Out of Time (21 page)

Randolph merely shrugged.

‘We’ve travelled along different paths, your civilisation and ours, but it seems to me we’ve arrived at the same point. Man’s destruction of man. We’re all the same.’

Joe did not then attach any significance to Randolph’s remark, offered without emphasis and with a dismissive shrug.

Joe had always taken life for granted. The limited world of home, school, family and friends had absorbed him and, while he had some personal problems, they were not major threats to his well-being. The all- inclusive term ‘adolescent’, like some label at the supermarket, reduced them to an apparently common denominator. He would mysteriously grow out of his difficulties. This, at least, was the myth but as he approached the end of his teens he could see no reduction in the weight of inner conflicts. If anything, they increased and he was exponentially less able to deal with them.

The wider world, the one outside his private existence, he left to other people. He watched world events in an unfocussed kind of way, conscious of their potential danger but not seriously disturbed by them. The words and works of politicians sounded like a howling gale on mountain ranges too high for him to hear. He had other things to think about.

Here, in this wilderness that offered no distractions but left each individual with a choice, fend for yourself or perish, the more fundamental issues of being human were thrown into relief. He pondered on what lay behind Randolph’s remark.

He turned to Kathryn, breathing easily in her sleep, her face partially concealed by her fair hair. He gently pushed it aside and she opened her eyes to meet Joe’s serious gaze.

‘Is it time to get up?’

Dawn was breaking, promising a clear day. She half rose but he pushed her down.

‘Not quite. I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you think people are inherently evil?’

‘When they wake other people and face them first thing in the morning with deep philosophical questions, yes.’

‘If they got you a hot drink?’

‘Then I would think them very good indeed.’

Joe padded upstairs with two steaming mugs of a herbal tea that was the common beverage and returned to the attack.

‘Well, do you?’

‘I don’t think I have a clear-cut answer. There are certainly plenty of wicked people about. We’ve got Helmuth and, by the sound of it, you’ve got more than your fair share of tyrants and dictators.’

‘What makes them behave as they do? What’s in it for them?’

‘Power,’ she said. ‘It corrupts people. Look at Helmuth! He was a good man until power was put in his hands.’

He supposed she was right. In the history of his world there was one common factor - domination. Whatever the stated aims of imperialist countries, the outcome was the same. Give any set of people a means to hold sway over the rest of humanity and they would use it without mercy. Long-life drugs, nuclear weapons. It came to the same thing.

He put his arms round her. Had they got time?

‘YOU don’t seriously believe in a superhuman being called God who alone created the universe?’ Otto asked. His tone was incredulous.

Joe’s had been a conventional protestant upbringing; he had been christened and had an elaborately illustrated card of Jesus surrounded by angels to prove it, and he and his mother went to church at Christmas with his grandparents, sometimes at Easter. It had always seemed a meaningless and formal affair to Joe whose mind was on other things less spiritual. He was constantly amazed at the fervour with which people prayed to a God who remained stubbornly invisible. He had tried the odd bit of prayer himself, once when a particularly fierce row was in progress in the bedroom next door. He asked God to put a stop to it, to have his father stay with them forever and ever, and he made a deal. If God left a leaf on his bed during the night he, Joe, would believe in Him. It seemed a fair bargain as God was always asking mankind for one’s soul. But there was no leaf in the morning and his father left home shortly after.

That settled the matter. God did not exist, not at least in his, Joe’s orbit and when, at age thirteen, the question of his confirmation came up he refused to countenance it. His grandfather, who lived in a thirties middle England long extinct, was outraged. When threats failed to work he tried bribing Joe with the promise of a gold watch, the last thing Joe wanted. Mrs Harding, who was indifferent to the outcome, was surprised by Joe’s intransigence, the first manifestation of a character trait she was to encounter with more serious consequences at a later date.

But God was clearly a presence for other people. When a fight broke out at school between a Catholic boy and a Protestant from Belfast, it gave Joe pause and instituted a school debate to which he listened with attention, concluding that hard economics was the major motivating force on both sides. The different religious interpretations he viewed with superior disdain. Later, comparative religious studies at school gave him a wider breadth of understanding while Ground Zero, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and the Middle East conflicts left little room for ignorance to even the most disinterested.

The group listened intently to Joe’s description of the major religions. These were so far removed from their beliefs and experiences that Joe despaired of making them understand the complexities of the various dogma. But he had once again under estimated their grasp of essentials.

‘All your religions,’ Otto, who had questioned him closely, now said, ‘they may have different names but they’re really all the same. Monotheistic. Mere superstition. We left that behind generations ago.’

This assumption of superiority nettled Joe. Feeling he owed a debt of loyalty to his own world, he put up a defensive argument.

‘I didn’t say God was superhuman. The belief is that He has no body, He is an incorporeal spirit and it is part of that spirit that He has bequeathed to us - the divine spark. We’re not like animals. God has raised us above them.’

Joe was glad Kathryn was busy elsewhere. She would most certainly have protested.

‘We appreciate beauty,’ he continued, ‘we can read, write, we can think abstract thoughts. We believe in the spirit, we believe in an afterlife. Well, some people do.’

‘What kind of afterlife?’

‘When you die God or his son Jesus Christ.’

‘Son?’

‘Yes, God sent to earth His only son to save mankind.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have made too good a job of it.’

Joe ignored this and continued, ‘God judges whether you have led a good life and followed the Ten Commandments.’

