Angelmaker (28 page)

At which, to Joe’s outrage and amazement, Arvin Cummerbund steps lightly behind him and fastens his wrists together in the small of his back with a pale nylon strip. Joe gives a startled shout of “Hey!” and turns his head to Patchkind in mute appeal.
Do something!

Patchkind looks very grey, and quite deliberately turns to face the scene of the crime.

“DC Topper,” he says, as if through a mouthful of dust, “tell me about our corpse.”

“You’re not under arrest,” Arvin Cummerbund murmurs into Joe Spork’s ear, “because we don’t do that.”

The fat man drives, and Rodney Titwhistle sits next to Joe in the back. His earlier chattiness has evaporated, and Joe’s bewildered affront has lost its edge, so that a sad, nostalgic quiet settles on the car as Cummerbund guides it through London’s complex tangle, each man thinking his own thoughts in a curious kind of fellowship.

The traffic light turns red again in front of them, and Mr. Cummerbund tuts. Rodney Titwhistle sighs.

“Arvin, my apologies, I’m going to start the conversation. You’ll just have to join in from the front. You can multitask, can’t you?”

“Certainly, Rodney.”

“Thank you, Arvin.”

“Thank you, Rodney.”

“In that case, let us proceed. I wonder, Mr. Spork, if you could tell me just one thing?”

“You could tell me who the hell you are. Not the bloody Loganfield Museum, I know that.”

“Oh, dear me. No. Let us say, we are the embodiment of an unpleasant necessity of the global reality, specifically concerned with the well-being of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And let us further say, in accordance with convention, that I will be asking the questions.

“I should also remind you that you are not in the custody of the police. The usual rules, as so often referenced in popular television programmes, do not apply. Our mandate is not justice. It is survival. In that context, you will understand when I say you should not attempt to ‘take the fifth.’ The U.K. no longer recognises a right to remain silent, you know. We protect the nation’s future, rather than its conscience. I find this noble.” Mr. Titwhistle smiles apologetically, then, as the car stops at a set of traffic lights, gazes out of the window to a small horde of teenaged girls in fishnet who are whooping and bouncing up and down. After a moment, he goes on.

“Suppose I were to ask you ‘What is the Apprehension Engine?’ What would you say?”

“ ‘I don’t know.’ ”

“And if you were to speculate?”

“A device which makes people afraid.”

Rodney Titwhistle gives a soft cough. “Which you conclude from the use of the term ‘Apprehension’. Indeed. Well, Mr. Spork, in a way you are quite right. It is indeed a device, and it certainly scares the bejeezus out of me. Tell me, instead, about the Magic Beehive of Wistithiel.”

“How do you know about that?”

Rodney Titwhistle sighs. “Very shortly, Mr. Spork, everyone will know about that.”

“Why? It’s just an automaton. What’s any of this got to do with Billy, anyway?” Joe sees Billy’s corpse beneath the blanket, smells the room, and swallows bile.

“Everyone will know because everyone will see. In the beginning, the bees will fly around the world. They will awaken further hives. The device is intended to encompass the globe. There will be—shall we call them ‘outbreaks’?—during which the machine will function at its lowest level where the swarms are concentrated. Then, when they are all in position, it will activate. I would conservatively estimate that three or four million people will die shortly thereafter by ordinary human action. Murders and so forth. If the machine moves on to the second and third stages, as I understand them—and I will grant you that this certainly is not the notional purpose of the device—the fatality rate rises dramatically. In the worst case, it approaches one hundred per cent of the world’s population. So you understand why I feel a little unwilling to let this slide?

