If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  * * *

  He walked along the high escarpment of the South Downs, the green turf suffused with sunlight reflected by the chalk bedrock. Radio masts lay broken and prone at Firle Beacon. Southward to the coast, the churning factories of the Process, the glimmer of sunlight upon the sea, the distant horizon. He went north, down a long broken tarmac road into the village of Firle, where the streets had been cored through overgrown trees and hedgerows. It was the same route that he took on that first day, when he found Hector in the barbed wire. Here was the spot where he had stopped to speak to the girl, Agnes, about the other soldiers that had been seen around the village.

  From Firle, he passed across the old railway line and on through Glynde. The villagers were finishing their work in the fields and the blacksmith’s chimney smoked noisily into an overcast sky. He did not tarry. He was no longer the bailiff. He was beyond these people and this place. They belonged to the time before the war, a time of great certainties and worthy sacrifice. Now that the war was over, home felt strange, its old rituals absurd, and everywhere the oppressive silence of the guns.

  The Institute was on the other side of a coppiced wood. He felt its proximity as a pressure upon his brow. He passed a broken wall overgrown with bindweed and ivy, and walked through sickly abundant gardens. The light above the lawn was heavy and sluggish, the water features stagnant and choked with lilies. The old house was a hodgepodge of different time periods, the architectural affectations of three centuries apparent in the variation in the chimney stacks.

  The gas lanterns were on in the Round Room.

  He opened the tall wooden doors and stepped into the hallway. It was a house on the eve of mourning, quiet and careful so as not to disturb death at work. In the Round Room, Alex Drown sat on an armchair in her managerial skirt and blouse next to an occasional table with a quarter-full cut-glass carafe and an upturned glass. She balanced her own tumbler of whisky upon her knee, and suggested he help himself to a drink. He righted the empty glass, poured himself two fingers’ worth and sat forward on the edge of a damp chaise longue.

  “Omega John is very close to death,” she said.

  “I want to speak to him.”

  She waved the cut-glass tumbler at the mural covering the west wall of the Round Room, portraits of the various personalities who had dwelt in the house across the centuries. He had often considered it on previous visits, but only now did he recognize some of the individuals it depicted: Trevenen Huxley, long-faced, in a flowing ceremonial gown and bearing a censer of incense; Lewis Collinson in round spectacles and unkempt brows, with compasses and wind gauge; Doctor Blore with a scalpel that James, on previous visits to the Round Room, had mistaken for a pen. Even the yeoman Jordison was among the portraits, stocky and shirtless and clutching a hoe.

  “You recognize anyone?” she asked.

  “They were my friends in the war.”

  “Your implant is running hot, James. I can feel it.” She adjusted her short black fringe. “It’s going to be hard for you to come back to us.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I was in the war also. As a nurse. I had hoped to be spared the fighting. Omega John showed me what I was missing.”

  “Ruth told me.”

  “Did she get the children out?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. It was the right thing to do. You mustn’t take goodness lightly. Not in this world. Omega John was once a good man. Many talented people were gathered by the Institute but he was the first and the best of them.”

  Her insistence on this point made her seem drunk.

  “Omega John sentenced me to death,” said James.

  “Yes, he almost killed me too.”

  Alex took a moment to consider her thought.

  She said, “My mother was an alcoholic.” She winced at her glass of whisky. “Her anger and selfishness got worse the closer she came to death. Drink was killing her so she drank more, to bring it on. But she was still my mother. That’s how I feel about Omega John.”

  “What will happen when he dies?”

  “That remains to be seen. Is John Hector with you?”

  “No.”

  “He’ll come. He has to come, after all our sacrifices. Without Omega John, the implants will degrade. What this means for us I could not say.” She counted off the possibilities on her fingers. “Madness. Death. Maybe nothing. The brain can route around damage. Over time, new networks form. You may get back some of what you have lost.”

  Ruth.

  “Or you may starve to death because you lack the basic will to survive.”

  “What will you do next?”

  “If we live? I’ll get another job. Find another challenging client, send some money home. Survival is not included in the terms of my employment.”

  She refilled her glass and offered him the carafe. He demurred.

  “The Institute will persist too. In its history, the Institute has been through many incarnations; after the war it was Omega House then, briefly, the Institute of the Unfolding Dialectic; in the thirties it was the Institute of the New Accelerant, or Iona, then after the Second World War, there was a substantial new intake working on the Omega Project; by the sixties it was known informally among its inmates as the Institute of Artists and Murderers. In the eighties, it was a respectable thinktank called the Knowlands Group. Graduates of Knowlands went on to remake society in their own image. But dominion was never John’s aim. He always stayed behind.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “In many ways, nothing.”

  “The Process killed thousands of the evicted.”

  “Precisely. Because they were the evicted, their needs were not a mission critical metric.”

  “They were people.”

  “Once they were placed outside of the Process, placed there by you, they became a low-value resource to be used for the benefit of the high-value resource – Omega John and the remaining Lewesians – within the Process. We are all resources of one sort or another.”

  “It seems wrong.”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s how the line has been drawn. Choose which side of the line you stand, and then live with the consequences of your choice. I hope you don’t intend bothering Omega John with these moral qualms.”

