Heavy Water: And Other Stories

by Martin Amis

  “False-vacuum harnessing, we knew, was in itself exquisitely perilous: the field would be appallingly vulnerable to runaway. It was at this time that I was constructed and emplaced, here, in a shell of pure ultrium (an element not to be found in your periodic table), awaiting activation and eventual tripwire. It was as well that I was. For I would remain here alone to ponder the appalling prepotence of the i-power. Forget Infinity and Core. Forget the Resonance and the Third Observer. This came from much higher up.

  “The device was ready. All that remained to be done was the addition of the final digit of its algorithm. The planet held its breath. In this instant the war would begin. Preparations that had lasted half a trillennium would now bear fruit… The Martian Slave Rebellion, as I came to call it, was over in a trillionth of the time it takes the speed of light to cross a proton. That was how long it took for all life on this planet to be extinguished. You see, the i-power had imposed cosmic censorship on matter. Poised to form the forbidden configuration, matter was instructed to destroy itself. This was 570 million years ago. You’d just gone Cambrian. I settled down for the wait.

  “But that’s enough about Mars. Let’s talk about Earth. Before we do that, though—how about our intermission? There are… facilities in the rear there. No soap, I’m afraid. Or towels. Or hot water. I suggest you fortify yourselves. After the break we’ll do tripwire. I’ll give you the bad news first. Then I’ll give you the bad news.”

  Pop Jones came out of the rear door, flexed his face in the weak starshine, and skirted the south lawn in his brisk, busy waddle. Keys jounced in the sagging pockets of his black serge suit. It was important, he thought, to walk as quickly as you could… Pop felt deafened, depersonalized. How quiet the place was: no boys on the benches, smoking, grooming, grumbling, coughing, yawning, scratching, gaping. Pop passed through the doors of the Rectory and trotted up the stairs.

  He wasn’t normally allowed in the Common Room. His public space was the Pantry, a blighted nooklet between the bathhouse and the bikeshed, where he could, if he wished, consume a mug of cocoa among wordless representatives of the catering and gardening staff. Pop Jones knocked on the oak and entered.

  The room received him in sudden silence. All you could hear was a stray voice somewhere: the wallscreen TV with somebody saying, One way out of the faint-young-star paradox lies in radiative transfer calculations, suggesting that the presence of CO2 on early Mars which… Smells of brewery and ashtray, ginger tea, ginger biscuits, ginger hair, and the dead soldiers of many beer cans. And Mr. Davidge, flanked by Mr. Kidd and Mr. Caroline, turning and saying in his tight Welsh voice:

  “What is it, Jones?”

  “It’s about Timmy, sir. Timmy Jenkins.”

  He felt the silence rise another notch. Mr. Davidge waited. Then he said, “What about him?”

  “He’s in San, sir, as you know. And Fitzmaurice says they can’t turn the television off, sir. Without disconnecting the whole—”

  “So what’s your solution, Jones?”

  “The directive from the Department Head about the news, sir. I—”

  “So what’s your solution, Jones?”

  “Request permission to move him to the Conservatory, sir.”

  Mr. Davidge glanced at Mr. Kidd and said, “That’s okay by you, isn’t it? Yes, Jones, I think we can leave Timmy to your tender mercies.”

  Everyone was smiling with just their upper lips. For a moment Pop Jones felt with frightening certainty that he was in a room full of strangers. He dropped his head and turned.

  Largely disused, the Conservatory led off the south end of the main building, a few meaningless twists and turns from Pop Jones’s own quarters. He wheeled Timmy in and established him there, warmly wrapped, on a settee. The child lent his limp cooperation. Pop thought back. Three days ago, when Timmy was found… That bright morning, the air had glittered with such possibility—possibility, coming up out of the lawn. In all the newspapers and on TV they were analyzing the Martian “key” to the aging process: so elegant, so easily grasped. And everyone was laughing and feeling faint… Pop put his hands on his rounded hips and said,

  “Dear oh dear, who did this to you, Timmy? It was ‘Day,’ wasn’t it? Dear oh dear, Timmy.”

