Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  CHAPTER 16

  A torn petticoat lay on the floor, and broken makeup pencils littered the dressing table. Their room, once so warm, now looked shabby and stark. It looked like a room where a whore took her clients. Blair sat on the bed, wretched without her. They were right, of course. She was in the Ministry.

  He had wandered the streets of London through the night, searching for her aimlessly. About midnight he had downed five pints of beer and a quarter bottle of gin. For a brief time his brain had seemed marvelously clear. He had seen as something far, far away, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope, his wasted life, the blank future. He seemed immediately to sink into some immense abyss from which he rose again more gradually and with only partial consciousness of what he was doing. He was gliding smoothly through darkness stained with lights. Or were the lights moving and he stationary? It was like being on the ocean bottom, among the luminous, gliding fishes. The landscape in hell, he fancied, would be just like this. Ravines of cold evil-colored fire, with darkness all above.

  He had walked through the seedier parts of London again. The appalling faces of tarts, like skulls coated with pink powder, peered meaningfully from several doorways. He became aware of two hard yet youthful faces, like the faces of young predatory animals, that had come close up to his own. They had blackened eyebrows and hats that were like vulgarer versions of Kate’s. As he approached the Palace Theater a girl on sentry-go under the porch marked him down, stepped forward, and stood in his path. A short, stocky girl, very young, with big black eyes. She looked up at him and broke out into a broad-lipped smile.

  A short while later they were in a smallish, darkish, smelly hallway, lino-carpeted, mean, uncared for, and somehow impermanent. An evil-looking chambermaid appeared from nowhere. She and the girl seemed to know each other.

  Another young woman came mincingly down the stairs, buttoning on a glove; after her a bald, middle-aged man, who walked past them with small mouth tightened, pretending not to see them. Blair watched the gaslight gleam on the back of his bald head. His predecessor. In the same bed, probably.

  Then Blair heard himself say, in a suicidally loud voice, “Wharr-I-shay is, perfijious Big Brother! You heard that? Perfijious B.B. Never trust Big Brother! You can’t trust the bastard. You wanna do anything ’bout that?” He remembered sticking his face out like a tomcat on a garden wall as he spoke. The man with the bald head had hit him across the legs with a walking stick. Through his private mist, Blair saw in the man’s face a curious blend of fear and sadistic exaltation.

  A moment later, Blair and the girl were on the landing. There was a smell of slops in the air, and a fainter smell of stale linen. They entered a dreadful room. He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.

  “How about my present?” she had demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.

  Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!

  In the morning he had emerged from some long, sickly dream. He remembered the feel of more gin after the girl, as it flowed down his throat, bitter and choking. A frightful spasm of nausea overcame him. He rolled over and was violently sick, three or four times. His face was close to a brick wall, and at first he thought he was in a prison cell. But he was lying on the pavement.

  “I’m going to be sick!” he had muttered as he tried to stand up. And as he began to fall, a strong arm went round him.

  A moment later the stallkeeper—the razor-blade man—had handed him a mug.

  “ ’Ja do with a cup of tea?” the stallkeeper had said.

  “Please,” Blair had replied weakly.

  “You’ll have to go get her,” the man had said. “It’s ’cos of you and me, mate,” he had said. “ ’Cos of the diary.”

  Blair had stared back uncomprehendingly.

  “They get Kate, they get you nervous, you come to me, I go to me mate that copies the diary, to me friends that works on the screens—they get all of us. Lucky for us you just wandered around and got drunk.”

  Blair’s head had slowly cleared. As it did, the first thing he had seen, towering above him in the distance, was the vast, glittering white, windowless pyramid that was the Ministry of Love.

  Then he had set off again, in search of the phreak.

  CHAPTER 17

  The camp bed was still in the corner of the room. Two small tables, covered with green baize, stood against the wall. Behind the spare brown desk was a high-backed, red-leather swivel chair. O’Brien was seated in it, rocking slowly. He had been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up, like a mountain crumbling.

  The prisoner sat on a wooden chair directly in front of the desk. There were no chains, no ropes. He had a forlorn, jailbird’s face with a knobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose and battered-looking cheekbones above which the eyes were fierce and watchful.

  For several minutes O’Brien sat quite still looking thoughtfully at his victim. He felt unable to keep his own mind from wandering. It was easy enough, O’Brien reflected, but it was still a serious matter to kill a man. It was comparable to destroying an intricate and costly piece of machinery.

  “I would like to make this as easy for you as possible,” O’Brien said at last. “Please cooperate. I do not wish to waste time with hypodermics and the pain machine.”

  The prisoner stared back with the same hooded, fierce gaze. His eyes had sunk deep in their sockets, and the thin blue membranes of his lids drooped down over them. Ravaged grooves ran down his face from cheek to chin.

  “Please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you to whatever degree I choose. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” came the hoarse whisper.