  “John Hector told me he was going to stop the war. I want to know why that didn’t happen.”

  The door to the Round Room opened. Sunny Wu entered in soft slippers, his enlarged hands covered in silk gloves. He whispered to Alex. She nodded and drained her glass.

  “He’s ready to speak to you,” she said.

  They walked through the decrepitude of the great house, the paint sloughing off the walls in silvered skins, the tiled floor gritty and loose. On the staircase, he paused to consider the second substantial mural of the Institute; a rendition of the tale of Demophon and Mastusius, two robed men seated at a blue crescent moon table drinking from goblets, the Aegean sea in the distance. The king unknowingly drinks the heady blood of his own children. On discovering that he has been grievously deceived, he throws his cup into the sea, and it cuts the coastline in a distinctive shape of a crescent moon.

  “The shape of Suvla Bay,” said James.

  Alex gazed up at the mural. “It dates from the late sixties, when the house was known as the Institute of Artists and Murderers.”

  “Omega John painted it,” said James.

  “How do you know?” asked Alex.

  “The blue crescent moon table. John Hector told me about a meeting he once attended in which many great men sat around that table.”

  Sunny Wu was keen for them to move on. James asked for a moment longer. Omega John had told him that the theme of the mural was the sacrifice of the innocents. Virgin daughters were a high value resource, as Alex had put it, and the gods could not be bought off with anything less. Demophon and Mastusius, their cold, layered expressions utterly modern in their self-mastery, knew that sacrifice was futile, but still the
y pandered to the people’s need for blood to be spilt, because to repudiate sacrifice, to admit that the plague was beyond their power to control, was to lose standing in society. In serving the wine, Mastusius did not merely avenge himself – he repudiated the worth of a ruling class that exploited such a primitive rite.

  Sunny Wu showed them into the master bedroom. Omega John’s long body lay under a thin sheet. He turned his head to gaze at James. Father Huxley, in priestly garb, knelt beside the dying man and adjusted his pillow. Doctor Blore was there also, and he acknowledged James with a silent meaningful bow. Alex joined the remaining inmates of the Institute on a row of chairs beside the death bed: Adlan the Observer, great Jamsu, little Neha, the stony countenance of Yoruban Ken.

  The room smelt of incense.

  James sat close to Omega John.

  “I was just admiring your mural. The blue table across which Mastusius and Demophon dine is Charles Masterman’s table.”

  Omega John’s thin lips parted; it was an effort to remain above the pain.

  “You’ve spoken with John Hector. He should be here. Not you.”

  “He went to stop the war.”

  Omega John coughed violently, the laughter of a dying man.

  “The confrontation with Masterman. I remember it well. Are the Order of the Omega camping up on the Downs?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would so like to camp with them again. To be fit, and in the open air and ready to face the world.”

  His attenuated skin, liver-spotted in parts, hung in loose folds under his arms. The palms of his hands were smooth and plump but their backs were a landscape of dried ridges; under his thin scalp, a long blue vein meandered.

  “Don’t get old,” he said. “Especially not this old.”

  His hand searched the bedside table and tapped open a velvet case of syringes. Father Huxley loaded a syringe and applied the longevity fluid directly into the back of Omega John’s head. The young-old man sighed, his eyes lost their focus, and then he looked questioningly at James.

  “You’re supposed to be dead, bailiff. Why are you still alive?”

  “John Hector saved me.”

  “How?”

  “He sent me the armour.”

  Omega John was surprised.

  “Are you certain that it was his doing?”

  “He promised to find a way of getting me out of the war.”

  “Then our plan succeeded, but, as with all plans, the results are quite different from what was anticipated.”

  “Tell me what happened when you returned to London.”

  Omega John’s eyes widened at this show of will from the bailiff.

  “This is really not the time for your questions,” said Huxley.

  “It is the only time,” said James.

  “The benefit of the injection will not last long, and we cannot administer many more without lethal effect.”

  James said, “Tell me about Masterman, please. I want to understand how all this began.”

  The dying man bared his teeth at some deep inner pain, then gasped.

  “Give me a cigarette, Huxley,” said Omega John. “I know you have them. Your shirt is sour with nicotine.”

  The priest lit a cigarette and held it out to Omega John. Two drags were sufficient to set his heart racing. The smoke made its own way from his mouth.

  “We were all in a very bad way after Suvla,” he said. “Our nerves were so shot that we believed the collapse of civilization was imminent and it was best to prepare for it like good boy scouts. I retreated to my caravan camp in Friston Forest and the others camped nearby. We spent months around the campfire devising a plan for the new age. There are always plans. They provide alibis for our secret desires. I wanted only to pass on the experience of the war, to make others suffer as we had suffered.

  “When we were ready, I travelled to London with the intention of confronting Masterman at his office on the top floor of Wellington House. I walked the streets with the war boiling in my mind. On the street, a woman gave a passerby a white feather from her basket. I decided to audition my ability. I gave her the war as if I were returning her umbrella. With a silent, quivering grimace, she fell down into her skirts.”

  He ventured another drag upon the cigarette.

