Monument Maker, page 52
Of course, it had been a propaganda exercise too, in a way, classic shock and awe. The team had been peopled by environmentalists, utopians, hippies and progressives who read mankind’s future in the stars. It had felt like the war, after the passing of the temporary dark skies legislation that the team had campaigned for. That way the planets could be seen in all their glory. And who would want to stay in, in the dark of a council estate, when Jupiter came down to earth? People had stood out in the streets, had sat up all night around bonfires and with music and food. A mass regression had taken place, a regression towards the future, as if Palaeolithic man were to take his place among the stars.
It was uncanny, too, on balmy summer evenings, to see Jupiter rise behind Jupiter, as if projecting itself onto earth, or for Venus to appear as a bright light on Venus, a campfire, as if to reflect the ceremonies on the ground.
In the wake of the rolling out of the Galactic Map across the world, the first of the Victory Gardens had taken to space, and had been greeted with flag-waving and applause, as if mankind was simply taking its preordained place, as if up was down. The earth would be fructified, and space would yield like a new bride. It was a time of great hope.
In the end they toured the Galactic Map across all twelve of the Victory Gardens signatories. The UK, the USA, Spain, Israel, Sudan, Mexico, Germany, France, Australasia, India, Russia and Japan, signatories who later formed ecological, technological and economic blocs with their neighbours and allies, a series of treaties that made the project feasible. It seemed like a coincidence at the time, or maybe there really was something in the Galactic Map itself, which was hard to dispute when you first glimpsed Neptune, huge across the snowy tundra of Siberia, or Mars turn the Nile blood-red.
Besides, was it really possible to be a propagandist for space? Space was a fact, we were already in it; the Galactic Map was just a reminder. Still, there was an element of deception written in, if you really thought about it. People spent days or weeks or even months tracking a series of holograms, a series of optical illusions, an empty spectacle, while up above them the real thing revolved regardless.
Well, isn’t that art? Aros asked himself. Isn’t that meaning? And isn’t there something quite beautiful about it? About emptiness and futility and pointlessness on that kind of scale? Plus, if it really had led to the creation of the Victory Gardens, or at least contributed to the kind of atmosphere that was more conducive to it, wasn’t that justification enough? Now we could control the rains, manipulate the temperature, fix what came in and what came out with this huge global shield that covered the earth, this incredible collaborative project that had brought governments and populations together.
Still, sometimes it was hard to fight the feeling that we had simply built ourselves a new prison. That we had actually sealed ourselves off from the rest of the universe. What was that song again, that piece of music? “Die ganze Welt ist ein Krankenhaus.” “The Whole World is a Hospital.”
Aros had volunteered for the Victory Gardens as soon as the announcement went out. Having worked on the Galactic Map, he was fast-tracked into the role of cultural co-ordinator for the UK project ship The Advance. Here he had been initiated into an inner order calling itself The SIRK (Secret Interstellar Reconnaissance Kommando, he was told) that saw the Victory Gardens not so much as a holding position to be maintained for the future of the earth but as a first step towards mankind’s place amongst the stars. Quite a few of the Galactic Map team were involved, but politically it was mixed, and there was a certain degree of distrust and many counter-agendas at work. After all, there are many reasons to want to get away.
Aros had been responsible for booking Scott and it had been his idea to follow up with Muldoon as artist-in-residence. He had expected to come up against some kind of protest from the top brass; after all, Muldoon was hardly a household name. But his arrest during the protest against the new spaceport on the moon gave him common cause with many of the radical ecologists on board, even if his opposition to further colonisation put him at odds with them. Still, this was new science, and they were making it up as they went along; dissenters were welcomed, artists embraced, priests, well, barely tolerated, to be honest, after Scott’s infamous foul-mouthed rant. Fuck them, Aros said to himself. It’s hard truths we’re after up here. If they can’t take it, send them back to the hospital.
o
Muldoon’s first request was for a complete transcription of every interaction with the Advance WordPool, every input, every response, right from the start. That’s out of the question, Clyde Evans told him. They had met in Evans’s private quarters, which were all rigged up like a television set from a 1970s sci-fi serial. A personal indulgence, Evans told him, forgive me, as he offered him a seat in a white bubble chair suspended from the ceiling. I feel like a monkey, Muldoon said. Baboons in space, Evans joked. That’s all we are at this point.
Do you think we’re going to meet our maker? Muldoon asked him.
Well, as far as I can see, Evans replied, as he took a stubby cigarillo from a stainless-steel case on the table and offered Muldoon one, you’re the closest thing to a creator that we’ve uncovered.
What have you actually uncovered?
That’s the thing, Evans said. It has all been redacted.
