The Book Of Ian Watson, page 19
Coincidentally, not long after I watched the misery of this sheep, BBC-TV was showing Bread or Blood, an adaptation of W. H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life, in which the shepherd similarly, though more swiftly, delivered a lamb and then by the same method his wife, of a son. The TV film was intensely, shall we say, ‘earthy’; though it couldn’t convey the smell, or the droppings tumbling out of loosened bowels. But this all puts me in mind of another sort of ‘pole’: namely, the greasy pole of traditional rural fairs. If you could climb the greasy pole, you got the piglet. Once upon a time.
Once upon a time, too, in the Hudson tales of circa 1830 the countryfolk rioted for two shillings wage to feed themselves. So they were sentenced to death or transportation as evil criminals.
Today, going round the rural villages canvassing for the election—and driving in short space from some fairly wretched council houses to stone mansions with paddocks full of ponies—I hear the poor described as evil criminals again, because they are unemployed. And a few people in those Council houses are still going to vote Conservative. They are going to vote for their own impoverishment. Because they know from the media that unions and Lefties are evil.
Just so, quite a few people at Leeds knew that it was not proper behaviour to oppose nuclear weapons at an SF convention. Or they rationalised this feeling by arguing about procedure—always a convenient way out of embarrassing situations.
Because they have been told for many years that politics is something we can do without. We can do without it in local government; we can do without it at SF conventions. Politics is something which spoils: rugby tours, or cricket tours, or England’s green and pleasant land and the chance of all pulling together to get us out of our present crisis (politically created, of course), or which spoils the gentle art of getting on together (some on top, many underneath), or which spoils Art, or Science Fiction. …
But these people are already leading political lives, unaware, even at an SF convention. And it is highly convenient to the Cold Warriors in power that they should refuse to acknowledge the fact. And abstain. And try to keep politics out of SF.
Election Results (Helmdon Division of Northamptonshire):
Tattersall (Conservative): 1860
Watson (Labour): 927
As I mentioned earlier, “Shrines and Ratholes” was written for a high-circulation, glossy French magazine at the behest of its editor, Jean-François Bizot. After I’d written the piece, total silence ensued, despite several letters from me en françois. Early in 1984 a French fan sent me a copy of Actuel dating from the previous summer with my piece in pride of place, leading off Alberto Moravia, William Styron, Richard Brautigan and others on the theme of earthly hells and paradises. My words had been edited very creatively, and I was tagged as an Irish author. Maybe, without revealing himself, Monsieur Bizot had been lurking in Paris’s new Irish restaurant on the night when I visited it? (See April in Paris.) He certainly hasn’t revealed himself since. But at least my basic message was correctly conveyed …
Shrines and Ratholes (part II)
I guess the ideal rathole to describe would be a bug-infested brothel in El Salvador or somewhere else exotic (exotic, so long as you don’t have to live there yourself!). But thanks to the world financial crisis, the savageries of our mad British monetarist government, and the way publishing—particularly in the USA—is being run by corporate accountants who couldn’t care a piss for art, I’ve been an economic prisoner in my home island for what seems an eternity.
So I nominate for worst rathole my cursed idea for a brief idyllic holiday last summer with wife and daughter and our three cats (quite a Noah’s Ark) on a narrow boat on the South Oxford Canal, and the specific location of the rathole Upper Heyford village in Oxfordshire.
Of course in the context of waterways a ‘rathole’ ought to be quite a sentimental thing. Here in England we’re reared on the picnics and escapades of Ratty and Mole in the classic children’s tale The Wind in the Willows. So, abandoning the overdraft, the mortgage, days chained to the typewriter, and exclaiming “La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres (or even perhaps: j’ai écrit tous les livres); fuir là-bas, fuir!” away we fled to be caressed by the douce brise humide, on a rural canal, where ratholes are the homes of happy little furry animals.
