If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  The term is unfamiliar to James. Huxley explains its meaning: when man becomes conscious of the universe, he will take control of his evolution and the evolution of the other species. Father Huxley has to clench his fists by his sides to restrain his passion.

  “If the profiteers and the warmongers hear of his existence they will not think twice about killing him.”

  “Enough,” says Hector.

  An eerie silence falls over the distant ridge. The machine gun fire ceases – it’s as if the whistle has blown on a shift, and now the workers can trudge wearily back to camp.

  “Upon my return to London, I intend to stop the war across the whole of Europe.”

  Hector turns onto his side and pulls the blanket up to his chin.

  * * *

  James sits on the shadowed side of a moonlit dune. Collinson and Huxley, Hector between them on a stretcher, join the morbid procession of stretcher bearers down to the evacuation point at the pier; under the cover of darkness, the black barges berth and the loading of the wounded begins. Collinson and Huxley disappear in the crowd gathering by the waterside.

  The prickling sensation in James’ scalp subsides and he feels a great release of tension. The veil falls, briefly, exposing a truth that can only ever be glimpsed: the enormity of what he has done and what has been done to him. He remembers gazing through the Zweiss glass and seeing, in its magnified circle, the terrified faces of men and women as they ran down the steep hillside. The faces of the evicted, all people he had cast out of the town. The naval guns swept them aside. It was a massacre.

  When was the last time he cried honestly? Without having to force it? So long ago. Even in childhood, he could hold back tears. He was not emotionless. On the contrary. But he was raised without hope that his desires would ever be met and that he must accommodate his needs to the greater imperatives of society. To what must be done. How had he learned this terrible lesson? Poverty. Powerlessness.

  He cries alone. A minute or so suffices. He will never recover from his exertions on the Kiretch Tepe.

  The green and red electric lights of the hospital ship wait in the bay. The silhouettes of the stretcher bearers flank the waterside. And then he sees him, a silhouette taller than the others. A foot or so taller. The silhouette of the sniper.

  The sniper limps through the lines, watching as the stretchers are loaded aboard the black barge. The first barge slips out into the cut, and then the tall figure walks north toward divisional headquarters. James checks the gun in his tunic and follows him.

  * * *

  Inside the great tent, Omega John is sat upon a camp chair in the uniform of a lieutenant general, conferring with Barker Bill and his adjutants. The rising tip of his oval skull is a soft mass of skin and tough membrane. His general’s cap is tucked in the crook of his elbow, and he fiddles with the ends of his thin white moustache. A bandage around his knee distorts the line of his trousers, which are too short for him, exposing his long ankles.

  “Hello James,” says Omega John. “How do you like my war?”

  James hesitates. He is scared in a way he had not anticipated. The air of the tent is warm and close. The lanterns fizz with midges. The officers go about their duties like ponderous automata. One officer lies face down in the earth, arms twitching, and entirely ignored by his fellow soldiers. Barker Bill speaks to Omega John in his cracked and indecipherable code, although by his tone, supplicant and queasingly familiar, he seems to be telling some kind of joke. Barker Bill does not acknowledge the stretcher bearer from his division.

  James salutes his superiors.

  Omega John tells him to stand at ease.

  “Permission to speak freely,” says James.

  “Denied,” says Omega John, handing the briefing notes back to his adjutant, and accepting another sheaf of orders.

  A replica of the Suvla Bay landscape has been constructed in the centre of the headquarters, the high ridges rendered in sculpted papier maché, with the various positions of the fighting men plotted, and matchstick destroyers afloat on painted card. With a drugged gait, some officers circle the replica, with one or the other lashing out an arm occasionally to reposition a model of artillery, or a band of tin soldiers.

  “You will be punished for what you’ve done, sir,” says James.

  The officers do not rouse themselves at such insubordination.

  Omega John peers at him.

  “What have I done?” he asks. “I’m curious to discover the extent of your understanding of what has occurred.”

  “You shot Jordison, sir.”

  “I administered a projectile which prepared the subject for treatment.”

  Omega John accepts a sheaf of orders from an adjutant, and inspects them.

  “You shot John Hector also.”

  “How is the sergeant?”

  “He lives.”

  “But does he live in a way that is more evolved?”

  “Father Huxley thinks so.”

  “Then it has been a cruel and pitiless business, but a success nonetheless.”

  “I saw men and women massacred on the hillside. The people I evicted.”

  Omega John winces.

  “You should not have seen that. The suffering of the manufactured soldiers was insufficient. The Process needed more. This must all appear very strange to your morality. I’ve been in the Institute for so long, I’ve forgotten what it is to live with such a rudimentary understanding of the soul.”

  “How do we stop this?”

  “It’s over. Did you not hear the rumour? I’ve been relieved of my command. The lieutenant general is to be sent home.”

  Omega John inspects the rank insignia on his cuffs, the symbol of a crown above a crossed baton and sabre.

  “They won’t cashier me out, not as such, but my judgment throughout the landing has been seriously flawed.”