  “London was different than I remembered it. There were women driving motor cars, women eating sandwiches in the ABC. Always the smell of hot tea from those places. Every bus had a different coloured ticket and when they were torn and discarded, the tickets lined the gutters like confetti. The city was a party to which I was not invited. At the Bank of England, the statue of Wellington on his horse was black with pollution; it reminded me of the burned men of Chocolate Hill. I knocked the straw boater from a chap’s head and when he and his chums confronted me I gave them all a taste of the fucking war. A traffic policeman with long white sleeves ran over to see what could be making these adult males whinny and soil themselves so. I hopped onto a bus.”

  The cigarette made him swoon. Omega John sank back onto the bed, the sweat from his large head darkening the pillow case. Huxley insisted he rest and recover his strength. But there was to be no recovery. “Am I really dying?” asked Omega John, and, seeing Huxley’s silent pained expression, his fingers gripped the bedsheets. His lips and tongue worked dryly at the thought of death. It was too much. Better to return to the past.

  He turned back to James, and told him that after the Bank of England, he got off the bus at Charing Cross Road, where the wounded used to come in from the trenches. There was a soldier dressed as a medieval knight lecturing on the war. His audience was entirely made up of other soldiers as if they all required further instruction in the matter. The irony of it, he laughed and that made him cough. Save your breath, ministered Huxley. Save it for what, he replied. The act of remembering gave him solace.

  “I met up with Collinson at the free bar in Victoria Station. A woman in a black tie and hat served us tea from under a portrait of the king. Masterman’s office was nearby at Buckingham Gate. I was closing in on my quarry.” He reached out with a dithering open hand, then closed it slowly around an invisible object. “We watched the crowds gather around another trench train: beseeching mothers, angry silent wives, children hefted up for one last turn in father’s arms. Collinson asked me if I thought grief could be quantified. I said that it was in the nature of emotions that they swelled to new and unexpected proportions, although I was thinking more of my anger than any sorrow.” He let his hand fall upon the blanket, where it opened slowly.

  “Collinson counselled me to be careful. It was a crime to spread unease. The work of Masterman’s department was secret but he had a weakness for literature, and it was under the guise of young writers that we secured an appointment with him. He remembered me, of course. In the first weeks of the war, Masterman had struck me as indecently dishevelled. By the time of our second meeting, more than a year later, the nightmare of the war lay heavy upon him. He needed a stick to walk and his complexion was gelatinous. Yes, imagine a great sullen fish in a tailcoat, propping itself upright upon a walking stick.”

  The image of Masterman stirred him. He smiled somewhat.

  “We spoke about my service. I told him that Collinson and I had served at Suvla Bay as stretcher bearers, and had been assigned that duty due to our Quaker background; he said he admired the attitude of the Quakers toward the war, felt they had come out of it much better than the Anglicans. He confessed that the proofs of a history of the battle of Gallipoli were on his desk. He had the decency to show a modicum of shame at its contents.

  “Collinson took out a book of his own. In Suvla Bay, the professor had devised a mathematical proof of the efficacy of pacifism. It hinged upon the reduction of warlike activity to zero, a reduction we felt should begin with the publications of Wellington House.

  “It was early evening, and outside the tall windows of the office, the street lamps gave out a dark blue light. Masterman sat behind his desk and inspected Collins
on’s paper on the Equation of War. Then he put it aside. There was no question, Masterman said, of Wellington House ceasing in its operation. He returned the book to Collinson and asked us to leave, citing a heavy workload and a hades of a liver.

  “I said, ‘What if it were possible to communicate the experience of war directly from mind-to-mind? Given your knowledge of the masses, don’t you think that such an ability would quickly reduce warlike activity to naught?’

  “He did not entirely comprehend my point. So I tried again.

  “‘If I could place the experience of thousands of men as they fight and die into the thoughts of a politician, a lady, the king himself using some mechanism, a combination of Marconi’s wireless and the energies of the elan vital, then what?’

  “He confessed that, at Cambridge, he had undertaken psychical research work but had refused further involvement in it.

  “‘We disproved every report of psychic activity,’ he said. ‘Except one. The only verified phenomena were time slips.’”

  Omega John took up another cigarette.

  “A time slip is when a person finds themselves unaccountably in a different era and returns with knowledge so detailed that it could only have been accrued at first hand. I said to Masterman that my ability was a phenomenon related to the time slip. It was a collective memory of the sensations and emotions of thousands of men, everything they saw, heard, smelt and tasted in the heat of battle. More like a time loop.”

  “I understand.”

  “Yes, you experienced a recurrence of it. I saw fear in Masterman’s eyes. He was a widow’s son. He had no facility for confrontation with another man.”

  Omega John relished this aspect of the story.

  “‘I can communicate the experience of war mind-to-mind,’ I said to Masterman, ‘by touch and act of will. What effect would that have on the nation?’

  “He told me that I was mad. I put my hands over his eyes so that he could see only what I had to show him: my compressed symphony of horrors. Did you know that when I pass on the war in this way, I relive it also? I never tire of it. That is why I think of it as a symphony. It has such complexity of thought and feeling, and one never tires of Bach or Vaughan Williams.