New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  ‘[I saw that,]’ McGuinness was saying. ‘[Not with my own eyes, but here’s a link to the vuetube footage - rafjet mashed that car park up pretty bad. English said they buried two dozen of us.]’

  ‘Two,’ I said, watching the hips of the nearest youngster slipping left, right, left. ‘Just two of us.’

  ‘[You got out, though, Block,]’ said Thirlwell. ‘[That’s great, though!]’

  ‘[Who was the other?]

  ‘Recall Simic?’

  ‘[Yeah. Simic. Chelsea fan isn’t he? Where’s he at?]’

  ‘He’s nowhere now,’ I said.

  The sympathy was immediate, and genuine, and all-surrounding: a dozen pings of ‘Sorry to hear that’; several personal messages of sorrow, ‘Man I loved Simic’, ‘He could fight.’ And so on. McGuinness said: ‘[You boys were tight.]’

  ‘That we were.’

  I was crying a little, but not in a debilitating way.

  ‘[So you want some bigger guns,]’ said Gunesekera. ‘[I’m off to a place called Sonning. There’s a couple of trucks there that’ll have some of the stuff we need. How about see you there?]’

  ‘Sonning,’ I said. I fed the name to the satnav and touched the acceleration, pulling past a dawdling old Micra on to the dual carriageway. Point your right big toe, like a ballerina, and the car leaps forward. It’s a dancing.

  Without Simic’s death I don’t suppose I would be in this position - I don’t mean physically, since that can’t be predicted. They call that the hazard of war. I mean being in this place, talking to you. I mean, readying myself to become a weapon contra the NMA.

  Yesterday I was down in that white-lit development space you guys have. Terence took me down (and what a nice fellow Terence is, by the way). So there I sat, puffing a little, in a chair and Donaghy explained everything to me. My eyes were tired, and my face ached, but I tried to pay attention. Behind him, his workstation was improbably tidy. Was this because Donaghy is a tidy person? (Tidy people have tidy notions; they cannot bring down a giant as sprawly and messy as an NMA.) Or was it because he wanted you, and your officer caste, to think him tidy - to think him safe, and reliable, and so on? I think that’s a question you need to address. Anyway, this Donaghy explained that although viruses could not, with any military reliability, penetrate the NMA firewall, and its patrolling semi-conscious AI worms, they could nevertheless interact with that wall. Talk to the worms themselves. A firewall could not be a fireweall unless it interacted with the viruses that assaulted it. And, he went on, we have this added advantage. The virus we are talking about will be you, so it won’t come at the wall after the manner of the sorts of malware the worms are comfortable handling. It will live in that plate in your head, he told me, nodding and smiling as if the plate in my head is nodworthy, or smileable. It will depend as much upon your syntactic network as upon the plate’s circuitry.

  Donaghy was a nice-looking young fellow: a thumb-shaped face, slightly podgier at the jaw and chin, but with a neat nose and wide-spaced, clever, childlike big green eyes. He must be in his early twenties, though his hair is white. There were, I noticed, little pocks and marls in the skin of his forehead, constellated around the bridge of his nose, like dints in metal. ‘You understand?’ he asked me.

  The striplight was strobing just on the edge of my vision. The walls were like clenched, bleached teeth. Away on the far side of the room, a woman was hunched over her workstation grooming her keyboard with feverish fingertips. Behind him, Donaghy’s screensavers seemed to be a continual downpour of tears, like a window on to a rainstorm.

  I did not say ‘I have a headache.’ Instead I said: ‘This isn’t the first time a viral attack has been used against NMA.’

  ‘Nope. But this is different. It’s like War of the Worlds. Do you know War of the Worlds?’

  ‘Richard Burton,’ I said. ‘David Essex. The Moody Blues.’

  His lovely, pea-coloured eyes narrowed a little at this, but he carried on. ‘You were fighting over that ground, you see. H G Wells’s novel describes all that territory pretty well, even after all this time. And like that novel, the way to bring down an otherwise invulnerable alien is to . . .’ He glanced left and right, as if worried at the prospect of being overheard.

  ‘A chain being only as strong as its weakest link,’ I said. ‘I have to say . . .’

  But he was ahead of me. ‘Oh, you’re not the only person being loaded with the stuff. There’s an American volunteer about to go out now into Missouri. Or Mississipi. Or another one of those unmarried girl-y states.’ He tried a smile at this; and if I didn’t join him it was only because it hurt my face to move it too much.’

  ‘But I am the only individual you’re working on,’ I said.

  ‘You are the only person I’m working on,’ Donaghy said, and glanced furtively left and right again. ‘You are a special case. The Colonel has spent a lot of time with you. And persuaded you to - reconsider your attachment to the New Model Armies?’

  The way this last was inflected, with its retroussé little voice-lift at the end, brought something very significant home to me. I looked again at his face. ‘So the virus will . . .’ I prompted. And when he didn’t take up the prompt, I added: ‘. . . degrade the NMA wiki? Turn it to mush?’

