Monument Maker, page 50
Ook. That was what it read. Ook. Okay, that was weird. But sometimes it happened. A ghost in the machine. Adam shrugged, though there was no one here to see it outside of his reflection in the glass of the observation deck, as lonely in space as the earth itself.
WordPool time was strictly rationed for Victory Gardens staff and crew. It had to be. Safety, flight protocol and environmental information had to override all other potential sources of instruction or command, even, or more especially, divine inspiration. But they couldn’t outlaw it altogether. That would have been like banning literature.
Gazing out at the infinity of stars and the light of distant planets brought to mind his friend Robert Scott and his fantastical ideas about man’s new place in the universe. No Prince of Peace up here, Scott had insisted, and as Adam scanned the dark from his single bubble of light it was impossible not to agree. Out here the sole arbiters were elementals, gas giants, impossible gravities; our true heavenly nature stood revealed as fire unsound. Earth is monotheistic, Scott had claimed. Space is pagan. Yet here we are, Adam thought, fighting to preserve the ancient balance of life and death.
Scott was back on earth now and his replacement was already on his way, now a small speck, spinning slowly in the sun, a single bright teardrop, rising up. Adam couldn’t resist another look at his WordPool, although he was nearly at his ration point for the day. It is me, man, who will be judge at the end of the count, it read. He recognised the quote, but he couldn’t place it.
o
Who could remember their entire story, who could ever hope to put it all back together, to make perfect sense of it? When the WordPool had first taken off, an unexpected development for its bookish creator Dr. Crevasse, there had been much debate over its function of auto-forgetting. How to remember where we were in the story, everything that had come before? There had been a movement to replace the single sentences, instantly deleted and wiped from memory, written over again and again, with immediate back-ups and endless scrolling. Pirates and entrepreneurs rushed to issue hacks and patches that facilitated the creation of marathon texts that allowed you to search through time-dated pronouncements. But who had the time to constantly reread a book that would never end? Or is that the definition of a classic?
Crevasse held out, refused to legitimise the upgrades, even as rival companies issued their own handhelds with massively improved functionality. Still, a superstition held around the original WordPool, an irrational belief that somehow it, and only it, had access to something that was supra or subconscious, something spectacular that had been loosed, or more properly channelled, by Crevasse, something that had been looking for a voice and that had used Crevasse as the medium. His media-shy reputation, his refusal to give interviews, his reported antipathy towards his own invention: all of this led to much rumour and speculation. There was an aura to Crevasse’s creation, a magic to his algorithms, a purity—a naivety, even—to his creation, that no marketing team was capable of divining. Sure, you could write every line down, and many people did keep WordPool diaries, but it was hard to dispute that the readings most truly made sense in the moment they were issued, as if somehow they were intimately caught up with the precise co-ordinates of now, as if the very nuance, the freewheeling dance of time and space, had been for a moment stilled or mirrored, more precisely, in their gnomic utterances, in the endless, coterminous play of the alphabet.
o
The Earth Got Fucked and She Knows It, That’s Why She Winks in Space. No, that won’t do. How about Y’All Have Knocked Her Up? Pointless, no one else is gonna get that.
How about Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down to Me? Ditto.
What the fuck—excuse me—but what the fuck was a performance poet, an amateur painter, an amateur explorer, an all-round amateur never-been-paid-for-a-thing-in-his-life guy like Peter Muldoon doing as artist-in-residence on the Victory Gardens?
That’s what everyone wanted to know. Friends were jealous, colleagues bemused, peers furious, at least they would have been except that he had few friends, zero colleagues, and the concept of peers was a complete fantasy. He had only been in space once before and that was illegally, during the protests over the construction of the new spaceport in the Sea of Tranquillity. Back then you could see it from earth without a telescope, this terrible metal construction surrounded by high floodlights, this awful wound. They’d have concreted over the whole of the moon if they thought they could get away with it. Muldoon had hitched a ride on a small interplanetary Snowdrop commandeered by a gang of radical geodesics who had talked Helpless Clairvoyants into playing a protest gig inside a pop-up bubble somewhere in the region of the original Apollo 11 touchdown. The idea was that afterwards they would record an album on the dark side of the moon, the first music ever made by humans out of sight of the earth and face-on to the outlands—who knew what it would sound like?—but in the event most of the attendees had been arrested after protesters surrounded the spaceport with a series of domes and tunnels and tried to proclaim it a Free State. Clairvoyants’ lead singer, Firth Column, was last seen heading for the dark side on a moon buggy with nothing but a guitar and amplifier, a pair of wraparound shades and a DIY dome kit. Since then a number of solo recordings had appeared purporting to be new work, most of them collections of lonely tones like the sound of foghorns from ships at sea or of interstellar shortwave, singing softly to itself, but they were patently a put-on. I mean, he was obviously dead, right?