Hèlas, we did not get too far as regards ‘fuir’ but the ‘là-bas’ bit was true enough. Canal boats (steered by me) blunder about like bemused elephants; Victorian locks are bloody exhausting to crank by hand, and the very first lock was the deepest on the whole canal, a descent into a dripping stone abyss out of Dante by way of Gustave Doré. Surviving this first ordeal with the help of cans of strong beer, we then got drowned from the sky by one of many lashing thunderstorms; though the arctic gales did dry us out quickly afterwards. Meanwhile, of our three cats, two went catatonic with culture shock; while the third leaped ashore while we were choking down our lunch and killed 23 mice in an orgy of murder, leaving corpses littered along the towpath, finally becoming so excited that he tumbled off the boat into the canal; whereupon he did not so much learn to swim, as to launch himself out of the water like a Trident missile, racing back inside the boat to splatter the whole interior with litres of canal water.
Mooring near Upper Heyford, nerves too frayed to try another lock that day, we were of course directly under the flight-path for take-off from Upper Heyford US Air Force base—rubbing home one basic fact about much of the idyllic English landscape which was never known to Rat and Mole when they played around in boats hereabouts: namely that behind every second cow there lurks a radar dome, a microwave transmitter, an airbase—and soon, soon, we can look forward to cruise missile mobile control centres and launch trucks too, ambling through country lanes.
This was Upper Hey ford, so here it was F-111s which hurled themselves thunderously overhead every few minutes, at an altitude of 200 feet or so, preparing for the Third World War, while the US and British governments crank up the Cold War in preparation.
Every year at the ‘Promenade Concerts’ held in the Albert Hall, London, they finish the concert series by singing William Blake’s poem Jerusalem: “… and we will build Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land!” But the land is pockmarked with the ratholes of the next war, pockmarked with transplanted enclaves of military America where the US army of occupation eat their burgers and play 10-pin bowling, in between jockeying their jets. (Army of occupation? Is that accurate? Well, what will happen if a future British socialist government tries to carry out its promise to expel all US military bases? How long will that government survive, before the country is destabilised?)
Walk up the lane from the canal, through Upper Heyford village, and you arrive at a Peace Camp outside the airbase gates, of women living in battered little caravans and under plastic sheets on a tiny patch of bridlepath. (Just as at Greenham Common, where 40,000 peace women recently encircled another camp, hand in hand, and where peace women blockade the entrances by tying themselves together in spiders’ webs of knitting wool.) Of course, the local councils try to expel them and take them to court; while Margaret Thatcher inveighs against the decline of family life, with mothers quitting their homes and husbands to demonstrate for survival.
Just beyond the Upper Heyford peace camp, behind the wire, commences a slice of Texas or Alabama—and of course the peace camp is a dirty, cold, unhygienic rathole, with its denizens looking like female tramps, while the US base is very neat and prosperous and domestic, God-fearing and elegant. But I know which is the real rathole. It’s the foreign warbase in the green and pleasant land, where Rat and Mole and Toad of Toad Hall used to wander and where Rat once exclaimed, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
Actually, exhausted by lock gates and soaked to the skin, I don’t quite agree with Rat’s sentiment, but what really put paid to the proposed idyll was the thunder of the F-111s, presaging the thunder of the H-bomb.
Fuir, là-bas! Hélas, I only escaped to reality.
Anger is one response; but comedy is also a weapon …
The President’s Not for Turning
‘They’re cutting our funding by fifty per cent,” Sam Dexter announced to a conference room full of worried faces. He chopped his hand emphatically down, as if dividing an apple in half with a cleaver. ‘There’s too much public spending on science. That’s the new policy. As you all know. So here it comes: chop, chop. Frankly, I’m surprised we survived this long. I believe I’m not overly boastful if I say that I—”
“Have defended us, like a wolf her cubs.” Dr. Marion Kurtz completed the sentence for him, not exactly as Sam would have completed it, but satisfyingly enough to his ego, none the less.
“So what do we do now?” asked Dr. Xerxes Ritsos. “Send up half a satellite? Send it half way up?”
“Perform bio-engineering with a single helix?” asked Dr. Kurtz. Others were calling out too.