  ‘It will reconfigure the worms,’ he said, weighing each of these words very carefully. I really could not get past the sense that he was trying to tell me something. ‘It will make something new of the worms. But I wouldn’t worry about the specifics of that,’ he said, with a rather startling and abrupt shift of manner, speaking now with forced jollity and almost bouncing in his seat. ‘Here’s your escort!’ And I swivelled my whole body to look behind me and there was Terence, in uniform, to bring me back upstairs for another little interview with you.

  You don’t think you have an accent, because nobody thinks they have an accent. But try to put yourself in my place. In the exchange that follows, don’t think of your speeches as blandly normal and mine as articulated through a highfalutin fuck-you British accent. Think instead that I have a neutral tone and you have a West Texas rumble that would have done the Rooster from those cartoons proud.

  ‘I ain’t bored,’ you say. ‘Don’t think I am. It’s all most diverting. But I am curious as to why you’re giving me so much detail about this Harry.’

  ‘I might hope,’ I said, in my neutral tone, ‘that it’s obvious.’ It’s obvious to me: the detail about Harry stands in place of the detail I cannot utter about Simic.

  But you said: ‘I’ll tell you why I think you did it.’

  ‘Go on’

  ‘It’s you know I’m a Baptist—’

  I remember laughing at this. ‘I didn’t know you were a Baptist!’

  ‘Come, come, you know I’m a Christian.’ You seemed, from where I was sitting, relaxed and cheerful. ‘You put in all that cocksucking, all those description of homosexual, ah, activity, to bait me. You can be straight with me.’

  ‘Straight,’ I said. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Now, now, you see what I mean. You’re not trying to get a rise out of me?’

  ‘Rise. Even better.’

  ‘A reaction - yeah?’

  ‘You’re a mighty bizarre fellow, Colonel.’

  ‘Man in your position,’ you said. ‘Natural you want to kick out a little.’

  ‘Not at all. I hadn’t pegged you as a prude, that’s all.’

  Your smile didn’t sag. ‘Oh I’m a man of the world, Block.’

  ‘What you’re telling me is gay sex is an abomination.’

  ‘I don’t say so,’ you said. ‘Nobody gonna listen if I talk about homosexuality. But the Bible, now - that voice is loud. That’s a giant among books.’

  I would have given you the finger - actually, no. I would have been more English than that: I would have flashed a V-sign at you. But my fingers wouldn’t unclench from their withered-up fist. What I had, instead, was words.

  ‘Its old and fat,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t make it a g
iant.’

  ‘You know a better book?’

  ‘I know there are better ways of organizing our fucking lives than following the purity codes of an antique desert tribe.’

  ‘Oh ho,’ you said, in a you’ll-have-to-do-better-than-that tone.

  ‘Try: democracy.’

  Baiting your religion, and talking about gay sex, didn’t crack your façade; but I saw a glint of annoyance in your eye at this. ‘I’ve dedicated my life to the defence of democracy,’ you said. ‘Defending it from cocksuckers like you, Block. I’ve lost good friends in the line. I’m ready to join them in a heartbeat, because I love my country, and I love my country because it is built on freedom. Don’t you pretend your hooligan shit had anything to do with democracy.’

  ‘Jonathan and David,’ I said, rubbing my face a little with my knuckles.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s your book.’

  ‘Oh. That Jonathan and David.’ Big beamy smile.

  ‘Gay lovers,’ I said. ‘Warriors, too. Fine warriors, and leaders of a newly modelled army, back in the day. They took a small but properly motivated force and defeated a much larger, arthritic, unmotivated army.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Jonathan and David, queer as all get out.’

  ‘Jonathan and David?’ You weren’t outraged by my suggestion here, I think, so much as actually puzzled. Which is to say, I believe you really hadn’t ever come across the notion before. So sheltered an education!

  ‘No, you’re right, of course not,’ I said. ‘Theirs was a love passing that of women, sure, it says that. But when two men love one another in a way that surpasses the love of women, I guess that has nothing to do with anybody’s cock going up anybody else’s poop-hole.’

  ‘I’ve known a number of homosexuals in my time,’ you replied, indulgently, ‘My experience, they are prone to doing that - I mean, to confusing love and sex. But there’s a rainbow of possibilities of love that have nothing to do with what you do with your blessed dick.’

  ‘Would you like to bless my dick, Colonel?’ I offered. ‘Feel that urge?’

  This made you laugh, and with that the mood unnotched a tad. ‘So why tell me so much about this Harry guy, if not to try and outrage my decent Baptist sentiments?’

  I didn’t reply at once. ‘I haven’t told my story very well,’ I said, shortly, ‘if you think it really is about sex. Harry and me - it’s not at all about that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I was going to say love,’ I said. ‘But that would confuse you, I think. Or maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t want to underestimate you. Harry was one of the big loves of my life.’

  ‘You were an item?’