Things were different now. Governments could no longer ignore the facts. Ecological disaster was no longer disputed, no longer the domain of cranks and hippies and psychedelic guitarists. Now the freaks were taking over. Even so, Peter Muldoon in residence at the Victory Gardens? Give me a fucking break.
o
In the end The Bible got it right, right at the very end, that whole bit about revelation through destruction, apocalyptic gnosis, rising up in rapture as the planet goes up in flames. It’s ironic but it was there all along, the story of our future, the great mess of our tenancy on earth. The earth used to be the centre of the universe. Now it felt more like a fortified island.
It was environmental destruction, our trashing of the precious gift, that marked humanity’s adulthood, its coming to some kind of terms with its place in the universe. Which had coincided, ironically, with a new sense of occupying the planet, a new tenancy, if you like. Now we would have to negotiate with beings and forces that absolutely transcended the kind of fantasy figures we had spent much of our time on earth bartering with. The equinox of the gods, the twilight of the idols, it had been coming for some time. Still, it was a lot to take in.
Robert Scott was much occupied by the role of the new priestly caste and what form it would take in the future. He was just back from the Victory Gardens, where he had used his residency to argue that Jesus and the Apostles and the saints were characteristic by-products of a certain era, a certain time and place. That didn’t make them any less real or any less eternal. It was just that the axis had shifted, humanity had stepped out of the frame and with it the suffering of Christ was finally at an end. The lighting out had begun. Still, all of this was for the more advanced members of society, you understand. Scott went about his days on earth as though nothing had changed. He still gave communion, he still absolved sins, he still attended flower shows and garden fetes, even as he denied Christ in space. But he was occupied, that much was obvious, and friends and members of his diocese began to make comment on it. He heard them talk. It only encouraged a feeling of contempt that had been building, contempt for these sheep without a master, these pathetic children who were unable to take responsibility for a single stray thought or action.
He was rude at the flower show. He couldn’t help himself. He always maintained that daffodils stank, that there was something of the grave to them, and he told them so. These flowers are cadaverous, he insisted. Get them out of my face. His judgement was ruled invalid. He left early. I’m a born negotiator, he told himself. I should be up there, bartering for the next man. He stood in the street in front of the church hall and stared up at the ring of steel that circled the earth. He caught himself out and laughed under his breath.
The earth is in the sky already. Why do priests always insist that we need to die to get there? We came close, we came damn close. But then we woke up and looked about us. Then we established where we were. The earth, it turns out, is in heaven.
o
Welcome to space. Adam Aros held out his hand and Peter Muldoon reluctantly took it. It’s not my first time, Muldoon said. Oh, we know, Aros replied, we know. Who the fuck is this we? Muldoon thought. He imagined a group of boffins scrolling through a secret file that tracked all of his actions and that listed him as a crackpot artist and hopeless seditionary. Hopeless as in crap. He still had no real idea of why he was here, but why blow a lucrative gig? He vowed to say nothing. This could change everything. You’re probably wondering why you’re here, Aros said. Not really, Muldoon shrugged. I knew the time would come. Very well, Aros said, though he seemed vaguely puzzled himself. I’ll take you to your quarters.
Aros led him around the curving observation corridor, dotted with glass portals on either side. Two-headed, Muldoon thought. The twins, diastole and systole, suspended in time and space, drawn back towards earth while pushing deep into the future. The architecture of the Victory Gardens held the echo of the moment. Muldoon went to say as much. He knew he had better turn up the poetry. Gnomic utterances and extravagant proclamations would be the order of the day if he was to pull this off. The Dark Continent, he said, and he motioned towards the stars. What do you mean? Aros said. We’ve been here before, Muldoon said, that’s all. He shook his head. Aros shrugged. Leave it at that, Muldoon said to himself. That’s the trick.
This far out the stars seemed closer to suns, to blazing fires, than they had ever done from earth. Man’s fascination with fire, his internal relationship to it, has driven him to the edge of the universe and given birth to the technology to get him there, Muldoon thought. Reunited. Voluntary exile and a great return. That was a good one. He’d save that for later.
Muldoon was presented with his quarters. When was the last time he had slept the night, undisturbed, curled up in peace? Truthfully, not since his early thirties. He scanned around the room, the simple bed, the skylight with the stars up above, the bookcase, already filled, and saw himself for a strange split second curled, once again, in the warmth of possibility, in the womb of the future. Thank you, he said to Aros, and he sealed the door behind him. Then he took off his clothes and lay back on the bed; newborn, chosen, and perfectly confused.
o
Life is clingling, dwindling. The same sentence three times. Life is clingling, dwindling. Aros shut down his WordPool and pulled it up again. Each time it read the same. Nonsense in, nonsense out, wasn’t that the mantra? But Aros had been scrupulous, had built up his own WordPool as he would his diary, had obsessively tracked stray thoughts, articulated vague urges, detailed his relationship with his parents, reviewed every film he had seen, every book he had read, included every person who had ever meant anything to him. Yet now the machine was sighing, as if to fade away, making sounds to itself like a retiree in a home rolling words around their mouth in memory of their tongue.
