A History Maker (19 page)

MARXISM. Yet even in those states folk were excluded from social improvements. Many of the rich lived wastefully with two or three huge houses while labouring families lived in one or two rooms. Landlords kept great fertile parks uncultivated while peasants paid them rents for the right to scratch potatoes out of stony soil.
The hardest workers were taxed to pay for wars which left the rich uninjured and did the poor no good, unless a soldier son came home with loot to compensate for his wounds. The development of industrial factories enriched several new classes of people while impoverishing an equal number. In 1867 Karl Marx suggested a new division of time:

1 – Tribal Communism, when people live in communities so small that most families have a voice in the governing council so are seldom much poorer than their richest neighbour.

2 – Class Warfare, when folk live in big states ruled by small unions of conquerors, scribes, landlords, factory owners, businessmen and/or moneylenders. These unions keep power and great incomes by the continual creation of poverty in the underclass.

3 – World Communism, when the underclass form their own unions, take the land and factories from their masters and manage them for the good of themselves, whereupon the evicted upper classes have to join them, riches and poverty vanish in a fair sharing of goods, and all states wither away.

This resembled the Jewish and Christian time division in giving hope for the future, though the future was to be created by human
effort instead of God. Many labourers and poor tradesmen in machine-making nations were then forming unions to improve their conditions. In some states they created political parties which helped them do so.

In 1914 an inbred clique of owners who had inherited the Russian Empire went to war. They commanded a vast, obedient, conscripted people but could not give them enough food, boots and bullets to defeat smaller armies of industrially efficient neighbours. This caused a workers' revolt. A clique of middle-class Marxists rushed back to Russia and seized control in the name of World Communism. The new clique created a party dictatorship which did not share its advantages with other Russians and died of broken promises before the end of the century.

POSTMODERNISM happened when landlords, businessmen, brokers and bankers who owned the rest of the world had used new technologies to destroy the power of labour unions. Like owners of earlier empires they felt that history had ended because they and their sort could now dominate the world for ever. This indifference to most people's wellbeing and taste appeared in the fashionable art of the
wealthy. Critics called their period
postmodern
to separate it from the modern world begun by the Renaissance when most creative thinkers believed they could improve their community. Postmodernists had no interest in the future, which they expected to be an amusing rearrangement of things they already knew. Postmodernism did not survive disasters caused by “competitive exploitation of human and natural resources” in the twenty-first century.

MODERNISM developed when households became the largest units of government on earth and satellite co-operatives the largest off it. Once again time was split into three.

1 – Prehistory, before people lived in cities.

2 – History, when increasing numbers did so and city cultures shaped family life everywhere.

3 – Modernity, when the open intelligence network and powerplants made cities, nations, money and industrial power obsolete.

The simplicity of our modern divisions misled many into treating history as a painful interval between prehistoric tribal communities and modern co-operative ones. Others wanted to lump the historic and prehistoric eras together with a new calendar dated from the start of modernity, but disagreed about where
to place the first year. Open intelligence gurus said the new era opened when the United States government let an early open intelligence network take over the Montana state education service in the 1980s. Others put it in the twenty-first century when the first modern powerplant synthesized a bowl of rice, a Samurai sword and a perfect Hokusai print on a Japanese peninsula — others when the first self-sustaining powerplant community took root in an Israeli kibbutz or in Salt Lake City or in the Vatican — others when the Islamic league began distributing powerplants to every Mohammedan nation on earth — others when the open intelligence network announced an accord with Japan through which it would sell any sixty people in the world their own powerplant if they owned an area of land able to support one.

I will end this far too lengthy note by quoting Pat O'Rafferty, a guru unknown to the open intelligence since he only speaks into the ears of friends:
Modern housekeeping and modern
gangrelling grew from more than two
thousand years of decent people struggling to
live as Jesus advised — struggling to do as
they would be done by, not as lords and
government officials did with them. The fact
that Buddha (a former hereditary lord) and
Confucius (an ex-government official) said
the same centuries before Jesus proves they
too were God's excellent sons. Calendars were
invented to help us keep appointments with
each other. Using them to cut us off from a
host of the dead is like using fire to burn
a library instead of keeping it warm.

Page 147.

The public eye presenters and telecom gurus
and commanders broadcasting just now
seem part of her conspiracy, but so do I.

The epidemic of military enthusiasm following the Ettrick–Northumbria draw was a worldwide male reaction to the omnicompetence of women who only needed them as inseminators. It is impossible to know what damage this epidemic would have done had it not been interrupted by another. The military threat had not been contrived by the conspirators. They merely tried to take advantage of it, fortunately for humanity.

Page 151.

About great-grandmothers:
Their gossip has
been the only government and police the
world has needed for more than a century.
Among modern folk the very calm healthy intelligences of old women had most leisure to ponder and exchange news about their families:
families whose total sum (if the gangrels are ignored) was humanity. Even loving families bred people who could only bear life by changing their world or finding another. A poet called this state
divine discontent
because good new things are made or discovered by those who tholed it. In historic times, however, neglect steered many potential makers and discoverers into crime, insanity or that legal compromise between the two, remorseless competition for power and property. In modern time the great-grandmothers ensured nobody was neglected by distributing among their daughters and grand-daughters news and suggestions which brought friends and opportunities to the most lonely and despairing. This news only reached men through remarks made by aunts, sisters or lovers, so like Wat most fighting men did not notice the power of the grandmothers.