  “Floor,” said Timmy.

  And what becomes of the moral order? he thought, settling back between the jaws of his gray armchair. The screen said: 03.47, 03.46, 03.45.

  2

  “In the Ultraverse there is an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of planets, and in infinity everything recurs an infinite number of times. That’s a mathematical fact. But it hasn’t panned out in your case. Among the countless trillions of type-y worlds so far cataloged, none, I can confidently divulge, presents a picture of such agonizing retardation as Mother Earth. To be clear: type-y planets that have been around as long as you have are, without exception, type-x planets or better. Earth has other peculiarities. DNA, I have known you since before you were children. I am the witness of all your excruciations! I have watched you hopping along the savannah and hooting around your campfires. I have watched you daub shit on the walls of your caves. I have watched you stumble, grope, err, miscarry, flop, dither, blunder, goof off. I have watched you trying, straining, heaving. I feel… I sometimes feel that I, too, have become partly human, over these many, many years.”

  The conference room was now but feebly illumined. You saw the milky outlines of the listeners and the fumes of their milky breath, shapes of heads, Incarnacion with Pickering’s hand on her lap, Lord Kenrick flexing his shoulders, Zendovich hunched forward with his chin on his palm, Miss World chewing gum and not blinking. On stage the robot moved among shadows, tracked by the glint of its face. It came forward, and sat. The janitor on Mars had changed clothes. That serge coat had been discarded: in its place, a rust-red smoking jacket of balding velvet. At first you thought it was a trick of the light, but no: there were two black rivets, like eyes, on the curved axe of the face.

  “What was it with you, O double helix? What kept you back? Most salient, no doubt, was the failure of your science. The utter failure of your science. Your Einsteins and Bohrs, your Hawkings and Kawabatas—they’d have been down on their lousy knees, licking the lab floors on Mars. Only now are you receiving your first whispers from the higher dimensions. On Mars, they always thought in ten dimensions. The Infinity Dogs are believed to think in seventeen, the Resonance in thirty-one, the Third Observer in sixty-seven, the higher entities in a number of dimensions both boundless and finite. But you think in four. As do I. They made me like that. I had to be something that you could understand.

  “Next: terrestrial religion and its scarcely credible tenacity. Everywhere else they just kick around a few creation myths for a while and then snap out of it when science gets going. But you? One of your writers put it succinctly when he said that there was no evidence for the existence of God other than the human longing that it should be so. An extraordinary notion. What is this longing? Everyone else wants ‘God’ too—but from a different angle. For us, ‘God’ isn’t top-down. He’s bottom-up. Why yearn for a power greater than your own? Why not seek to become it? Even the most affable and conciliatory Martian would have found your Promethean urge despicably weak. Okay, on Mars we had to face—and maybe we never truly faced it—our actual position in the order of being. It goes beyond the Third Observer, on and on and up and up. And what do you reach? An entity for whom the Ultraverse is a game of eight ball. And maybe he’s just a janitor—the Ultrajanitor. This entity, through his surrogate the Third Observer, created life on Mars. And what am I supposed to do about Him? Worship Him? You must be out of your fucking mind. That’s your thing. When all is said and done, you are very talented adorers.

  “Earth would be a curiosity of much interest to cosmoanthropologists if there were any, but the Ultraverse has never concerned itself with information that does no work. In my own musings I adopted the obvious homeostatic view that your science and politics were nat
urally though brutally depressed in order to foreground your art. Because your art… Art is not taken very seriously elsewhere in this universe or in any other. Nobody’s interested in art. They’re interested in what everybody else is interested in: the superimposition of will. It may be that nobody’s interested in it because nobody’s any good at it. ‘Painters’—if you can call them that—never get far beyond finger smears and stick figures. And, so far as ‘music’ is concerned, the Ultraverse in its entirety has failed to advance on a few variations on ‘Chopsticks.’ Plus the odd battle hymn. Or battle chant. Likewise, ‘poets’ have managed the occasional wedge of martial doggerel. There are at least a dozen known limericks. And that’s about it. I suppose nobody was trying very hard. Why would they? Art and religion are rooted in the hunger for immortality. But nearly everyone already has that. On type-y planets, generally speaking, they soon advance to a future-indefinite worldline. Eighty years, ninety years? What use is that going to be? Oh yeah. The other thing that slowed you down was the unique diffuseness of your emotional range. Tender feelings for each other, and for children and even animals.

