Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

She said quietly, “This is terrible. In the days of the old Elite you were a definite, independent sort of man in your limited way. I was slightly afraid of you. I envied you. I was a silly weakling then, the mouthpiece of someone who despised me. And now that I’ve lost my looks and gained some sense and self-confidence you’ve gone as feeble as putty. Did Rima chew your balls off?”

  “Please don’t talk like that.”

  Gay sighed and said, “Where will we go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re my passenger. Where do you want me to drive you?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “All right,” she said, reaching into the back seat. “Here’s your briefcase. My daughter found it somewhere. It was empty, apart from a scientific dictionary and this pass with your name on it.” She stuck a long strip of plastic into his breast pocket.

  “Get out.”

  He got out and stood on the kerb, trying to find comfort in the familiar smoothness of the briefcase handle. He expected the car to drive away but Gay got out too. She took his arm and led him to a double door, the only feature in a wilderness of wall. He said, “What place is this?” but she hummed softly to herself and touched a bell button. Each wing of the door suddenly swung inward and Lanark was appalled by the sight of two tight-mouthed security men. They spoke sharply and simultaneously, the voices springing from their shirtfronts:

  “Pass, please.”

  “You can see it in his pocket,” said Gay.

  “Identify self.”

  “He’s the Unthank delegate, slightly late, and I’m from the press.”

  “Delegate may enter. No press may enter without the red card. No press may enter without the red card. Delegate may enter.”

  They moved apart, leaving a narrow space between them. Gay said, “Well, goodbye, Lanark. I’m sorry I won’t be able to twist your arm when the right moment comes. But if you manage to improvise some guts, old man, I’ll certainly hear about it.”

  She turned and walked away.

  “Delegate may enter. Or Not,” said the security men. “Delegate may enter. Or not. Invite expression of intention by progression or retrogression. Request expression of intention. Demand expression of intention. Command expression of intention!”

  Lanark stood and pondered.

  “Think hard!” said the security men. “In default of expression of intention, delegate demoted to condition of obstruction. Think hard! In def of exp of int del dem to con of ob think, conofobthink, conofobthink.”

  And although it made him shudder, he stepped through the narrow space between them because he could think of nowhere else to go.

  CHAPTER 43.

  Explanation

  A concrete floor, dusty and stained by pigeon droppings, lay under a high roof upheld by iron girders. From the doorway a long blue carpet ran into the shadowy distance. He walked down this till it touched a similar carpet at right angles. He turned the corner round a little gurgling fountain in a glass bowl and heard a hubbub of voices. A dozen security guards stood before the door of a circus tent. He went forward, holding out his pass and saying loudly, “Unthank delegate!”

  A displeased-looking girl in red shirt and jeans appeared between the black-clad men and said, “I’m surprised to see you here, Lanark. I mean, everything’s finished. Even the food.” It was Libby. He muttered that he had come for the speeches.

  “Why? The’ll be horribly boring, and you look as if you hadn’t washed for a week. Why do you want to hear speeches?”

  He stared at her. She sighed and said, “Come inside, but you’ll have to hurry.”

  He followed her through the door. The hubbub grew deafening as she led him along between the inner wall of the tent and a line of waiters carrying out trays laden with used dishes. He glimpsed the backs of people sitting at a table which curved away to the left and right. Libby pointed to an empty chair saying, “That was yours.”

  He slunk into it as quietly as possible. A neighbor stared at him, said “Good God, a ghost!” and started chuckling. It was Odin. “It’s very, very, very good to see you,” said Powys, the other neighbour. “What happened? We’ve been terribly alarmed about you.”

  The table formed a white-clothed circle filling most of the tent. There was a wineglass to each chair and a sign with the guest’s name and title facing outward. Red girls carried bottles about inside the circle, filling glasses. Lanark explained what had happened to him.