  O’Brien looked down at the papers in front of him. “You are a member of the Inner Party.” It was a statement, not a question, as though he were reading from a record that was already complete.

  “Yes.”

  “You have betrayed the Party.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have been sabotaging the network.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have read Winston Smith’s diary.”

  “Yes.”

  “You believe in the secret accumulation of knowledge, a gradual spread of enlightenment—ultimately a proletarian rebellion—the overthrow of the Party. You believe Orwell’s network will bring about universal liberty, fraternity, and equality.”

  There was a pause. “No,” the prisoner replied.

  O’Brien looked up.

  “No?”

  The prisoner seemed to gather himself for an effort. “The network will bring liberty but not equality.”

  “And fraternity?”

  “Up to a point,” the prisoner whispered.

  It struck O’Brien that in almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their aitches. For a moment the old pleasure was back. The prisoner would certainly be hanged, but first there would be good conversation. It was a privilege to explore an intelligent mind before obliterating it, a bit like deflowering a virgin or shooting a great elephant. For a moment at least, you owned the thing. You knew it was yours to possess forever, that no one else would delight in precisely the same pleasure again.

  He reached for the decanter of wine at the side of his desk, poured a glass, and handed it to the prisoner. “I shall enjoy talking to you,” he said. “Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.” He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully. When he spoke again his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.

  “The Party has always understood the danger of machines. From the moment when the steam engine first made its appearance it was clear
to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery had disappeared. Within a few generations, those machines might have eliminated hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease. They produced wealth. You understand that, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “The living standards of the average human being improved steadily. If we had allowed the process to continue, the all-round increase in wealth would have destroyed the hierarchical society, and our favored position in it. Once it became general, wealth would confer no distinction. Given leisure, the poor would become literate. Sooner or later they would realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

  O’Brien paused, slightly surprised at how much he had said. “You agree?”

  The prisoner looked at the floor, his head drooping farther. Then, very carefully, he lifted the glass O’Brien had given him, and holding it in both hands like a child, he sipped it. He seemed to have difficultly swallowing. He sipped again, then drank greedily, emptying the glass. His eyes closed, and his face seemed to relax.

  “Do you agree?” O’Brien repeated.

  “No,” the man answered, in a firmer tone. He seemed to be collecting thoughts that had once been coherent, but had become fragmented and broken.

  “Why not?” said O’Brien.

  The prisoner took a long breath. His eyes wandered around the room, then he looked straight at O’Brien and replied with a soft resignation.

  “Inequality is the unalterable law of human life. Liberty is incompatible with equality.” The prisoner seemed to ponder. His eyes burned under the transparent lids.

  “Please explain,” said O’Brien. “There is no hurry.”

  The prisoner looked back, and for an instant his stillness seemed full of strength.

  “Even at the apex of the old machine age, human equality had not become technically possible. Men were still not equal in their native talents.” His words seemed to give him new energy. “Functions still had to be specialized in ways that favored some individuals over others. There were still sharp distinctions in ability, in achievement, in accomplishment, and thus in social standing and wealth. None of the industrial engines of mass production changed any of that. They steadily reduced drudgery and increased wealth. But they could not abolish inequality.”

  He sat back against the chair. O’Brien reached once more for the wine, and refilled the man’s glass. “I am surprised to hear you say this,” he said with a smile. “But you are quite right, of course. The division of humanity into rulers and ruled is unalterable. In their capabilities, as in their desires and needs, men are not equal. There is an iron law of oligarchy, which would operate even if democracy were not impossible for mechanical reasons. So you agree that Smith was wrong? We are not entering a new age of human equality?”

  “Not material equality,” the prisoner answered in a low voice. “Not equality of intellect, achievement, or material success.” There was another pause. The prisoner looked at O’Brien with a curious kind of reservation, as if he could not understand why he asked these questions.

  “What kind of equality then?”

  “Equal opportunity. Equal dignity. Equal freedom to succeed or fail.”

  “And what will bring that about?”

  “The machine.”

  “You have just said that the machine will not bring about human equality.”

  “I mean Orwell’s machine. The telescreen.”

  “What will it do?”

  “It will give every man equal power to choose.”

  O’Brien felt a twinge of annoyance. Was it all so obvious? He wiped his eyes. When he spoke his voice was even softer than before. “You know a great deal about the network. Far more than I do. I should like—” He paused, unsure for a moment just what it was he wanted. “I should like to understand. Explain to me please how the telescreen will bring about equality of any kind.”

  The man gazed back hollowly; for a moment his eyes seemed to be sinking back into the shell of his skull.

  “I am starving,” he said at last. “I am terrified of my own body. I am a skeleton; my knees are thicker than my thighs. My spine is curved; my neck can hardly support the weight of my skull.”

  O’Brien sat still, expecting the plea for food, or perhaps just for the bullet. He wondered vaguely how the man would conduct himself on his way to the gallows. He remembered one man in particular, who had urinated all over the floor of his cell. Another had clung desperately to the bars, and it had taken six guards to pry him loose.