“In retrospect, it should have been dismantled years ago, but governments do so hate to throw things away, especially dangerous things. Did you know, incidentally, that ‘retrospect’ can be an adjective? One might say ‘Joshua Joseph Spork is retrospect; he’s a man who learns from his mistakes.’ In any case, Mr. Spork, the beehive is not just some clockwork toy. It is a scientific advance of ludicrous complexity, so secret that no one who knew about it could understand it and no one who would understand it could be allowed to know about it. A game-changer. And consequently in many ways we might also call it a time bomb. It is the Apprehension Engine to which I referred earlier. We are, as you see, somewhat nervous about what will happen now that it’s active. So I must ask you: how do we switch it off again?”

An opportunity to come clean—perhaps without prejudice. Very attractive. Except that, on diverse occasions, unscrupulous persons have been known to use this line of argument to lure a suspect into unwise confessions.

Deny. Hedge. Evade. Play stupid. Which, in any case, is what you are
.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I just … I have no idea.”

“No, I am almost sure that you don’t.” Mr. Titwhistle sighs. “Ted Sholt’s the fellow I need to talk to, isn’t he?”

“I suppose he may be.” A pleasant vision: urbane Rodney Titwhistle in his clean car, struggling with Ted of the foul-smelling sandalled feet, the burlap smock and the sou’wester pressed against the window and the weird battle cry sounding:
Angelmaker!
Although … no. Ted Sholt might not fare so well in that engagement.

And that word: angelmaker. That’s much less funny, here and now.
One way of making angels, in cartoons and so on, is to kill people. He should mention it. But if he does, will they keep him for ever? And will “mention” equal “confess” in the watery eyes of Rodney Titwhistle?

The moment passes. Rodney Titwhistle claps his hands, very lightly, as punctuation.

“Taking myself as the example, Mr. Spork, the problem—and it’s a common problem in this debased age—” the faintest nod of the head towards the horde, still audible over the hiss of the tyres “—is that while I am known to be mostly infallible, I have also been known, very occasionally, to be quite wrong. Do you see?”

“We’re all wrong from time to time,” Joe says nervously.

“Even on matters about which we have absolute confidence, alas.”

“Even then.”

“This is the basis of René Descartes’ famous doctrine, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Rodney Titwhistle gives vent to a polite sigh of reproach.

“Debased, as I said. Well, Descartes realised that in his lifetime there had been any number of occasions on which he was absolutely certain and yet absolutely mistaken. He had dreamed himself in front of a fire attending dinner with friends when he was in fact at home in bed. He had seen what he took to be an eagle and discovered later that it was a buzzard, much closer than it appeared. Well, silly man, he was a mathematician rather than a naturalist.”

Mr. Titwhistle’s expression does not entirely conceal his personal feelings regarding this lack of ornithological
nous
.

“He therefore asked himself: ‘If I were held captive by a malign fiend which deceived my senses, of what if anything could I be certain?’ He inaugurated a method of doubting everything, and was finally reduced to the simple statement that because he was conscious, and aware of his own thoughts, he could not plausibly doubt his own existence. That’s the famous ‘I think, therefore I am.’ You see? It sounds so trivial, until you see it in context. Here is René, half-convinced that his soul is a toy of demons. His sanity hanging by a thread, he finds this one, simple nugget of truth, and he stands with it in his clenched fist and he says: ‘I’m real! I exist! And upon that rock, I shall build an edifice of reason!’ It’s magnificent, really.”

“And does he?”

“What? Oh, no. No, he was worried about being burned alive by the Catholic Church. He said actually God would never allow such a
terrible ruse to be perpetrated upon a human soul. I don’t know where he found evidence for that. Seems to me … well. The point is that insofar as we are anything, we are things which think. Not
Homo sapiens
but
Res cogitans
.”

This seems to warrant a confirmation, so Joe ventures a noncommittal “I see.”

“In this case, my point is that truth is a slippery item. Hm?”

“Yes, it is.” Because he can think of nothing else to say, even though there are alarm bells ringing in his head.

“And although that slipperiness is a disadvantage in some situations, it is also vital to the way we live. The wrong truth at the wrong moment causes housing markets to plummet and nations to growl at one another. We can’t have too much of it running about loose. We’d have wars all over the place. Economic crisis, certainly—well, we’ve seen that, haven’t we?”