When Wat had been carried off to the circus Kittock ran at once to Dryhope house and told the great-grannies why she thought this might have dangerous results. As he shook hands with folk from six continents in a Selkirk meadow the old women began a worldwide enquiry which spread through the solar system. Starting with grannies and mothers it came to involve
everyone who knew anything about Meg Mountbenger and her colleagues. It lasted fifteen hours, those who directed it dozing in relays.

Meanwhile Wat, with a mixture of boredom and perplexity, saw a creative evolutionary opera called
Homage to Ettrick
. The overture was a firework display representing the explosion which created the universe and the origin of species. Glancing at the programme Wat saw four acts would follow depicting the heroic, religious, industrial and modern periods. He fell asleep halfway through the heroic period and was nudged awake by General Shafto near the end of the modern. Lulu Dancy was projecting a mirage of his last battle onto the dawn sky. In a pause after a crescendo of organ, trumpet and bagpipe blasts a Russian Orthodox church choir chanted “Do you surrender?” and Wat saw a mile-high coloured shadow of himself sing a splendid “No!” stab another shadow and dive down into the globe of the rising sun, preceded by a shining golden eagle pulling after it a banner like the tail of a meteor.

Then came the breakfast banquet served in a vast marquee with more speeches,
back-slapping, kisses from visiting soldiers' wives, congratulatory speeches and toasts. Beside him in the place of honour sat Meg-Delilah-Lulu in a silk dress as scarlet as her lipstick. It seemed impossible to talk with her but she kept filling his glass with champagne and giving him such lovingly mischievous glances that he gazed at her in puzzled wonder and hardly saw anyone else. Shortly before the breakfast ended she whispered, “I'll be back soon,” slipped away and never returned. She was never seen again by anyone who admitted to knowing her. An hour later the foreign guests flew home while Wat, drunk for the first time in his life, raved and threatened violence through the circus caravans in a search for Meg Mountbenger. He was overpowered and carried to Ettrick Warrior house by Archie Crook Cot and the Boys' Brigade. He arrived there unconscious.

By noon the old women had informed the open intelligence of the following. Meg Mountbenger and two public eye people and three biologists in the lunar Clavius laboratory were the K20 clique who had killed Haldane. They were still morally stupid, having kept in close touch with each other while pretending not to. By using vast amounts of public energy, then drugging him, they had infected Wat
Dryhope with a harmless-seeming, highly contagious virus which could spread to all who talked with him. This virus must be a host to something more sinister since there could be no good reason for spreading it.

As a result of this information Wat was visited by a team of scientists who took him to a quickly improvised quarantine hospital and laboratory on top of Ben Nevis. Before they isolated the nanomechanism, however, its target became obvious. In Dryhope house the powerplant started gulping and wheezing, the stem grew grey and blotchy, lost its transparency and power to synthesize anything, and finally began crumbling into powder from the summit down. A few hours later this plague struck homes of nearly all who had been close to Wat or close to people close to him. All over the world centres of light, heat, and nourishment died. Knowledge unique to these districts — music, stories and local records — only survived now in memories of the living and a few old books that were mainly read by gangrels. Meanwhile biologists discovered that, though quarantine would reduce the speed of the plague's spread, it could never be finally eliminated. Animals could carry the virus, and windblown dust from withering powerplants.

Yet the worldwide panic and collapse into barbarism expected by the plotters never came, partly because wrist communicators did not depend on local power supplies so everyone stayed in the intelligence network. No military action to quarantine homes was suggested or needed. Infected families quarantined themselves. The uninfected raised their powerplant food production to a maximum while reducing what they ate to the minimum, leaving a surplus which was airlifted and dropped to deprived families. Since this could only be a temporary measure while the virus spread further, and since some time would pass before a plague resistant powerplant could be bred, men put their military discipline into planting crops, building wind and watermills to provide local energy supplies, building and manning fishing fleets — luckily the oceans were as throng with life as in prehistoric times, since for over a century only sportsmen had fished them. The enthusiasm with which men turned to such work looked like thankfulness for a world where women required their labour. The Council for War Regulation in Geneva had extended its moratorium on war games for the foreseeable future, pointing out that folk who enjoyed these had plenty of recordings to watch, yet public eye replays of these records were no longer popular.

“Warfare now seems a fatuous way of passing the time,” said the former commander of the East Anglian Alliance who now commanded a North Sea trawler, “Obviously our lives were so valueless then that we wanted to lose them. I'm glad the biology mandarins are developing a plague-resistant powerplant but in future I think women should use it as an auxiliary source of necessities — enough to keep them independent of us, not enough to make us dependent on them. I don't know how family life will be reshaped by the present emergency — I hear that monogamous crofting communities of husbands and wives have started in Ireland and the Scottish west. It may not be a bad thing. Whatever the future holds it looks like containing less killing. I suspect that what some gurus now call the early modern period was just another bit of bloody history which spared the women and children. It's a funny thing, but since the plague erupted nobody has died except of old age and unforeseeable accident. Those plotters deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”

When Meg Mountbenger's fellow plotters were shown proof of their guilt they readily admitted it. One said, “We dislike modern life so wanted to make it exciting. We thought this
required killing a lot of people, but everyone who has swatted a fly or poisoned a rat knows it is no crime to destroy inconvenient lives. You find us inconvenient — make your own lives exciting by having us gassed, electrocuted, guillotined, garrotted or hanged. Or revive the old English punishment for treason. Hang us by the neck, cut us down while still alive, rip out our intestines, burn them in front of our eyes, hack off our limbs and genitals. Tapes of the event will be replayed for centuries.”