by Adam Roberts
‘But,’ he said, looking around himself at the gorgeous filigree beauty, the enormous comforting expanse. ‘Surely there’re differences in the, you know, the quality of info you experience? Some experiences are just intrinsically preferable to others?’
‘Change,’ she said. ‘As good as a rest.’
‘OK,’ he said, thinking harder. ‘But . . . isn’t Hell more entropic? The tearing down of bodies, the burning up of flesh?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s no real entropy anywhere up here, because there’s no real energy; not in the sense of thermal energy, of Brownian motion, do you see? It’s all information and the organisation of information. Well,’ she said, looking thoughtful, ‘I guess that is energy, you could say that, but . . . it’s more a question of focus. Hell is a more focused info-environment.’ She looked at him, and smiled. ‘Freud,’ she said, ‘you remember him? He’s from your time?’
‘I did a course on him,’ said Avis, ‘in my freshman year.’
‘Great. Well, he talked about the death-drive. He didn’t realise that it works both ways. The living are oriented towards death by time’s arrow, and they yearn for the end of struggle, for the stillness, without even realising it. Oh, but the dead yearn for death again, for the opposite reason, from the opposite side. It’s a kind of symmetry.’ She paused, looked around her. ‘You come out of death at a certain velocity, if you like. I remember me. I died in Canada. Then I hurtled up Purgatory, I just hurtled, I prayed, I worked, struggled to submit myself to God’s will. I rose to the sphere of the moon, where I started to understand . . .’
She stopped. Avis waited for her to finish, but after a while it seemed she wasn’t going to say any more.
‘Understand what?’
A shrug. ‘Understand that God’s will is only one force among many. To be precise, in the material world the key force is gravity. Gravity is apprehensible here, just about, but this afterlife isn’t the proper . . . idiom for gravity. We only sense it vaguely, intermittently. Now, the key force in this region is God’s Will - that’s a force that barely registers in the material world. It’s a very interesting circumstance actually. Paralleled. So I started to realise that God’s Will is a force like gravity. You can overcome it if you like. You can - or that’s not very well put. A Wernher Von Braun can achieve an escape velocity from it. It’s still there, it still shapes this particular cosmos, but . . . that’s all, it’s just a shaping. I figured, to begin with, that I should get as high up the circles of paradise as possible, as close to God. But it doesn’t require that of me. And after a while . . .’ She stopped. ‘Not a good way of putting it, but the best I can do. After a while you start to wonder about the backward journey. And, you know? When you start wondering about it, it suddenly dawns on you that the vast majority are on that same journey, back down. So, you really didn’t wonder, as you came through, why the circles of Hell and the lower slopes of Purgatory are so full? But now? What do you think?’
‘I assume that they hadn’t had time to work up the mountain yet. And I assumed the ones in Hell were stuck in Hell.’
‘Yet you came up faster than them. And you came right out of Hell.’ ‘
‘I guess.’
‘Besides it doesn’t really mean anything to say they hadn’t had time yet to do this or that. I mean, it’s all relative. I mean, the best way to get a sense of time passing is to move. Man you gotta go. When you’re on your trip up the circles, or when you’re going down - then you feel it. Time, I mean. It’s a drag. That’s what living is, before death or after it. It’s the sensation of moving through the medium, you know, like an anchor being tugged through the tourbillions of the water. That’s where the impression of time comes from. It’s cool, in fact. People become hooked on that sensation, hooked on the feeling of time passing, like the wind in their hair. It’s a unique kind of high. So I realised that people here were - most of them - constantly on the move. They climb up. They clamber down again. And the most exciting part of the journey is Hell. Because it’s the most information-dense, the richest medium, you feel time passing most acutely there.’
‘There’s nothing about that in Dante,’ said Avis.
‘You know about Dante?’
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘I’d like to re-read him,’ said Welsh. ‘I barely remember anything about his book.’
‘Dante thought,’ said Avis, wanting obscurely to match her lecturing with some of his own, ‘that souls yearned upwards, like flames. Yearned after God. No?’
‘I guess you tend to,’ conceded Welsh. ‘At first. But Dante - he was in the thrall of the Death Drive, that’s what he was. Though he didn’t realise it. He didn’t realise that the Death Drive is a kind of tiredness. After a while you achieve it, and you sleep, and then you wake up from it and then you need stimulation, information. We need information like a plant needs sunlight. So you go back down for some.’
‘But I want to see the rose,’ said Avis.
‘Rose?’
‘God. At the very top of it all.’
‘Good luck to you. Not me.’
‘Don’t you want to know the answers?’ asked Avis.
Welsh had stood up, and was stretching her arms and curving her back in the all-encompassing sunlight. ‘Answers,’ she repeated, dreamily. ‘Do you want to know the answers? Or do you want to know that there are answers, and then have fun finding them out? I heard from others that God is a slightly off-putting presence. All crystal, lattice, quite abstract.’
She was sinking through the transparent floor now like a figure in the platonic ideal of quicksand.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, as she elevated down.
