Monument Maker, page 51
The Advance had been the first ship to take its place, closely followed by Israel’s New Jerusalem and Spain’s Aboyos. Right from the start there had been a strange undercurrent of religious fervour to the project, a new millenarian dream. Although in one sense the horizons had really been narrowed—earth was now the mission, not deep space—to many it felt like the vanguard in mankind’s eventual lighting out, in its sailing to the stars and its leaving of the planet altogether.
Already the skies had changed. The Victory Gardens had become as familiar as the stars and the planets in the sky, as the links of the chain spun slowly by, the shimmering blue steel of Aboyos, bright, hopeful Praetoria, gentle Gyrus, summoning the rains, bringing food to the hungry, and all the flora of the earth seemed to rise up in salute to the bounty of the skies.
o
The priesthood is nothing but a temperance society, an organisation dedicated to the policing of the sex urge, Robert Scott fumed. He gazed at himself in the mirror. Isn’t it ironic, he thought to himself, that the one thing the Church is incapable of dealing with is revelation, is actual experience of the unveiling of the divine? All we have to offer are rules, codes of behaviour, terrors and frights. The birth of Christ damned us to the future and we gave up on the present. But suffering is at an end. Isn’t that what he had told the audience that had gathered to hear him on the Victory Gardens? But why invite a theologian into space if not to ridicule his faith?
He had fielded questions, barbed comments, all set-ups, obviously. If heaven is a state of mind, they asked him, then whose brain are we in now? That got a laugh alright. You mistake me for a liberal, he came back at them. Heaven is somewhere we have arrived at. Our new vantage point demands that we rethink the specifics of our location. Look, he said, and he pointed back at the earth, now a point among points, a circle within circles. The earth is in heaven. And we are among the gods. What of Christianity? someone asked him. What of Islam? We still have many believers amongst the crews. As a representative of the Church, what do you have to say to them? Will there be a new revelation? Scott felt a fury rise in his veins. A new revelation? Another fairy story, is that what these infants require? We stand face to face with the very depths of ourselves and we ask for revelation? Where will it end? When will it begin?
Instead he held his breath. He felt his pulse rise to his temple. He put his hand on his head. He mopped his brow. He kept at it. These clowns think I’m receiving the word of God right now, he said to himself, and he continued the charade some more, even going so far as to close his eyes and mutter under his breath. Give them some glossolalia, he said to himself. Why the hell not. He held out for as long as possible. He milked the silence of every nuance, sustained every pathetic hope and dream with jaw-dropping amateur dramatics. Then he spoke.
The book has been written, he said. The stars are in place.
There were gasps, nods of approval, thankful blushing faces staring out amidst the usual impassive science types. The believers will swallow anything, Scott thought to himself. So long as it is empty. But truly, there is no such thing as empty space. Not any more. Now there is only time. And those who would set sail in it.
He steadied himself on the lectern. He gazed out at all the faces, staring back at him. Have you ever looked out at the world and recognised yourself, he asked them, seen the work of your own hand, in the soft, warm rain, in the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, in men and women, and in sex, and the idea of it, and the dressing for it, in the past and the future and in the moving through it, in the rising and falling, the coming and going, in the idea of dreams, of tastes and experiences and desires, in the existence of biographical facts? How unlikely it all is, and how specific; who else could have thought of it?
They think God is coming, he thought to himself. They think the whole thing has a punchline.
Let me tell you a story, he began. This is some years ago, he said, as if to distance himself from the person he was about to describe. But really, it was distance and time that had conspired to make of it a lesson, an edifice, a commandment written in stone. That’s what these idiots need, he muttered, and he cursed them beneath his breath, they need a stone tablet, they need a set of dos and don’ts, a law to live by, and a past and a future to be torn apart between.
I was serving time, he admitted, and he shook his head. Best thing that ever happened to me. I was careering, out of control. I ran with a gang, he said. Hardnuts with big kick-your-cunt-in faces.
There were gasps all around. This isn’t a man of the cloth speaking any more, he told them. Make your peace. He stared down his critics and continued with his talk.
These men had faces to terrify you, faces all out of proportion with their bodies, which is the criminal type, I’m afraid, and which comes, I believe, from a certain form of mental pressure, an isolation, if you like, a social maladjustment, that results in the expansion of the head as the centre of consciousness—hear me out—and the concomitant thickening of the features, the fortification of the face, which can be willed or caused by belief and circumstance. A big kick-your-cunt-in face, he repeated. That was gratuitous, he could admit that much.
My own features changed, he admitted. You might not believe it, but I was a different man. The more you look in the mirror, the more you fix your own face. The vanity of the criminal classes is beyond reckoning. In prison everyone is working out, haven’t you ever noticed it? Everyone is squatting and grimacing and dropping suddenly to the floor and pushing up or grabbing hold of a door frame and suspending their entire body weight from it. Just to experience a little resistance. You go into a jail an island and you come out of it a fortress. I went down for GBH. I rearranged someone else’s face. Then I took a chisel to their privates, so they couldn’t go making any new ones. I’m not proud of it. It’s who I was, at least who I thought I was.