  “I’m glad it was only that,” said Powys. “Some people whispered you’d been shot or abducted by the security guards. Of course we didn’t really believe it. If we had we’d have complained.”

  “That rumour did the assembly a power of good,” said Odin cheerfully. “A lot of cowardly loudmouths were afraid to say a word during the big energy debate. Bloody idiots!”

  “Well, you know,” said Powys, “I don’t mind admitting I was worried too. These guards are ugly customers, and nobody seems to know what their precise instructions are. Yes, the business of the last few days has been settled with unusual promptness, so you did not piss in vain. But it was reckless of you to pollute their river. They’re very fond of it.” Solveig came along the table filling wineglasses. He stared down at the tablecloth, hoping not to be noticed. There was a sound like a colossal soft cough then a perfectly amplified voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you will be glad to hear that after an absence of three days one of our most popular delegates has returned. The witty, the venerable, the not always perfectly sober Lord Provost Lanark of Greater Unthank is in his place at last.” Lanark’s mouth opened. Though total silence had fallen he seemed to hear a great roar go up. The multitude of glances on him—mocking, he was sure, condescending, contemptuous, amused—seemed to pierce and press him down. Someone yelled, “Give the man a drink!”

  He sobbed and laid his head on the tablecloth. The hubbub of voices began again, but with more speculation than laughter in it. He heard Odin murmur, “That wasn’t necessary,” and Powys said, “No, they didn’t need to rub it in like that.” There was another soft cough and the voice said, “My lords, ladies and gentlemen, pray silence for Sir Trevor Weems, Knight of the Golden Snail, Privy Councillor of Dalriada, Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Provan Basin and Outer Erse Confederacy.”

  There was some applause then Lanark heard the voice of Weems.

  “This is a strange occasion for me. The man sitting on my left is the twenty-ninth Lord Monboddo. He has been many things in his time: musician, healer, dragon-master, scourge of the decimal clock, enfant terrible of the old expansion project, stupor mundi of the institute and council debates. I have known him as all these things and opposed him as every one of them. A rash, rampant, raving intellectual, that’s what I called him in the old days. Everyone remembers the unhappy circumstances in which his predecessor retired. I won’t tell you what I thought when I heard the name of the new Monboddo. If I spoke too plainly our excellent Quantum-Cortexin security guards might be obliged to lead me away under the Special Powers (Consolidation) Order and lock me in a very small room for a very long time. The fact is, I was appalled. Our whole Provan executive was flung into profound gloom when we realized we would be hosts to a general assembly chaired by the dreadful Ozenfant. But what has been the outcome?” There was a pause. Weems said fervently, “Ladies and gentlemen, this has been the most smoothly run, clear-sighted, coherent assembly the council has ever convened! There are many reasons for this, but I believe future historians will mainly ascribe it to the tact, tolerance and intelligence of the man sitting on my left. He need not shake his head! If he is a rebel we need more of them. Indeed, I might even be persuaded to vote for a revolution—if the twenty-ninth Lord Monboddo undertook to lead it!”

  There was some loud laughter.

  By slow degrees Lanark had come to sit upright again. The centre of the circle was empty. Far to the right Weems stood beside Lord and Lady Monboddo. Microphones protruded from a low bank of roses on the tablecloth before him. All the guests o
n that side of the circle were pink. On the other side they were sallow or brown, with the five members of the black bloc directly facing Monboddo. Several dark delegates talked quietly among themselves, not attending to the speech. Weems was saying, “… will be far too deep for me, I’m afraid, and what I do understand I’ll almost certainly disagree with. But he has heard so much from us in the past three days that it is only fair to allow him his revenge. And so, Lord Monboddo, I call on you to summarize the work of the council, Then, Now and Tomorrow.”