“Okay, there are a lot of competing interests in this room: space science, social science, biology, theoretical physics. Obviously you can run fifty per cent of the programmes, and axe the rest. “But,” and Sam raised his hand to stem the swelling murmurous tide, “that might be the neat administrator’s answer. But it isn’t mine. I will not have this Foundation fight each other tooth and claw for the half of the beefsteak that’s left. I’m not a specialist, myself, so I’ve no special axe to grind. All of you are equally precious to me, and to the Foundation. The work of the whole damn lot of you, and your departments—whether they contain fifty people, or just two—counts equally, in my view. I will not have any discussion of who to kick in the teeth, to save the rest of you. Sure, I could play it that way. It’s what the Government expects. But I won’t. The whole point of this Foundation is its interacting, synergistic structure.”
Mark Bernstein, of Economic Forecasting, stood up—rather than merely raising his hand, as many others were.
“That’s a very idealistic pitch, Sam. I’m sure we all love you for it. But the economic war’s arrived on our home front. Shouldn’t we get on with the business of triage?”
“What’s triage?” demanded Dr. Ritsos, suspicious that a powerful tool was being brought out of hiding, which he didn’t know about.
“French word. It means ‘sorting.’ Specifically, it means rationally sorting the wounded into those who can survive without attention, those whom medical aid will save, and those who are just going to have to be put on one side, to die. In the absence of enough bandages, or money, or whatever.”
“No,” said Sam. “That’s just my point. This Government is playing Divide and Conquer. And what I say is, we all survive together. Tell me, Mark, what is your honest assessment of the new economic policies?”
Mark smiled wanly.
“Well, they’re borrowed from Britain. So we have a working example over there. The result: the collapse of industry, and nearly seven million people unemployed. The virtual destruction of a functioning country—not by the red beast, Socialism, but by a Conservative administration. It’s a punishment mentality, really. ‘You’ll all take your medicine, and may it poison you.’ It spells the death of initiative, and hope, and research.”
“And?”
“And perhaps the same’ll happen here.”
“Perhaps?” cried Marion Kurtz sarcastically. “It’s happening right now. Fundamental research is essential to the future.” She glanced at Paul de Leuw, from the tiny Theoretical Mathematics division. “Even if it seems quite cooky. Or, let’s say, marginal.”
Paul rewarded her with a faint grin.
“You mustn’t cut back on funding fundamental research because of an economic dogma about belt-tightening,” she went on. “I mean, I’m relatively okay, I guess. Genetic technology is a boom business. But I agree with Sam. On principle, I must defend the sort of games that Paul plays, with geometry or topology or whatever it is.”
“You needn’t defend them to the death,” said Xerxes Ritsos. “As you said, you’re not dying. So you can afford to be generous. But me, I’d never sacrifice one antenna from the new space probe—for a new concept of infinity, or the seventh dimension!”
“My work may have space travel applications,” said Paul mildly.
“Oh sure. Hyperspace travel applications. You find some kind of space that’s ‘higher’ than ordinary space. You pop into the eighteenth dimension, and out again five minutes later at the nearest star. How close are you to a breakthrough?” Ritsos allowed himself to sneer.
“Well, I hadn’t been meaning to bring this up at a crisis meeting. But actually, I think it may be possible—I mean, it isn’t explicitly ruled out mathematically, in which case it may only need a hell of a lot of energy to stress the underlying topological structure of space-time for a few micro-seconds—that’s to say, the space-time matrix—”
“What you do mean is, zilch.”
“No …” Paul waved his hands, but there was no stick of chalk in them, and no blackboard near.
“So what would this achieve? Instant travel from the Earth to Mars?”
Paul frowned.
“We might be able to build a field—some day—that would change left into right. I mean, we could put a glove in the field and it would come out reversed—with the thumb pointing the other way.”
“Great for thumbing rides in trucks, eh? I guess some of us are going to need rides, real soon.”
Paul persevered.