  “You’re mocking me?”

  “How can I not, James? You are so dutiful.”

  “What will happen?”

  “The battle is over. John Hector has left the battlefield. The Process may reset the algorithms at this point and run them again. But I have what I want.”

  Omega John dismisses his adjutants, and gets hesitantly to his feet. So tall and thin, his skin translucent, he is attenuated, stretched out between two points in time.

  The blade of his nose. His ghastly pallor. Years of experimentation and longevity treatments have rendered him largely unrecognizable. James wonders if it is possible.

  “You are John Hector.”

  “I was. But I’m not anymore. I’m not even human. Or should I say, I am the only human. This has been a trip down memory lane for me. A hundred and seven years ago, John Hector was shot in the head by a sniper in the botched landings at Suvla Bay. The resultant surgery, combined with particular conditions of the war, connected him to the collective suffering. I was born at that moment.”

  He points to his distorted head.

  “This war never ends, James. It is always here.”

  Omega John puts his lean, avian arm around James’ shoulder. His breath smells like boiled metal.

  “Tell me, what do you remember of Lewes and the Process? I’m guessing your recollection is obscured.”

  “It comes and goes. I was the bailiff. I evicted people. The Process was how we decided who stayed and who left.”

  “John Hector is the necessary instrument of the next stage of the Process.”

  Omega John walks him around the scale replica of the battlefield. Beyond the ridge of Tekke Tepe, there is low rolling downland and then a town, intricately fashioned from painted balsa wood, with red roofs clustered around a castle on a hill.

  “The Process is the future of mankind. It is the best way to ensure the maximum amount of fairness in society.”

  “There is no fairness here. Only suffering.”

  “You will be stronger for it. You will come to appreciate the test. I did. It is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have felt it a
feature of beauty. “

  “You’ve been manipulating the Process.”

  “The Process is made from me. I am its point of origin. The calculations for fairness are made within mind organs modelled on my odd brain. Your implant was also grown from my tissue cells. It is hard to say where any of us ends and the Process begins. I cannot consciously manipulate it. But my desires, my needs, have undue influence upon it.”

  “You wanted a war.”

  “I wanted human things. To see my friends again. You met Huxley, didn’t you? We were very close after the war. He helped me understand my new way of being. I wanted to be young. I wanted to reproduce. This war is how the Process has met those needs. The Process would not sacrifice such resources to achieve one heart’s desire if doing so did not also serve the greater good.

  “The world needs the Process, James. Without it, your savage race with its doomed ideologies commit atrocities that exceed even the Great War. I believe that the Process has – on some level – calculated that its dominion must be expanded in the future, and urgently, if it is to ensure fairness for all, and to avert a greater disaster. By revisiting the moment of my creation, it has manufactured the resources it requires for that expansion. The Institute tried to recreate my oddness in others. Without success. You saw the skeletons in the necropolis, the failed test subjects. It took time for us to realize the truth: the mind is a process of interaction with its environment. Merely tinkering with the brain is not enough. We adapt to our environment. If you wish to recreate the adaptation, then you must recreate the environment. My oddness was a consequence of Blore’s procedure plus the war.”

  “The Process killed all those people.”

  “People you evicted, James. What did you think was going to happen to them?”

  “I was following the orders of the Process, and you have corrupted it.”

  “You’re not listening. You are emotional. Unevolved human beings are incapable of detachment during moments of suffering.”

  James takes out the Webley revolver. He has not fired a gun since basic training. It is heavier than he expected.

  “Exactly my point,” says Omega John. “My intentions are good, James. I have no interest in ruling the world, nor in the material gains of a mechanized society. The shepherd does not rule over his sheep. He does not want what the sheep want. He cares for them and he guides them.”

  Omega John squirms under the pressure of the gun sight. “You are dangerous, aren’t you? You halfmen.”

  “Make it stop,” says James. He feels lightheaded.

  “I could have stopped the war in 1916,” says Omega John. “I was persuaded otherwise. I will see all their systems destroyed and a better one put in its place.”

  A vein pulses. The atmosphere in the headquarters tightens. The hubbub of officers and soldiers coming and going ceases. James becomes the focus of their attention.

  “My god, man!” shouts Barker Bill. The lieutenant colonel looks up from the map to see one of his stretcher bearers pointing a revolver at the general. He strikes at the man’s knuckles with his Malacca cane, sending the revolver spinning to the floor. Then the adjutants thoroughly subdue the mutiny. The last thing James is aware of, as he passes into unconsciousness, is a remark the lieutenant colonel makes to his general, “And he calls himself a pacifist!”

  * * *

  The lieutenant colonel acted as president for the Field General Court Martial brought against Private James. The president and the two captains also convened were unanimous in their verdict: James was found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to suffer death by being shot. The procedure was in accordance with military law. Private James, the accused, objected, stating to the court that the lieutenant colonel did not have the eyes of a real man, and the general he threatened with a revolver was in fact a mutated version of a sergeant of the 32nd Field Ambulance division. The verdict included the prescription that the prisoner should be given the opportunity of seeing a chaplain if he so desired. James requested to speak to Father Huxley, and this request was granted on the eve of the execution.