They share a little eye-rolling. The madness of bankers.

“And to make matters more troublesome, it has even been suggested that we human beings are incapable of knowing anything at all, in the absolute sense. We believe. We theorise. But we have no direct perception of whether our belief is matched by the objective universe.”

Mr. Titwhistle sighs deeply. Epistemology is cruel.

“But … what if an engine might be constructed which functioned as a species of prosthesis? Which extended our senses into the realm of knowledge? An engine which allowed us after all to
apprehend truth
.”

He nods as Joe’s eyes flicker at the words. “We would behold wonders. But then … Old atrocities would come to light, old promises would be revealed as lies … And if one were of a scientific bent, one might worry ever so slightly about such a power of observation accidentally destroying life on Earth for the rest of time, or possibly changing the nature of this universe to make it inhospitable to conscious thought in perpetuity. Scientists will go on so about the precautionary principle, won’t they?” He smiles benignly: boffins and their little ways.

“I’m sorry,” Joe Spork says, his thoughts rather focused by this addendum, “what was that last part?”

Mr. Titwhistle shrugs in his seat. “Arvin, you will help me out if I go astray, won’t you?”

“Of course, Rodney.”

“I get lost among the quanta.”

“Leave ’em out.”

“This won’t compromise our strict scientific integrity at all?”

“Needs must, Rodney,” Arvin Cummerbund says, and philosophically puts his fat hand on the horn for quite a long time. A late drinker bangs on the bonnet of the car, raises two fingers, and staggers on.

“You see,” Rodney Titwhistle resumes, “it seems that if all that extraordinary Heisenberg stuff is literally true, we as conscious beings have a sort of role in the ongoing creation of the universe. We cause tiny indecisions to go one way or another, just by looking at them. So one has to ask, if one’s a responsible person: if we learned to appreciate the universe directly and without the possibility of error, would we inaugurate a sort of cascade? What if our way of existing is contingent on these little uncertainties in the fabric of our world? And what if knowing this entails knowing that, which implies that, and so on and so on until there are no open questions any more, and every choice is made as a consequence of every other, and finally we become little … well, to employ a metaphor, little clockwork people. Pianolos, Mr. Spork, rather than pianists. And wouldn’t that rather mean the extinction of intelligence? Don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I grant,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “that it’s a little tricky. Arvin?”

Arvin Cummerbund glances in his rear-view mirror. “Let’s say what we are now is like water, Joe,” he says gently. “Our minds. All right? And this machine might—just might—be like a freezer. It’s possible that it might freeze everything, anywhere, ever. And then we wouldn’t be liquid any more, we’d be solid, and we might never notice, but we’d be following a pattern laid out in advance, feeling we were making our own decisions. Right now we have choice, you see, Joe. A man might decide one thing or another in a moment of stress. It’s not random and it’s not fixed. It’s conscious. But after the freeze … There’d be no escape, ever, from a path set from before we were born to the day we die, which takes no notice of what we do along the way, except in that we are part of the mechanism creating more inescapable paths. We’d be no different from any other chemical reaction. Salt has no choice about dissolving in water, does it? We wouldn’t be special, or conscious, we’d be so much rust. Clockwork men. See?”

“Oh,” Joe says.

“Indeed,” says Rodney Titwhistle gently. “ ‘Oh.’ I quite agree. And
now you are wondering how such a thing was ever built, and the answer ultimately is desperation. Or a species of carelessness—something which is, I’m afraid, rather a feature of the history of weapons of mass destruction. Suffice to say it is an old project. It doesn’t really matter now.

“The Apprehension Engine is a device which would allow one to know the truth of a situation, without fear of error. You can see how that would appeal—to deceive the enemy and know that the deceit was successful; to recognise his lies infallibly. A massive strategic advantage.