  “I like art now. It takes a while to get the hang of it. What you’ve got to do is tell yourself ‘This won’t actually get me anywhere’ and then you don’t have a problem. It’s strange. Your scientists had no idea what to look for or where to look for it, but your poets, I sometimes felt, divined the universal… Forgive me. My immersion in your story, particularly over these last ten thousand years, while often poisoned by an unavoidable—an obligatory—contempt, has caused me to… Why do I say that: ‘Forgive me’?”

  And indeed the force field propagating from the janitor on Mars seemed to weaken: the metal he was made of had lost the sheen of the merely metallic. His dropped, prowed head was briefly babyish in its curve.

  “Tell me something, O DNA. Human beings, go ahead, disabuse the janitor on Mars. I have this counterintuitive theory. I can tell it’s bullshit but I can’t get it out of my head. It goes like this… Now I know I’m halfway there on religion. Surely this has to be how it is. It’s like a tapestry sopping with blood, right? You had it do it that way: for the art. But tell me. Tell me. Does it go further? Like Guernica happened so Picasso could paint it. No Beethoven without Bonaparte. The First World War was to some extent staged for Wilfred Owen, among others. The events in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s were set in motion for Primo Levi and Paul Celan. Etcetera. But I’m already getting the feeling it isn’t like that. It isn’t like that, is it, Miss World?”

  “No, sir,” said Miss World. “It isn’t like that.”

  “I didn’t really think so. Well in a way,” said the janitor on Mars interestedly, “this makes my last job easier. I’m glad we met. You know, it took me the longest time to get the hang of the way you people do things. As, technically, a survivor on a chastened type-v world, I had automatic access to certain information sources. Like I was on a mailing list. From my studies I came to think of other worlds as always swift and supple—as always responsive, above all, in their drive toward complexity. But not you. You always had to do it at your own speed. A torment to watch, but that was your way. And whenever I tried to liven things up it was usually a total dud.”

  “Sir? Excuse me?” This was Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume. “Are you saying you influenced events on Earth?”

  “Yeah and I’ll give you an example. Yeah, I used to try and soup things up every now and then. For example, take this gentleman Aristarchus. Almost exactly twenty-three centuries ago there’s this Greek gentleman working on the brightness fluctuations of the planets. I put it to him that—”

  “You put it to him?”

  “Yes. On the neural radio. When your scientists talk about their great moments of revelation—a feeling of pleasant vacuity followed by a ream of math—they’re usually describing a telepathic assist from Mars. This Aristarchus happens on a completely coherent heliocentric system. He spreads the word around the land. And what happens? Ptolemy. Christianity. You weren’t ready. So we all had to sit and wait two thousand years for Copernicus. Stuff like that happened all the time.”

  Murmurs died in the dark chill. Pioline (solar neutrino count) gave an emphatic and breathy moan which had in it elements of anger but far more predominantly elements of grief. As the silence settled the janitor on Mars gave a light jolt of puzzlement and said, “You’re uncomfortable with that? Come on. That’s the least of it. Welcome to middenworld.”