  “I wish I were free,” the prisoner said. “I wish I were free of hunger and disease, and free to leave this evil place.”

  O’Brien sat quietly. He had learned years ago that in some interrogations the trick was to say less, not more. The prisoner continued.

  “But you are not free either. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, or a fornicator, but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the Party’s code. Every kind of freedom is given to you except the one that counts most. Your whole life is a life of lies. As a member of the Inner Party you are tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of tabus.”

  The man was obviously mad, O’Brien thought. A raving lunatic, and suicidal too. The prisoner continued to speak.

  “Real freedom is now at hand. The telescreen gives man the power to decide for himself whom he will approach or avoid, what he will divulge or conceal, by whom he will be entertained or employed, what he will say or hear, show or see, think or believe. Man now holds in his hands the power to share his own thoughts precisely as he pleases, with friends near or far and with no one else.”

  For a moment, the prisoner seemed to subside and grow feeble again. In the silence O’Brien saw the man’s body melt out of focus, and then split into two. What was remarkable was that the two images were seated a couple of feet apart and were quite distinct. O’Brien shook his head, bringing on a burst of pain. A single body reappeared in front of him again. He looked at it with contempt.

  “Suppose your fantasy comes true,” O’Brien said. “Suppose you do create a world of perfect communication, with telescreens at the disposal and under the control of every individual citizen. What then? If the private citizen can communicate at will, so too can the Thought Police. If eyes can see they can also watch. Improve your power to communicate and you improve your power to spy.”

  The prisoner shook his head. “Improve your power to communicate and you improve your power to create privacy and solitude. If a spy can see a hundred miles, his target can range farther still. When communication is poor, a man must deal with the same small group of neighbors and associates day after day. He cannot move, so he cannot hide. The telescreened world offers the ultimate privacy—the privacy of distance and the crowd.”

  One had to admire the man’s impudence, O’Brien thought. His life was running down, like seconds ticking off a clock, and yet he was not afraid. “Even with the telescreen, your privacy will still be at the mercy of every nosy neighbor and officious tradesman,” O’Brien replied. “Sellers will track your every purchase of carrots and condoms. Bankers will record your every visit to the brothels in Soho. Your electronic footprints will be followed by every peddler of disgusting American breakfast cereal.”

  “You are wrong,” the prisoner replied in a low voice. “When people shop face to face in a small town there is no privacy. With the telescreen, they can do business with complete strangers a thousand miles away, who have no interest in anything but the sale. The telescreen supplies the privacy of the metropolis on demand, even to residents of small communities. When cash becomes a reliable medium of exchange once again, the telescreen will support cash machines next to every brothel, casino, or opium den. The power to communicate is the power to keep your distance and cover your tracks. The telescreen does
not destroy privacy; it gives people the power to mold their own privacy at will.” He looked up at O’Brien again. He seemed calmer, and his voice no longer cracked at every syllable.

  “The telescreen will become the instrument of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and libel,” said O’Brien. “If someone denounces you as a deadbeat, you will be commercially ostracized. If your spiteful neighbor whispers into the network that you thrash your wife, the entire world will hear it at once. Whatever empowers honest people also empowers criminals.”

  The prisoner shook his head again. “The telescreen makes possible new forms of lies, deceits, and frauds, but it also offers vastly more choice, and creates new standards of comparison. When one credit company falsely denounces you as a deadbeat, its competitors will quickly expose the lie; the market punishes sellers of bad credit reports just as it punishes sellers of bad eggs. Libel of any kind will be corrected quickly, because the responsible and well intentioned gain more from truths than the irresponsible or malicious can gain from lies.”

  “You are a fool,” O’Brien replied sharply. “The market itself will not survive the telescreen. In your telescreened Utopia most property will consist of information. But there can be no private ownership of expression, no true marketplace of ideas, in a world where words, sounds, and pictures can be copied effortlessly by anyone. The first buyer of your film or software program will flood the market with pirated copies. Books will get cheaper and cheaper, and the cheaper they become, the less money will be spent on them. You will have to choose between art and money. Cheaper communication spells disaster for every publisher, compositor, author, and bookseller.”

  The prisoner looked back. His emaciated face seemed hungrier than ever, but to his amazement O’Brien now saw a shadow of contempt under the yellow skin of his eyes. “Do you really suppose that the power to communicate will destroy the market for thought and speech? If the telescreen makes it easier to steal art, wisdom, or entertainment, the telescreen is what imbues those things with value to begin with. A printing press can be used to steal a book, but it is the press that makes the copyright valuable to start with. And in any event, there are defenses against pirates and bootleggers. With a machine as powerful as the telescreen, information can easily be encoded. The honest seller can sell openly in the mass market created by the network, while pirates who follow have to lurk in the electronic shadows. Theft and dependence always trail behind industry and wealth, but they never catch up.”