I shared a cell with a man with one hand. We all had our deformities, it was unremarkable. He told me he was an oracle. That was remarkable. At first I ridiculed him. Then you knew you would end up here, I told him. Yes, he said. I knew that already. Then he told me that the moon was being dreamed by a great lake beneath its surface, a lake of blood and water, somewhere near the centre. I asked him where his other hand was. It’s out there, he said, and he pointed out the window.
Later he wrote a book about the water of the moon and its dreaming of itself as a lonely satellite, a barren rock ejected from the earth like an egg. But really it was a great expanse of blood and water, which is exactly what the moon needs, if you think about it, which is what would solve the moon, in a way. Some of you may have read it. I don’t know. I can’t remember what it was called. The Stone Afloat? It was a science fiction or something. Years later, when I heard he had published a book, I used to picture him reading it in his lap and struggling to turn the page with one hand.
In prison I would lie in my bunk at night, unable to sleep, and sometimes the moon would shine through the window so bright and my bunkmate would sing under his breath, I could never make out the words, but in the morning the floor would be wet and the guards would accuse him of soiling our cell and we would be given a work detail and made to mop it up.
The other remarkable thing is he could stand on his hand, he could do a handstand with one hand. It’s not impossible, I’ve seen it happen. I thought of all these goons hanging from door frames and lifting weights above their heads when I would see my cellmate—whose name was Adolphus but whom everyone called Banjo because of his wiry hair and his hollow, empty face—upside down, with such ease, such lightness and grace, that I thought that he must be from the moon, or at least have some insider knowledge about gravity.
At the same time, I had started attending church services in prison. I can’t say why, the light of the moon, who knows. At that time there was a Father Sacraviscera who led confessions and who was available for counselling and questions of faith.
Sacraviscera, I said to him, that’s not an Irish surname, is it? No, he said. It’s not Irish. It’s my confirmation name. He said he had taken it in order that everything might be holy, even the most appalling soft organs of the body, those most vulnerable to clots and blows and sharp objects. He told me that he had received a vision where all of his internal organs, all of the cells, all of the corpuscles in the blood, all of the forces that push out the nails and sprout the hair, yes, even those that deal with the asshole and the gonads, the sweat glands and the beating of the heart, all of these, he said, rose up in a great salutation, a great yes which he described as a sort of cosmic orgasm, a great rushing climax, which he realised, right then and there, was man himself, and woman herself, a great symphonic climax, the very raiment of infinity, was how he described it. There are more possibilities in the brain, he said, more combinations in the body, than there are atoms in the universe. That’s where I first got religion. I found it up my ass.
There were gasps throughout the room. That was gratuitous, he had to admit.
Of course, there were inmates who drank, he continued. Who raged in their solitude, as if a mere cup of this or that, a good dose, would lead to the heart, would open up the thing in things. I did my fair share. I caned this, shotgunned that. I threw my guts up. I passed out unconscious. But there was no revelation, no transport between here and there. Narcotics, stimulants, are where the dream of time travel comes from. But time is not a prison, he said, time is not an exercise yard. There is nothing to escape from and nowhere to go.
That was my mistake. As a young man I went in search of revelation, of guidance, and I saw it in the future, in an apocalypse, so to speak. This is the promise of Jesus misunderstood. That at some future point there will be change, a revealing of the thingness of things, the same thingness that we wish alcohol and drugs and sex and achievement to reveal to us, the same promise of the future. I joined the Church. I stood in line. I practised good deeds. There was a mathematics of eschatology, a kind of adding up, and once you passed this certain point—people saved, good deeds done, prayers recited, beads counted, sufferings suffered—you would be granted a truth, given a bird’s-eye view of how it all went down. I was deluded. All we have to do is look up, look out, at ourselves and there we stand, revealed, beyond explanation.
You have asked me here, I can only presume, in order that a man of the cloth can give you his take as to where humanity stands, in relation to the gods, in relation to Christ’s revelation, to the love of God, as we stand on the cusp of infinite space, staring out but also staring back, at the planet we have destroyed, at the catastrophe we are now attempting to put right. And I tell you: down there is Eden; out there is Eden.
On the long nights when I lay in my cell after Banjo had been released, I thought about what he’d said. The water and the blood that coursed deep inside inanimate matter or what we thought was inanimate matter, cold stone, dead stone, and I thought about his missing hand. Where is your hand? I had asked him. And he had pointed out there. Just as I ask you to look out into space, to fix your gaze on eternity, and to see if you don’t find part of yourself there. Time is not a prison. We are not escapees who have somehow smuggled ourselves, in birth, out of the universe, in opposition to it. We are it; we are the epiphany of matter, the play of time, the thingness in things. Yes, we must continue to fecundate the earth, the precious womb, the mother of us all. But the age of earthly deities is at an end. Christ will not resurrect. The turn of the seasons is at an end. Environmental catastrophe has so altered the rhythms of the planet that Jesus himself has been forsaken. It’s no bad thing. Humanity’s childhood is at an end. And with it all sense of guilt. Through our misadventure we burned all of our bridges. Through strife we have been given the opportunity to find ourselves again. Through recombination and division we have been brought to nought. And this, before us, this emptiness which is really fullness, and which holds all of the stars and planets at their precise distances, in the perfection of their orbits, the glory of their revolutions, is the great gift. Here we will encounter new gods, an endless pantheon of powers, written in the pattern of the stars themselves. Our original heavenly nature is fire unsound, he said. And now, as we stand here, in orbit, suspended hundreds of miles above the earth, with the whole of space and time in front of us, at the beginning of a great adventure, I say to you, our new masters are no masters at all. Our new masters are the heavenly fires themselves.