‘It’s a nervous thing,’ she said to him as she dropped through the floor. ‘It’s nervous. If you’re not nervous then you’re not paying attention.’
She left him sitting by the lake. It was water, pure and clear, and yet the ripples on the surface moved much more slowly than water-ripples ought. They moved like some kind of treacle, a clear tar, slowly bulging up and sinking down. Avis sat by the lake for a length of time, but it was impossible for him to determine for how long.
<
~ * ~
ReMorse®
It’s on.
Yep. Hep. Yeah.
So, this is my understanding of how we came to be here. And it’s the least I can do to give you my sense of how we got here, how we arrived, as it were. It happened like this. ReMorse® was developed by the Pharmakon Corporation, using a smile-shaped wedge of governmental money, on account of drug development being so billions-expensive. It was initially designed as a treatment for certain psychopathologies in which individuals lack human empathic skills; it was designed so that they could be given the help they needed. It’s a - I’ve seen it - I mean I’ve seen it in its medical format - it’s a museum-piece now of course - it was a lozenge, a small pellet, like a Go pebble. White one, black one. And you placed this under the tongue, I think. Which is to say . . . no, I’m getting this wrong. I’m sorry! It wasn’t under the tongue, of course not. Sorry! Sorry! It was a lozenge, but you pressed it up against the roof of your mouth, and the nanofoam got itself going, set its pathways tentacling, insinuated its way into the brain pan. Sorry!
OK. So. Imagine a sociopath. They tested it on psychopaths and murderers first of all, you see. Not that there’s a centre in the brain where remorse is, you know, generated. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, I really am, that would be misleading. Killer kills because he is untroubled about the violence he inflicts on others. Killer kills because it makes him feel poweful and immune, and that power and that immunity depend upon the thing-ness of the victim. You cut a throat, and it’s only a throat, not a whole living, terrified human being. It’s not even a throat. It’s just a mechanism by which the killer reinforces his super-humanity. Or so I understand it to have been. Obviously - I want to be clear about this. I don’t want to give you a false impression - obviously I
really don’t understand the motivation of such people. Sorry. I’m sure you don’t either. But we can both agree that they need treatment.
So, ReMorse® becomes a treatment for crime, all of it, crime as a whole. Put it in the water! That was the famous slogan, the famous slogan, the Blanchett slogan! And why not put it in the water supply? Not for nothing was it called the utopia drug by, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t remember who said that. But it was a well-chosen word, don’t you think?
A dilution, a development of the pharmochemistry: why not dose up certain populations, that’s the idea. Because if we give Hannibal Lecter this pill, we discover that he empathises too much with his victim to kill them. He can’t do it anymore. He flat can’t. His victim is no longer a thing, his victim is a person. Just pulling the knife from its sheath maketh the killer for to burst into tears, to throw himself on the floor withal ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ And if it works, in large dose, for such extreme criminals, then might it not, in smaller doses, might it not take the edge off the whole crime wave? Dampen the tsunami? Could you steal someone’s car if your mental threshold for remorse were raised, just a little? Could you mug someone if you empathised fully with the victim? Of course not.
I’ll tell you something else, too: it was - I remember this - I’m sorry, I’m a bit disjointed in my narrative here. I’m sorry! It must be somehow annoying for you to have to listen to this rambling - this rambling. Look: I remember how it was, and I remember one of the reasons there was such widespread support for the drug. {Put it in the drinking water! they said. Give it to everybody, they said.) Let’s say you arrest Hannibal Lecter. Let’s say you punish him. He’s grinning the whole time. You put him in prison - do what you like, starve him, beat him, make him lie on a wet mattress (Oh God, just to think of it!) and pass electric current through it - and he’s grinning at you. You see, you can’t touch the core of his evil mind. You want to, but you can’t. You see, you don’t want just to hurt his body. You want him to feel the pain he has inflicted. You want to take the pain he has created and inject it into his mind. But you were never able to do that.
Now you can. The drug made that possible. It’s a boon to justice.
And it does reduce crime levels. It does guard against terrorism. And it does preserve the peace, and does all that simply by raising the natural human response to the pain of others. Even to contemplate a crime can cause overwhelming and gushing levels of remorse to flood the mind. I know, as you know, because we all know, now that it’s in the water.
Mr Blanchett? Too tight? OK, I’m sorry, OK, I’m sorry. Sorry, there, there, there.
Now, things were of course better, things were, and it’s a simple move to ‘expand the definition’ of crime to include political malefaction. So people don’t rape and rob anymore because so much as planning the crime brings on agonising bouts of remorse. So it’s not hard to refine the drug, such that planning to overthrow the government as a terrorist might, and planning to vote-out the government as a voter might, become pretty much the same thing. Opposing the government brings with it prolonged and agonising bouts of remorse. And I vote - I voted at the last election, and with a clear conscience, and for your administration too! Isn’t the world better now? I remember how it was before, when you couldn’t walk from house to store without risking getting gun-jacked. Much better now. And I’ve often wondered if there’s a connection between the remorse response in the brain and the gratitude response. I’m grateful, certainly. I’m grateful for what the drug has done for society.