So what exactly am I supposed to work from?
We can give you the last four interactions; that’s all.
I feel like I’m being set up. That this is some kind of experiment. Is this part of the WordPool’s plans? Is this what happens next?
The WordPool has no plans, per se, Evans went to reassure him. It is we who have the plans.
At least that’s the official line, Muldoon replied.
That is the official line, I admit, Evans nodded. But you’re on the inside now. Quite literally.
Have you tried asking the WordPool, simply asking it questions, straightforward questions? Muldoon suggested.
Questions beget questions, Evans replied. Listen, he said. Have you ever heard of The SIRK?
Muldoon blew a ring of smoke from his mouth and it settled above Evans’s head like a stinky halo. Should I have? he replied.
Probably not, Evans said. It stands for the Society of Inveterate Recidivist Knights. I’m one of them.
Is this like the Masons? Muldoon asked him.
Well, we’re dedicated to the brotherhood of man, put it that way.
And what are you doing up here?
We’ve always been here, Evans said. We’ve been behind the space programme since day one, give or take a few Nazi scientists and all of the stooges we had working for us. Thing is, we have been receiving messages for much longer than this. This is the tip of the iceberg. Only this time, the iceberg has a name. And it’s talking back.
Each planet has a frequency, a tone that it emits, Evans continued. We know that much, right?
The music of the spheres, Muldoon shrugged. It’s old hat.
Yeah, it’s old hat alright. It has been going on forever. Thing is, we decoded it some time ago.
And what’s it saying?
It’s a piece of music.
Must be pretty avant-garde, Muldoon joked.
It’s a piece of classical music, actually. “BWV 25,” to be precise.
Bach?
Yes.
Bollocks, Muldoon spat. You’re trying to tell me that no one ever noticed that the planets were playing classical music in space? Who’s the conductor?
Well, exactly, Evans said. It was as if something, some object, some event, was working on the solar system and somehow massively but subtly affecting the speed and scale of the planets’ revolutions. The reason that nobody noticed it before is that it was only a snatch, played once, over a certain period of years. And it was played so slowly, a single phrase spread across twelve months, then another, that it was only when we sped up the signals, accumulated over the period of a decade or so, that someone recognised it as the opening bars from “BWV 25.”
There is nothing sound in my body, Muldoon said.
You know the piece? Evans asked him.
I know it well, he said. Then he looked out the window. A small fleet of supply ships were fanning out, moving towards the Victory Gardens, like the slow opening of a peacock’s tail. The stars hung noiselessly in space. Clouds covered the earth. It was night-time down below. He looked back at Evans. What’s nothing sound? he asked him.
o
Robert Scott owned a small wooden shack built up on stilts on the banks of Loch Awe in Argyll in Scotland. He stood there on the deck, in the dim light of the evening, and listened to the silence, a final silence, he thought to himself. Despite all the talk, time was running out. The storms had swept away the diving gantry he had built running into the loch, this crazy wonder, and now it lay there, tormented, half submerged, as in the final resting place of a gargantuan fossil.
They say they have control of the weather, he thought. They say the climate is in our hands. But for that they would need to seize control of the sun. His wife joined him on the deck. His loyal wife who for so long he had hidden in the background. He had lived the life of a man of the cloth for all to see. But privately he had raged and roared and tormented them both. Barbara bore the scars. She was like a little white mouse. You got the worst of me, my darling, Scott said, and he ran his hands through her hair. She stared back at him without blinking, her green eyes now dimmed and untroubled, her dark curly hair now loose and long let go.
They had met long ago, in another life, and now they were here. What happened to us? she asked him. Whatever it was, he said, we should never have let it. It will take another planet to put us back together. We don’t have that much time, Barbara said. And besides, there’s no way back.
I dreamed that you died, she said. I dreamed that we rose too early and it caused your collapse. She walked to the edge of the deck and looked down at the dark water scattered with shattered wood and pieces of flotsam. I kneeled over your dying body on the floor and I said you were the best husband ever, the most perfect partner, how much I loved you, and forever. Then you recovered and got back up. That was embarrassing, you said. Now you’ll have to do that all over again the next time.
What does it say in The Bible, Scott said, something about how for one kiss we must be willing to sacrifice all? I don’t think that’s in The Bible, Barbara said. Think of it, Barbara, he continued, ignoring her. For just one tender moment we must be willing to say yes to all of it, all of it forever, running back into the past, streaming out into the future, the sum of every suffering and joy. A great secret river, a storm-tossed loch, a single bright teardrop, rising up. It feels awkward to kiss you now, Barbara said. We know each other too well. Don’t worry, Scott said, don’t worry, darling, we can forget each other and find each other all over again. At which Barbara started to cry.
o
The last four interactions with the Advance WordPool read:
Peter Muldoon painted the gods and gave them their names.