“By rotating it through a higher dimension, you see. Or else we could rotate a mouse, and it would have its heart on the other side, and its patches reversed left-to-right.”
“Neat. Very neat. Just what the world always wanted: a mouse-reverser. Didn’t somebody once say, ‘Build a better mouse-reverser, and the world will beat a path to your door? I foresee guaranteed sales to the Army. Reverse all the infantry left to right and the enemy will shoot them neatly in the heart—and miss.”
Everyone laughed—except for Sam Dexter, and MacDonald Carr, from Geophysics, who was fiddling with his hands, turning them over, fitting one on top of the other.
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Carr angrily.
“Sorry, Mac. It’s quite simple, really.”
Paul tore a sheet of paper from a notepad, pulled out a pair of pocket scissors and snipped the paper into the shape of a hand. He smoothed it flat on the table.
“We’ll call this crittur ‘Mr. Left Hand.’ Suppose his world is completely flat. Suppose it only has two dimensions: length and breadth. But no height. Well, Mr. Left Hand can move around his world okay, so long as he doesn’t meet any obstacles.” Paul demonstrated this by sticking a pencil in front of the piece of paper. “Because obviously he can’t climb over them. But there’s no way he can make himself into a right hand. Except,” and Paul flipped the paper hand over, “by moving through a third dimension: height. Now he’s Mr. Right Hand. But we already live in a three-dimensional world. You’ve got that scar on your left cheek, Mac. Could it ever become a scar on your right cheek? No way—unless you were turned through a higher, fourth dimension.”
“Fascinating,” said Carr. “Now could we please get on with the business—of survival?”
“Wouldn’t it be really cool, though—” murmured Bernstein. But he shut up.
“What would be really cool?” Sam pressed him.
“Oh, I was just thinking about economic policy speeches by our beloved leaders. In particular, the President’s ‘Not For Turning’ speech last month in Syracuse. He borrowed the phrase from the British Prime Minister, of course. She used it when everyone was begging her to do an economic U-turn, and inject money into industry and research and public works. The Lady’s not for turning,’ she said. She borrowed it from a play called The Lady’s Not For Burning. I was just thinking how it would be cool if we could turn the President and his policies right about face, by yanking him through Paul’s higher dimension …”
Again, everyone laughed. Except for Sam Dexter.
“Could we?” he said. “Could we? If you say it’s possible to create this ‘field’ for a few micro-seconds … Could we,” and he looked only mildly embarrassed, “possibly change a right-wing mouse—or politician—into a left-wing, liberal mouse? Or politician.”
“You’d have to be careful with that sort of thing,” called out Ritsos. “The Pope walks into your field—and emerges as the Antichrist! Heh, heh. But first, catch your mouse.”
Sam pursed his lips.
“Oh, I think that would be possible. A Presidential visit isn’t exactly out of the question. We command a certain amount of respect. It could even be seen as a trade-off. We swallow our medicine. He comes and pats us on the back.”
“But, Sam,” protested Lara Davis, of Oceanography, “this is just fiddling while Rome burns. It’s worse than that! You’re seriously suggesting that Paul eats up more of everyone’s funds—to build a, what, a mouse-reversing machine?”
“A higher-dimension oscillator,” said Paul, crisply.
“Call it what you will! It’s an absurd joke. Is that the real idea: to show what madness politicians can force us into? You mean: if they’re going to make nonsense of our legit mate research, we might as well be inventing a mouse reverser? You want to set this crackpot project up, then leak it to the Media? As a sort of psychological warfare—is that it?”
Sam quieted her with a practised gesture.
“Whatever I’m up to, Lara, please remember that fifty per cent budget translates either into half of us working for one year—or all of us working for six months. Which, as the wise Dr. Johnson once remarked, à propos a man condemned to be hanged, is a thought which should concentrate our minds wonderfully. Paul, I want to see a reversed mouse within six weeks. Everyone else: you’ll offer all the help and facilities you can. But we’ll keep this under wraps. Understand? Totally under wraps. Only department heads are to know what’s really going on. Only the people in this room.”