Of course, the, what you might call, I’m sorry, what you might call side-effects. There are side-effects. A lot of people are timid. Some are pretty cowed, I guess. Some take it bad, can barely leave their homes for fear of - you know - of whatever they might, accidentally or intentionally - you know. But others function pretty well. Pretty well, all things considered. And then there are those who . . . well, take me. Here’s the example of me.
I did try, for a time, to pick a path so as to avoid feeling this ramped-up remorse. I attempted, and this is not a figure of speech, not to hurt a fly. But then I came to an understanding. I call it self-revelation. Remorse is an intensity. It is an extreme focus of self-awareness and other-awareness. It’s - in a word - look, I’m sorry to use this word, but it’s sex. And, no, that’s not good enough, for it’s more intense than sex, provided only. Look: here’s what I mean. This stiletto, it’s better than a cock. The point on your skin, it’s - it’s - there’s an exquisite. There’s a, and the force, the pressure of muscles that—
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
Aaaaaaa.
I always do that, say it seven times I mean. I don’t plan to, it just comes out that way, as knife goes in. As blood comes out. Ah, the ecstasy of it. The sevenfold ecstasy of it! And, yes, it’s true I come, yes it’s true my heart goes poppity-pupoppity, but it’s not just - sorry - here, let me loosen that a little - there you go. Sorry the floor’s bare lino, Senator, but I’ll need to clean it shortly, and carpet would be - well, you can imagine. But, Senator, what I was saying, what I was saying, is that although my body makes manifest certain symptoms of physical desire, the . . . not that I don’t prepare for that. I’m wearing plastic boxers, for instance: I learnt that lesson right at the start, after the very first of them! But the intensity with which my excitement and my agony at your pain is mixed together, that’s more than just a physical thing. That’s a transcendent feeling. That’s religious. It unites me with you, and with the cosmos, as with - aaaaa.
There you go, and goodbye Senator. I’m really sorry. Really sorry, really I am. Thanks for all you’ve done! It’s made the world of difference to me. It’s put me in touch with - well. Yes.
<
~ * ~
The World of the Wars
‘So. Are you pro-war?’ Splendour-of-Thought asked me. ‘Or anti-war?’
I turned to him, my prostheses whirring. ‘I hardly need return the question,’ I said to him. ‘Your opinions on the conflict are well known.’
‘We are the most highly evolved creatures in the solar system,’ said Splendour-of-Thought, eagerly. ‘We have advanced to unprecedented levels in all the key scientific areas. Our machines render us strong and mobile. Our rocketry means we can span the vastness between worlds. Surely a people so advanced do not need to wage a war of imperial conquest.’
‘So!’ I retorted. ‘Many would disagree with your description of this campaign - imperialism? Who says this is a war of imperialism? The people of the Blue World labour under conditions of the most appalling primitiveness. We are liberating them from that tyranny, bringing the benefits of our far-superior technology and civilisation. They will benefit as much as we.’
‘You admit that we will benefit enormously from this war,’ pressed Splendour-of-Thought, as if it were a brilliant debating point. ‘You admit that self-interest is largely at work in this deployment?’
‘Is it a criminal thing to benefit?’ I replied. ‘Come, Splendour-of-Thought, live up to your name! Do we not worship the principles of pure mentition, the disinterested glory of Thought-as-God that shapes the cosmos? Or are we to surrender ourselves to the thoughtless glandular surges of emotion that marked our ancestors?’
‘Our glands may have atrophied,’ he said, ‘but they have not disappeared. And of course sometimes stray hormones filter into our brain, via our food. I would not be ashamed of arguing an emotional case, if I were doing so. But on the contrary, my case is argued from the position of mentition! Mentition tells us that we should allow the creatures of the Blue World to evolve at their own pace, until they are ready to join us in the solar system as equals! Not enslave them! That thought is abhorrent.’
‘Of course,’ I said, shuffling a little to the left to allow one of my service-devices to access
the launch tube, ‘it goes without saying that the idea of enslaving another people is anathema to any right-thinking Martian. But that’s not what the war is about.’
‘I might have thought you would say so,’ snorted Splendour-of-Thought. ‘You have been brainwashed by the pronouncements of the ruling council.’
‘Not at all. The soldiers over there are some of the most civilised, the most thoughtful citizens of our entire culture. They’re prepared to risk their lives to defend the Martian way of life - and to bring its benefits to surly and backward savages.’ I gestured with a metallic tentacle, and continued confidently: ‘Once the army has suppressed the local resistance, and established walkers and service towers across the key territories, then the natives themselves will come to realise how much better off they are. I predict that in a matter of months the people of the Blue World will be thanking us for what we have done for them. Thanking us!’
The work on the launch tube service coolant vent-carburant was complete. We geared up and strode across the plain, leaving the launch tube to the ministrations of the service devices.