He set a fountain of tears in my eyes.
Why and wherefore?
All throughout the book, all throughout time, all vainglorious.
What do you think? Evans asked him.
It’s hard to know, what are the stakes?
Incalculable.
It feels like Consequences. You know, like the surrealists would use, where you would add words to a sentence that you hadn’t seen. Who wrote “Why and wherefore?”
The Controller.
That feels like a really strange thing to say.
Evans poured each of them a glass of wine. A Polish wine, from one of the new producing regions.
It’s a little poetic, I’ll give you that, he said.
Why would naming the gods or rendering them in some kind of visual form cause them to weep?
Idolatry? Wasn’t God always against that, or one of the gods, anyhow?
It all feels a little Old Testament. But with names like Xstabeth, menwomen, that’s really how they announced themselves?
Basically.
Then there’s “vainglorious.” Great vanity. That feels like another warning. An imprecation.
Against what? Evans asked him.
Who knows, something that’s omnipresent, something throughout.
It could be drawing a line under the thing, you know, like this is where the mission terminates.
Is it?
If you’re asking me whether the results could have any effect on us pushing forward into space then, no, I would say it couldn’t. There’s too much momentum behind it now. Besides, what would we do, say that we had been hearing voices and they had told us to stop?
Did the WordPool always talk like this?
Talk? In voices? At first it was used in a completely technical manner, you know, it started off as a journal that we would add to.
Who’s we?
The SIRK. We would add to it communally. It was kept under lock and key and at meetings we would update it with our plans and any relevant developments and then we would take note of its replies. At first it was more like a secretary, taking minutes, making suggestions using a fairly transparent dialectic, that sort of thing. But once we got into space, well, it began talking more like this.
Which is?
You know: oracular, poetic.
Have you ever read the Song of Solomon? Muldoon asked Evans. In it they talk about fountains stopping and fountains flowing.
Evans pulled the Song of Solomon up onto his screen.
Here it is, Muldoon said. “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” And here: “A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.”
“Let my beloved come into his garden,” Evans read, “and eat his pleasant fruits.” He turned to Muldoon. Have you ever heard of a priest and writer named Robert Scott? he asked him.
o
There are countless fountains in The Bible, Robert Scott confirmed, and he shook his head. But everyone’s a sucker for the Song of Solomon. Clyde Evans had arranged a meeting between the two of them back on earth. Muldoon had insisted on meeting his predecessor. He looked ill, Muldoon thought. Troubled, certainly.
Scott sat on the porch of his hut, bent over an old wooden table where he was rolling a small joint of home-grown marijuana with one hand. He was dressed in a dark-blue silk dressing gown embroidered with golden planets, his thin grey beard speckled with Viking red. Muldoon fancied that his puffy eyes and his emaciated face made him look like an old jazz pianist, beaten down from smoke and drink and all-night performances in titty bars. Titty bars, Muldoon thought to himself, and he sighed. That was a blast from the past.
The wine was from a vineyard in Perth in central Scotland, now one of the most praised grape regions in Western Europe. The sun was up, high in the sky, and they sat on wooden chairs on the porch as the gentle waves lapped against the supports. Someone had taken a boat out onto the water, its sail a small triangle of light that rippled in the heat. Scott’s arm was bandaged after a drunken fall. Night swimming, he joked, is a perilous activity.
Have you ever heard of pathetic fallacy? he asked Muldoon. It was coined by some artist or other, but it has come to signify a kind of grotesque error, a kind of unforgivable presumption. Listen to the soft sound of the waves, he said to Muldoon. Muldoon listened. Wouldn’t you say they were gentle? Wouldn’t you say that they were almost caressing the supports? As if they were half in love with their own dispersal onto the land and into space? That would be pathetic fallacy. Waves aren’t gentle or fond of caresses or half in love. At least, that’s what they say. You see, when you start to interpret the actions of matter as having characteristics that can only really be ascribed to humans, then you have erred. When you pick out patterns in nature, patterns that are entirely arbitrary and entirely reliant on the specifics of your observation of them, then you have fallen. Matter functions without motive, a flower flowers for no other reason than its flowering.
Isn’t rising up towards the sun a motive? Muldoon asked him.
You might think so, Scott said. When you are confused and upset the sky itself can seem to rage.
I’m confused right now, Muldoon said, and yet the sky seems unconcerned.
You might think so, Scott said. But consider this. The best sex you ever had. Think of it. It wasn’t just fucking, I’m willing to bet. It was more like fucking and being fucked at the same time. Am I right?