  ‘Four years, off and on. He was the most beautiful man I ever knew. Physically beautiful, I mean. In terms of his personality I guess he was a little, what would you say? Passive, I suppose. That’s the problem you have, growing up beautiful. The world loves you not for anything you have done, but simply because you are so lovely. Things go easy. You never acquire the habits of overcoming, because people all around go out of their way to get you stuff. He wasn’t selfish, Harry. I’m not saying that. Just he’d never really needed to do more than simply exist.’

  I looked at you. Your expression was easy enough to read. You were thinking: Physical beauty matters a good deal to you queers, don’t it? You were thinking: And look at your mashed up face now, boy. But you said: ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I was younger I thought beauty was what I wanted. Beauty and pleasure. I thought Harry, who gave me both, was what I wanted. I thought the pain was a small price to pay.’

  ‘Pain?’

  ‘There’s a song. When you’re in love with a beautiful woman. You know it?’

  ‘Can’t say I do.’

  ‘But, look, that’s not the thing. Harry’s infidelities weren’t the thing. The thing was that I was looking for the wrong sorts of happiness. I didn’t want beauty and pleasure. Beauty and pleasure are trash, really.’

  ‘You say?’

  ‘See, what I wanted was - to come home.’

  This must have connected with you, because the smirk left your face, and you said: ‘There’s one true home in this universe, soldier.’

  ‘Ah, but you mean, God.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. The tone of our conversation had suddenly become hard to read. We had moved beyond banter into an unfamiliar zone. ‘I rather got the impression queers aren’t welcome in your church?’

  ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’

  ‘Imagine I didn’t choose to be gay. Imagine God made me this way. What would that mean, do you think? That God just wants me to have a miserable life?’

  ‘Don’t sound like the God of Joy I worship.’

  ‘But with some people he makes them in such a way that—’ I pushed. ‘I’m asking in all seriousness, Colonel. You know what I mean. Some people he makes crippled, or cretinous. Some people he brings into the world tangled up in pain and misery that never lets up. Some people have a soul with a twist in it that makes them depressed all the length of their days. Some had a different warp, and they’re killers, and no remorse about it, and no more joy in their being than a shark has. You going to tell me you haven’t seen such people, in your army? Army is where a lot of them end up.’

  Your smile was armoured, metal-played. ‘Sure,’ you said.

  ‘Join your congregation,’ I said, ‘and the price would be: to live the lie? There’s such a thing as a gay community, you know, and when I was younger I was an active part of it. But that’s a community of people who only have one thing in common, and lots of things that are different. After a while you realize that sex is not the be-all and end-all, and those differences start to loom.’

  ‘I’ve killed men,’ you said, in a sober voice. This wasn’t what I expected you to say at all. ‘I’ve killed men, and so have you. But that doesn’t cut us off from God’s grace. You’re talking about love. I understand that. Love.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be shy of the term,’ I agreed. ‘The thing, I guess, is that you can’t have love without equality. If you’re higher up in the hierarchy, then what you call love of those below you is actually a kind of condescension, or just the exercise of power. And what you call love of those higher up than you is just fear, a desire to placate them.’ I thought back to Harry, in the dark, fitting his mouth about my cock with that shiver in his eye. ‘You might fool yourself that you actually love your inferior, or your superior, but you don’t because you can’t. True love can only exist between equals. And what follows is, what follows is that love the beloved republic can only exist as the most transparent and radical of democracies.’

  ‘So you can’t love unless you can vote? Hard to buy that.’

  ‘Voting,’ I said. ‘That’s not a substitute. That’s not a symbol, not a negotiable bond. A vote is itself. Here’s what: you can’t love unless you take charge of your life, and you can’t do that if you’re handing over power to representatives to exercise it on your behalf. You can’t love if the very nature of your society is unequal. What I felt for Simic was an expression of - perfect equality. That’s what it was. There hadn’t been a society like ours in the world since Ancient Greece. And ours was more perfect than theirs, because we were open to men and women, to Greeks and barbarians, to atheists or religious types, to Pericles and Socrates. You had to be prepared to stand and fight, sure - but how can you be a human being and respect yourself if you’re not prepared to stand and fight? And you had to be prepared to live democratically. It’s not sex. It’s something much more profound than sex.’

  ‘You’re telling me that you never had sex with anybody else in this army of yours?’

  ‘Oh of course I did. It’s a collection of human beings, and sex is one of the things human beings do. But that’s not the point I’m making.’

  ‘What is your point, soldier? You’re taking your time getting to it.’

  ‘The point is
that you and I mean different things when we talk about love. That’s the point. I’m saying going back to Harry’s made me realize a truth about love. And I’m saying that you have yet to realize it. That’s why I spent so much telling you about Harry and me, because unless you understand that you’re not going to understand anything. We are the people who value the cactus for its luscious interior. You are the people who value the cactus for its dry and prickly exterior. How do we differ? The look-and-the-fee people, rather than the taste-and-sustenance people? You’ve gotten used to a distorted sort-of definition of love, but habitual is not the same a true. You don’t live your life amongst equals. At your rank, it’s possible you don’t even recognize the existence of equals.’