‘Which are?’

‘Ten exact instructions on how to live. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt honour thy father and mother. They’re are about the only ones I can remember.’

‘Seem eminently sensible to me. How can He tell whether you have followed them?’

‘The eye of God is always on you.’

‘So, if God approves of your conduct....’

‘Come Judgement Day....’

‘What’s that?”

‘That’s when God decides where all the dead spirits go. If you have led a good life you’ll be resurrected and reside in heaven for eternity.’

‘And if you haven’t obeyed the commandments?’

‘You stay dead. Forever. You are sent to hell, to the devil.’

‘The devil?’

‘He’s the evil spirit. He tempts us to sin.’

Otto looked at him in amazement.

‘One personification for good and one for evil. Interesting, but a bit simplistic, don’t you think? All this sophistication you’ve been telling us about, all the scientific and medical marvels and advances. We’re just primitive people, aren’t we, but…’

‘I never said that!’

‘No, but you thought it.’

Joe looked abashed.

‘…but at least we don’t have to invent and dress up a couple of beings and pretend they stand in for good and evil.’

‘As I explained, there are lots of religions.’

‘Do they all promise life after death?’

‘As far as I know, yes.’

‘That at least I can understand. People hanker after some kind of personal survival, like to pretend they never die.’

‘Which you don’t believe?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘What does that mean?”

‘It means first of all that we haven’t divided the afterworld into hierarchies with one lot of people going to heaven and another lot to hell; secondly, we don’t have a god. No one hands out goodies or bribes us to behave.’

‘That would explain Helmuth and his crowd!’

‘You mean that because of your religions everyone in your world is good? Doesn’t sound like it from what you’ve told us, sounds as though people use their religion as an excuse for intolerance.’

‘That’s partially true.’

‘So it doesn’t make any difference either way. The logical conclusion is that man is inherently evil no matter who or where he is.’

‘Then what Otto, according to you, is the alternative? What’s your recipe? Your philosophy hasn’t worked any better than ours.’

‘That’s true. But it once did and perhaps will again. And whatever we do, it doesn’t stop the world existing.’

Did it not? Otto was referring to the world as he knew it; but what, in Joe’s world, of the apocalyptic prophecies of the end of civilisation? They had become almost commonplace but were ignored except by odd individuals, like his geography teacher, who lectured on Gaia and gave humanity only one hundred years more existence, a mere blink of the eye to these people. Should he tell them? He thought not. It would open the floodgates to speculations impossible to satisfy. The similarities and differences between the two worlds were irreconcilable. Same heavens, same vegetation, same towns, even same names, presumably same earth but the two worlds at variance with one another. He could not understand how, under such circumstances, the atmosphere above this world remained unpolluted while back in his the ozone layer had a hole, ever getting wider. What had prevented the pollutants leaking into this atmosphere? And if there were nuclear meltdown back home would this world be affected? Probably not. It was impossible to devise a logical structure to this conundrum and he did not try. It would remain as puzzling as his sudden arrival.

‘Just look around you,’ Otto continued, more animated than Joe had ever seen him, ‘there’s a divine element in everything, animals, fish, plants, even stones and rocks. There’s absolutely no need to invent gods.’

Joe pointed to the kitchen flagstones.

‘Even in these? Or the erratic in Bantage?’

‘Yes, why not? Stones and rocks have been shaped by the elements for millions of years, by water and ice and weather. They’re our time clocks. Their span is merely different from ours and of course much, much longer.’

‘What about man? How does he fit in?’

‘Perhaps due to a cosmic accident, Man has been given the capacity to perceive divinity. I don’t know if animals or plants do. They may. We have no means of knowing but what is sure is that we have the privilege of being able to perceive the mystery of Being and to believe in a nature that is numinous. And that places a great responsibility on us.’

‘Does that apply to the townspeople?’

‘They no longer recognise it, discarded it long ago. Don’t you know that people with only power as their goal lose all sense of perspective, all spirituality, all humility in the face of creation? It enables them to perpetrate the most terrible atrocities.’

Flashes of past and potential history confirmed every word Otto was saying. It made Joe shiver with apprehension for his civilisation, made him realise to what extent he and his contemporaries had turned away from facing basic issues. And there was little time.

‘Isn’t this true of all the tyrants in your world? I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. You see there’s a basic flaw in your argument. If your God is all powerful and good why doesn’t he stop evil?’

‘Free will,’ Joe replied.

That’s what he’d been told anyway.

‘Sounds like a good excuse for God’s lack of power to fulfil His most basic function,’ Otto said.

Joe found this difficult to deny. He changed tack.

‘OK, so you believe in divinity. In which case, what happens to you when you die?’

‘You lie in the ground and decompose.’

‘Well, that’s cheering. Not much divinity in that.’

‘But there is. Our bodies decompose and feed the earth, they are part of the material universe. They die and revitalise. That’s an afterlife.’

‘According to your philosophy a person just disappears as though they’d never been. They’re nothing but food for worms.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with worms. And a person doesn’t just disappear. Their good deeds live after them. The greater the deeds, the longer they’re remembered and the resonance of what they achieved continued. And don’t forget, they leave possessions and works of art. What about my father’s carving that you value so greatly? What about the animals you’ve made since you’ve been here? They won’t disappear, even if you do. We’ll always treasure them.’

This sounded like an obituary. Did Otto, with his uncanny prescience, know something Joe did not? Joe was not prepared to pursue the possibility.