  He was confined to a barbed wire stockade pitched on the marshy ground at the Gully Ravine, where he could watch the transports come hither and thither. They were evacuating nearly a thousand men a day. Mostly dysentery. Hector had been true to his word about stopping the war; the fighting had lost its intensity and all that remained were the bureaucratic routines of the conflict: the eight o’clock artillery barrage, the swift response from the destroyers, which prevented one or other of the sides taking advantage of the general lassitude and slaughtering one another. The allies reinforced their positions, having fallen all the way back to the position they secured on the first night. As a military operation, the landing was a failure. But, as he now understands it, military victory had not been the intent.

  Lice gossip in his vest. He reaches back and picks one loose, inspecting it between his thumb and forefinger; some of them are observer bugs, no doubt, but not this one, nor that one either. He takes the vest off and lies it on the foul-smelling earth. His ribs are still sore from the beating and his back muscles are bruised.

  After leaving Ruth and Lewes, he had walked to Newhaven with Hector. The citizens of Newhaven had all been evicted long ago. He walked the empty streets. Shop signs hung from broken chains and dogs skittered in and out of the open door of a pub saloon. In every house, drone troops sat and stood in living rooms and bedrooms, silent, lifelessly waiting. The people of Lewes had interpreted the evictions as a response to their behavior, but it was not so: every eviction had been in service of this war. Newhaven was cleared so that it could be used as a refinery for the men and munitions. The people from Lewes were evicted so that they could suffer and die on the battlefield because suffering was another resource that could be cultivated and dispensed accordingly.

  The assembly lines emptied directly out onto the quay. The slow dock waters were slick with pollutants. The workers were also evictees, their hands and faces yellow from exposure to sulphur.

  The downland around the town had been blasted and excavated as part of the recreation of the particular topography of the battlefield of Suvla Bay, the land reworked by a legion of monster shovels and dozens of link belt cranes. The high dock walls echoed with the booming quarrying explosive. A troop division marched past him at the double and he was caught up in the herd, and that was the last he remembered.

  “They say you lost your mind,” says Father Huxley. “That you were about to shoot the general. Is this true?”

  The priest stands on the other side of the barbed wire stockade.

  “He was not the general.”

  “Then who was he?”

  “An old friend.”

  In the lull of the fighting, Huxley has taken the time to shave and comb his hair. His dog collar is clean. He offers James a cigarette.

  “You are not real,” mutters James.

  “My cigarettes are.”

  “Do you think that when a madman enters heaven, he becomes sane?”

  “Your sentence is inhumane.”

  “Well, the judge wasn’t human.”

  “You were not of your right mind.”

  “Tomorrow, when they shoot me…” His voice cracks.

  “What is your faith?”

  “It’s not a faith. It is what I know. I saw thousands of jars set up on the seaward Downs in great iron racks to catch the morning sun, each with their homunculi, the naked protoplasmic imitations of men floating in golden liquids and orange compounds. You were grown in one of those jars, Father Huxley. Everything you think and say is a mere echo of another Father Huxley. The pattern of who he was, as set down in his writings and his speeches, was preserved and put into your manufactured flesh. This battle was fought and lost long ago.”

  Huxley sighs.

  “You will not take these delusions into the beyond. Your soul will cast off its troubles.”

  Omega John said that he had been tutored by Huxley. The priest devised his un
conventional faith in the trenches.

  “We are a process,” says James, remembering what the general had told him, repeating the pupil’s words back to his master.

  “Yes. Not a thing.” Huxley smiles with pedagogic satisfaction.

  “I have a wife, Ruth.”

  “Do you want me to contact her?”

  “If only that were possible.”

  He tests the points of the barbed wire. It is sharp and new. The same wire on which he first found Hector. The sense of destiny closing around him like the fingers of a great fist.

  “Perhaps my words will find their way back to her, through the Process.”

  “As in a prayer,” says the priest.

  He inspects his sorrow. When he is sure he can traverse it without losing control, he speaks.

  “If you meet my wife, tell her this: Ruth, we were wrong to evict the children. I hoped that giving myself up to the war would atone for what we did. We struggled with life and in the end we lost, but before then, oh before then, I loved you.”

  The priest bows his head, listening, as in prayer.

  James continues, “I cannot tell all that I have felt and seen and understood in this war. It may seem senseless to you that I died here, in this strange sham. I was a stretcher bearer. Not a bailiff. I was kind and selfless in a way that our times did not permit. I want you to know, Ruth, that it was impossible to survive our time without doing wrong. It was an evil age. If we had lived in a better time, then we would have been better people.”

  Father Huxley asks, “Is there one more thing I can do for you?”

  “I would like one last swim, Father. I don’t want to die filthy rotten and riddled with lice.”

  * * *