  Weems sat down amid applause. Monboddo had been smiling down at the table with half-shut eyes. He arose and stood with one hand resting on the table, the other in his pocket, the smiling head tilted a little to one side. He waited until applause, faint conversation, coughs and stirrings sank into silence. As the silence continued his figure, casual yet unmoving, gained power and authority until the whole great ring of guests was like an audience of carved statues. Lanark was amazed that so many could make so complete a silence. It weighed on him like a crystal bubble filling the top of the tent and pressing down on his skull: he could shatter it any time by yelling a single obscenity, but bit his lips hard to stop that happening. Monboddo began to speak.

  “Some men are born modest. Some achieve modesty. Some have modesty thrust upon them. I fear that Sir Trevor has firmly placed me in the last of these categories.”

  Laughter went up, especially from Weems.

  “Once I was an ambitious young department chief. I launched policies and had flashes of creative brilliance which, believe me, my friends, verged, I thought, upon genius! Well, ambition has met its nemesis. I now stand on the top tip of our vast pyramid and create nothing. I can only receive the brilliant proposals of younger, more actively placed colleagues and find ways to reconcile and promote them. I examine the options and discard, without emotions, those which do not fit our system. Such work uses a very small pan of human intelligence.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” shouted Weems cheerfully.

  “Not nonsense, no, my friend. I promise you that in three years all the limited skills of a council supremo will be embodied in the circuits of a Quantum-Cortexin humanoid, just as the skills of secretaries and special policemen are embodied. It may be my privilege to be the last of the fully human Lords Monboddo. The idea would flatter my very considerable vanity, were it not for the great improvement people will see in government business when the change takes place. Everything will suddenly go much faster.

  Yes, today human government stands at a very delicate point of balance. But before opening the path ahead I must describe the steps which brought us here.

  “So stand with me on the sun some six thousand years ago and consider, with sharper eyes than the eagle, the moist blue-green ball of the third planet. The deserts are smaller than now, the forest jungles much bigger, for where soil is thick, shrubberies clog the rivers and spread them out into swampland. There are no broad tracts of fenced field, no roads or towns. The only sign of men is where the globe’s western edge is rolling into the shadow of night. Some far-apart gleams are beginning on that dim curve, the fires of hunters in forest clearings, of fishers at river mouths, of wandering herdsmen and planters on the thin soil between desert and jungle, for we are too few to take good land from the trees. Our tiny tribal democracies have spread all over this world, yet we influence it less than our near relation the squirrel, who is important to the survival of certain hardwoods. We have been living here for half a million years, yet history, with its noisy collisions and divisions of code and property, has not yet started. No wonder the first historians thought men had been created a few centuries before themselves. No wonder later theorists called prehistoric men childlike, savage, rude, and thought they had wasted time in fighting and couplings even more ferocious than those of today.

  “But big killings, like big buildings, need large populations to support them, and fewer people were born in 500,000 years of the stick-and-stone age than in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. Prehistoric men were too busy cooperating against famine, flood and frost to hate each other very much; yet they tamed fire and animals, mastered joinery, cooking, tailoring, painting, pottery and planting. These skills still keep most of us alive. Compared with the sowing and reaping of the first grain crop, our own biggest achievement (sending three men to and from a dead world in a self-firing bullet) is a marvellously extravagant baroque curlicue on the recentest page of human history.”

  “That’s crap, Monboddo! And you know it!” yelled someone across the circle from Lanark. There was laughter from the darker-skinned delegates. Monboddo smirked at them before continuing:

  “I still represent modern government, Mr. Kodac, do not worry. But the tools for harpooning other planets are still in the primitive phase, and it does no harm to admit that clever fellows like ourselves need not be ashamed of our ancestors. All the same, this petit-bourgeois world of gamekeepers and peasant craftmen bores me. Yes, it bores me. I thirst for the overweening exuberance of the Ziggurats and Zimbabwes, the Great Walls and Cathedrals. What is lacking from this prehistoric nature-park where sapient men have lived so long with such little effect? Surplus is lacking: that surplus of food, time and energy, that surplus of men we call wealth.