o
Back in his quarters, Muldoon’s head was spinning. They had been in touch. They were real. Xstabeth had spoken first. She had given her name. Then Qbxl. Then Lalino. They had identified themselves as menwomen. Then as gods. Then as the light of the stars themselves. The British Victory Gardens had been receiving these broadcasts for some time. It was as if their mission had somehow forced the gods into revealing themselves. This is impossible, Muldoon told himself. This is insane. I dreamed them up. I created them. I made them out of nothing. The Controller, that was the name they had given for the British government’s WordPool operative, had recognised the names, the figures in the stars, and had pointed them out to Muldoon. Then the gods had asked for him by name. Now the British government wanted Muldoon as the new Controller. Or did they? Paranoia was rife, that much was certain. Were the gods playing the missions off against each other? What of the other nationalities? Were they using WordPools? Were they in touch with the same gods? Different ones? Or had someone hacked into the WordPool? They said it wasn’t possible. The construction of the WordPool was so simple, so straightforward, it would be like hacking into a Hoover. Besides, what exactly was the WordPool, really, outside of an extended conversation with yourself?
You’re staying here, they told Muldoon. No one else knows, outside a small coterie. Not even Adam Aros, who believes he brought you here. This can’t get out. We need to trace the source of these messages. Had they been guiding the Victory Gardens project from day one? Had Muldoon?
What’s to prevent me telling everyone? Muldoon said to them. How can I even be trusted? You’re so tied up in it already, he was told. Besides, they told him, aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to get involved? Don’t you want to know?
Why did the project even have a WordPool? Because it was actually making breakthroughs; it was providing creative solutions to problems. Under the guidance—that was the term they used—of a series of Controllers, the WordPool had detailed every step of the way in terms of managing the environment and shielding the earth. It had been consistently offering solutions that worked. No one knew that the solutions were coming from the WordPool. The project was passed off as the result of the UK’s own brainstorming. But it was true. The WordPool was responsible for all of the breakthroughs, all of the technological know-how that had helped save the planet—or at least preserve it—and that had taken humanity back into space.
But what of other links in the Victory Gardens, Muldoon quizzed them, what of other nationalities? The Spanish had pushed for full colonisation of the moon, was that coming from a WordPool? And what exactly was the legislative situation? We all knew that WordPools couldn’t be outlawed, instead being simply time-locked when you passed through spaceport control on the way up. But governments needn’t enforce their own agents, although of course they had long played with the idea that the WordPool could be used to work against them as well as for them, a tool for sedition, suggesting other allegiances or loyalties, promoting megalomania or paranoia or alternative agendas.
But works of rogue imagination: they were impossible to police. Muldoon shook his head. There had long been alternative theories that the WordPool itself was in fact a propaganda tool, complete with subtle ideological algorithms, and that its creator was in fact a government stooge, something that Dr. Crevasse had strenuously denied. Though of course he would, wouldn’t he? But it was all too personal, all too specific in its response, in its extrapolations and intimate revelations, to fit one interest, one ideological aim, wasn’t it? Now I know how God feels, Muldoon thought to himself, and he lay back on his bed and stared out at the moon. He could have sworn that it winked.
o
As a boy Adam Aros had dreamed of becoming a sailor. Either that or a lawyer. Somehow the arc of his life had encompassed the two. He had been a map-maker, a navigator, part of the team that had worked on the Galactic Map, a three-dimensional imaging of the solar system and its environs that could be scaled up or down according to where it was to be installed: a gallery; a country park; a wilderness; the span of an entire country.
Looking back, it seemed more like a first tentative pilgrimage, a dry run through the Stations of the Cross in preparation for man’s entrance into the universe. It had been an art project and an educational tool but now it seemed like an imperative, too, a first dim realisation that new concepts of scale would have to be internalised. Together the team had created a series of gigantic holograms that they would set up in precise relationship with each other, the solar system scaled to fit Scotland, say, and they would publicise the locations, so that it became a contemporary pilgrimage, so that you could walk the distance between Jupiter and Saturn.
He had done it himself during the summer that the solar system came to Scotland. Who could forget the rings of Saturn rising in an arc above the mountains at night, the eye of Jupiter whorling above the council estates, now shadowed in a temporary blackout, lonely Pluto, just off the coast of the Hebrides, as if it had risen from the waters, and beyond that, the endless sea.