Life is clingling, dwindling. Of course, it was common for people to read augurs of illness or omens of sudden death in the machinations of the WordPool. It was the same kind of ignorance that had made people start when the Death card was drawn during a Tarot reading, or The Hanged Man.
Life is clingling, dwindling. He said it softly to himself. It seemed to make everything slow down. The people passing him in the corridor appeared diminished. Outside, in the starfield, the distant suns seemed no longer scintillating but nodding and heavy-lidded, running, finally, on empty.
He reached his quarters, where he updated the WordPool with the events of the day. He profiled Muldoon, his own take on him. It wasn’t flattering. He added a line from a poem that seemed apposite, a poem from the twentieth century. He confided his own fear of dying, far away from everyone he once knew and loved, in another life altogether. Then he punched it in himself. Life is clingling, dwindling. Now it was canon. Now, it was under control.
There comes a period in every person’s life, a season, best perhaps, where it would seem that he is most open to influence. Where this influence might be seen as coming from, or emanating out from, more properly, depends on the cultural vagaries of the moment, the psychological status of the person receiving it, the position of the stars, the flight of the birds, or the name of God Himself. A modern man might most likely locate it in the machinations of the WordPool.
Life is clingling, dwindling. It appeared as a song to Aros, but when did he ever attribute anything meaningful to songs, when had he last cast his fate to music or read in a lyric the direction of his life?
He rose from his bed and flipped listlessly through Peter Muldoon’s file. He shook his head. A crackpot artist and hopeless seditionary. How the hell had he stumbled over this? He reread an account of an exhibition that featured paintings of a series of couplings that Muldoon claimed were various “accidental” sexual positions lifted from Jackson Pollock paintings. A Japanese woman being painfully entered from behind; a woman with an enormous ass smothering a small-limbed boy; endless cocks ejaculating; a group of men urinating on a woman’s body; doggy style embraces; on-your-knees fellatio; mass couplings that appeared as multi-limbed gods and goddesses. Chaos always tends towards sensuality, towards the sexual and the procreative, Muldoon had maintained. That was the point. Then he had begun to locate the sex positions in the sky. Muldoon’s next exhibition had tied in with the creation of the Victory Gardens. Muldoon redrew the constellations as hermaphroditic gods, intuiting new connections between the stars and renaming them himself. Or so he said. Then he painted them, as a sort of cosmic Kama Sutra, as an orgy of stars.
o
Thing is, he was onto something. He had given them names, rechristened them as hermaphrodites, constellations of suns making love to themselves, weird names, sexy names like Xstabeth, Qbxl, Lalino, intersexed names that seemed to collapse in the middle only to reappear again, as if there were a black hole in their centre. That was quite possibly true. Because now Xstabeth was in touch. He, she, it, had started communicating via the British Victory Gardens WordPool. And it was asking for Muldoon.
o
You’re using a WordPool at the Victory Gardens? Muldoon burst. This is madness. What are you using it for? He had been called to a briefing in a meeting room situated in a bubble on the outer curve of The Advance, the British link in the Victory Gardens. He had been introduced to the project manager, a Mr. Clyde Evans, alongside a representative of the government of the United Kingdom who declined to give his name. You do realise that everything that is revealed in this room is top-secret, the nameless man repeated. That you are sworn by oath not to reveal anything you are told here. I realise that, Muldoon said, but seriously, I’m blown away by this. Are you actually making decisions based on WordPool results? I was under the impression that access to WordPools on the Victory Gardens was strictly controlled according to international agreements. Now you’re telling me there’s an actual project WordPool? The three men looked at each other. Evans spoke. We’ve been making decisions based on the WordPool for much longer than this, he revealed. Where do you think we got the idea for the Victory Gardens in the first place?
o
The Victory Gardens had been conceived as a last-ditch attempt to head off—or at least regulate—environmental catastrophe, a ring of steel that would serve to artificially regulate the atmosphere, recomposing weather systems and managing temperature fluctuations while recalibrating mankind’s relationship with the universe. The project had been the brainchild of the British, who had named it after the attempts to make gardens and grow food in the craters and potholes that had dotted the country in the wake of the Second World War. What at first had been written off as the utopian fever dream of a bunch of science fiction-addled hippies somehow, due to the rigour of the planning, the detail of the blueprints, the desperation of the situation, had attracted the interest of the major world powers and soon the powers of the new colonial axis—all twelve of them—had committed funding, technology and their finest scientific minds to the creation of what many began to speak of as a new Eden, with earth as the first garden planet.
