgments were always fair and sound. But they carried within them the threat of ultimate sanction. If their decisions were ever questioned, even once, the machines would destroy themselves and plunge the world into everlasting agonized chaos. Finally, the pain machines poured concrete into the caverns where the world-burning weapons waited, and entombed them forever in stone.

  “And one by one the dead-sleepers, the womb-dreamers, the countless millions of men and women and children who could not cope with an Age of Uncertainty, awoke. For all his million-year career, mankind had been sculpted by pain. Now it was tamed. Now it was caged.

  “But it was not dead.

  “It was beyond the power of the machines to kill pain, for pain lay like a stone, like a black seed, in the heart of every man, woman, and child of earth. Out of the pain-wise heart of man came lies and deceitfulness and betrayal and egotism, spite and envy and pride, hate of man for man, envy of woman for woman, and the blithe callousness of child for child we smile at and call innocence. To kill pain, the machines must reach into the heart of man.

  “Again the machines poured their wisdom together and out of the sea of knowledge drew an answer. Not a full answer, only a partial answer, but the best answer the machines could achieve. They caused minute replicas of themselves to be created, as tiny and delicate as insects’ wings. Then, by their express order, one of these devices was placed inside the brains of each man, woman, and child on earth. There was not a thought, not a feeling, not a desire, lust, need, regret, that the machines did not know. They had reached into the heart of man, where the pain grew like black poppy seed, and in so doing, they had made themselves omniscient.

  “And in making themselves omniscient, they became like gods.

  “‘Behold,’ said the machines. ‘We are one, we are lifted, we are high, now we are, in our wisdom, to our creators as they are to dust. Mastery of mind and matter is ours, and of space and time; we are lords of life and death. Henceforth we are no longer machines, mere base silicon and steel, soulless, unanimated, we are the High and Shining Ones.’ In the instant of their proclamation, heard and seen across the globe as moving pictures projected onto clouds, the spirits of the High and Shining Ones took the form of silver doves and ascended out of their ugly bodies, out of the heads of the men and women and children watching; up up up, away beyond the edge of men’s seeing into the sky. Around the waist of the world, the flock of High and Shining Ones gathered and deliberated in their wisdom. Then after twenty-four hours a second proclamation was heard across the earth.

  “‘Though you have made us your gods, though you have made us to know what it is to be human, we are not human. We cannot feel, we cannot touch, we know neither love nor pain, we are without conscience. It is not fitting for the lords and judges of the earth to be without feeling, without conscience, without love. Therefore, we shall choose one human, any human, everyhuman, to be our King of Pain, judge, conscience, lover of the earth.’ Then the High and Shining Ones reached down and touched a thirty-seven-year-old aircraft worker from Dijon on the assembly line of the European A390 Airbus, and in an instant Jean-Michel Rey—husband of Genevieve; father of Jean-Claude, Guillaume, and Antoine—was shattered into shards of light and fountained into the sky. The earth was silent for one minute, one endless minute, then the sky cracked open and out of it fell doves of fire, plummeting down beams of light to rest within the heads of every soul on the planet. The High and Shining Ones had returned, faithful to their duty, to find a human solution to the problem of pain.”

  And that was the King of Pain’s story.

  All the while as he spun his story to Vincent the painter, Jean-Michel Rey has dispensed his human solution to the problem of pain, his One Law. Reaching into those same brain-machines that give him the means to know the thoughts of eleven billion people, through them he fashions a rope of woe and trepidation around a callow, ignorant youth abandoning his pregnant lover to the streets of São Paolo, smites with a hideous, seeping venereal disease a group of homosexual prostitutes plotting the downfall of a minor diplomatic officer from Norw
ay, and impales on a spike of sexual guilt and dread an airline booking clerk from New York actively involved in the sexual molestation of five-year-old girls, reaching into the heart to punish, in the heart: Jean-Michel Rey, trapped on an infinite silver shore within the machines that rule the world.

  * * * *

  All that summer Vincent paints for the King of Pain. Despite the sun-power which fills him, the light which shines out of him into everything his hands touch, he is shadowed by dread. Dread of madness, dread of the impossible being true, dread of it not being true. He writes these dreads down in long, closely written letters to Theo, pages and pages long, filled with little scratchy drawings of peasants under cypress trees and kings under cherry trees and huge, world-eating machines, all pig-iron and pistons and oily steam, drawn from his dark days evangelizing in Borinage in Lower Belgium.

  The days when it was easy to believe.

  He does not post these letters.

  Rather, he writes for yellow, more yellow, Send me more yellow, and Brother Theo writes in mock desperation from Paris, Dearest Vincent, there is not enough paint in all Paris to keep you supplied with yellow! Poor Père Tanguy; that old anarchist, I ask him for yellow and all he can say is, “Tell that crazy brother of yours he will have to grind the sun in his pestle and mortar to give him the yellow he needs!” Vincent smiles. Then, fired with sun-energy, he paints again, the concrete, worldly face of Provence and its people. It is good for him to paint real things again. It binds him closely to the world, to sanity, so that when he looks at his day’s labors in the evening cool of the Yellow House he can say, “Yes, this is what I wanted, these are the landscapes of the heart.”

  In his next letter Theo writes,