  “So let a handful of centuries pass and look at the globe again. The biggest land mass is split into three continents by a complicated central sea. East of it, a wide river no longer meanders through swamps but flows in a distinct channel across a fertile geometry of fields and ditches. On the glittering surface boats and barges move upstream and down to unload their cargoes beside the cubes, cones and cylinders of the first city. A great house with a tower stands in the city centre. On the summit, high above the hazes of the river, the secretaries of the sky use the turning dome of heaven as a clock of light where sun, moon and galaxies tell the time to dig, reap and store. Under the tower the wealth of the state, the sacred grain surplus, is banked: sacred because a sack of it can keep a family alive for a month. This grain is stored life. Those who own it can command others. The great house belongs to modern men like ourselves, men, not skilful in growing and making things, but in managing those who do. There is a market beside the great house from which tracks radiate far across plain and forest. These tracks are beaten by tribesmen bringing fleeces, hides and whatever else can be exchanged for the life-giving grain. In time of famine they will sell their children for it. In time of war they can sell enemies captured in battle. The wealth of the city makes warfare profitable because the city managers know how to use cheap labour. More trees are felled, new canals widen the cultivated land. The city is growing.

  “It grows because it is a living body, its arteries are the rivers and canals, its limbs are the trade routes grappling goods and men into its stomach, the market. We, whose state is an organization linking the cities of many lands, cannot know what sacred places the first cities seemed. Luckily the librarian of Babylon has described how they looked to a visiting tribesman:

  He sees something he has never seen, or has not seen … in such plenitude. He sees the day and cypresses and marble. He sees a whole that is complex and yet without disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, dwellings, stairways, urns, capitals, of regular and open spaces. None of these artifacts im presses him (I know) as beautiful; they move him as we might be moved today by a complex machine of whose purpose we are ignorant but in whose design we intuit an immortal intelligence.

  “Immortal intelligence, yes. That undying intelligence lives in the great house which is the brain of the city, which is the first home of institutional knowledge and modern government. In a few centuries it will divide into law court, university, temple, treasury, stock exchange and arsenal.”

  “Here here!” shouted Weems unexpectedly, and there was some scattered applause.

  “Bugger this,” muttered Odin. “He’s talked for ten minutes and only just reached the topic.”

  “I find these large vague statements very
soothing,” said Powys.

  “Like being in school again.”

  “But all tribesmen are not servile adorers of wealth [said Monboddo]. Many have skill and greed of their own. The lords of the first cities may have fallen before nomads driving the first wheeled chariots. No matter! The new masters of the grain may only keep it with help from the clever ones who rule land and time by rod and calendar, and can count and tax what others make. The great riverine cultures (soon there are five of them) absorb wave after wave of conquerors, who add to the power of the managers by giving them horsemen for companions. So the growth of cities speeds up. Their trade routes interlock and grapple, they compete with each other. Iron swords and ploughshares are forged, metals command the wealth of the grain. The seaside cities arise with their merchant and pirate navies.”

  “He’s getting faster,” whispered Powys. “He’s covered twelve civilizations in six sentences.”

  “Men increase. Wealth increases. War increases. Nowadays, when strong governments agree there must not be another big war, we can still applaud the old battles and invasions which blended the skills of conquerors and conquered. The are no villains in history. Pessimists point to Attila and Tamerlane, but these active men liquidated unprofitable states which needed a destroyer to release their assets. Wherever wealth has been used for mere self-maintenance it has always inspired vigorous people to grasp and fling it into the service of that onrushing history which the modern state commands. Pale pink people like myself have least reason to point the scorning finger. Poets tell us that for two millennia Europe was boisterous with energies released by the liquidation of Asiatic Troy. I quote the famous Lancastrian epic:

  “Since the siege and assault was ceaséd

  at Troy,

  The burgh broken and burned to

  brands and ashes,

  It was Aeneas the Able and his high

  kind

  That since despoiled provinces and