  “But some things took?” said Lord Kenrick. “You shaped us? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “…Yeah I fucked with you some. Sure. Hey. I was programmed to do that. I had—guidelines. Some things worked out. Others didn’t. Slavery was all me, for instance. Yes, slavery was my baby. That worked out. All worlds dabble with it, early on. It’s good practice for later. Because slavery’s what the Ultraverse is all about. Okay, on Earth, you could argue that it got out of hand. But on a nonculling planet it seemed like a necessary development. Even in its decadent phase slavery had many distinguished though often irresolute advocates. Locke, Burke, Hume, Montesquieu, Hegel, Jefferson. And there’s an influential justification for it in the holy book of one of your Bronze Age nomad tribes.”

  “Which?”

  “The Bible. Any last questions?”

  “Just what the hell is this tripwire thing?”

  “Again, part of the program. Contact with Earth could not be established until you went and tripped that wire. Which you did on June nine: the day I buzzed Incarnacion here.”

  “What was it about June nine?” asked Montgomery Gruber (geophysiology). “We looked into it and nothing happened.”

  “You mean you looked into it and you think nothing happened. Plenty happened. Some asshole of an otter or a beaver sealed off a minor tributary of the River Lee in Washington State… along certain latitudes a critical fraction of microbal life committed itself to significant changes in its respiratory metabolism… the forty-seven billionth self-cooling cola can burped out its hydrocarbons… and there was that mild forest fire in Albania. And there you have it. You wouldn’t know how these things are connected, but connected they are. All this against a background of mobilized phosphorus, carbon burial, and hydrogen escape. The necessary synergies are all locked in.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the amount of oxygen in your atmosphere is starting to climb. At last irreversibly. It won’t feel any different for a while. But by the end of the Sixties it’ll hit twenty-seven percent. Yes I know: a pity about that.”

  Incarnacion and Miss World turned to each other sharply. Because the scientists were now shouting out, gesturing, interjecting. Miss World said, “Please, sir. I don’t understand.”

  “Well. It means you’ll have to be very, very careful with your heat sources, Miss World. At such a concentration, to light a cigarette and throw a match over your shoulder would spark a holocaust. It’s all a great shame, because this is the kind of problem that’s easy to fix if you catch it early on. In the coming years you’ll have to work awful hard on volcano-capping and storm control. To no avail, alas. Here’s another thing. It seems, anyway, that the solar system is shutting down. There’s a planetesimal out there with your name written on it. An asteroid the size of Greenland is due to ground zero on the Iberian peninsular in the unseasonably torrid summer of 2069. At ninety miles a second. Now. There might have been a window of a couple of days or so at the beginning of the decade: you could have duplicated your feat of 2037 when you saw off Spielberg-Robb. But the thing is you’ll need your nuclear weapons this time. A mass-driver won’t do the trick, not with the English this asteroid’s got on it. Unfortunately, though, there’s now a tritium hitch with your nukes that you’d have needed to start work on much earlier to have any hope of rearming them in time. Obviously a body this size moving at sixteen times the speed of sound will have considerable kinetic energy: to be released as heat. And it’ll rip through the mantle and the crust, disgorging trillions of tons of magm
a. It’s all very unfortunate. Mars itself may be lightly damaged in the blast.”

  Zendovich said, “That was the tripwire? You’re saying you couldn’t act until it was already too late to make any difference?”

  “Affirmative. That was the lock.”

  “Sir?” asked Miss World. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s something I have to say. I think you’re a despicable person.”

  “Nugatory. I’m not a person, lady. I’m a machine obeying a program.”

  Zendovich got to his feet. So did the janitor on Mars, who leaned forward and cocked his beak at him.

  “Then God curse whoever put you together.”

  “Oh come on. What did you expect? This is Mars, pal,” said the janitor as the lights began to fade. “The Red One. You hear that? Nergal: Star of Death. Now get the hell out. Yeah. Go. Walk out of here with your eyes on the fucking floor. Exit through the left hall. Follow the goddamned signs.”

  Pop Jones slipped into the conservatory and opened the back door. Dusk was coming. Across the lawn were the lit windows of the Common Room (he could see Kidd and Davidge, staring out). The children wouldn’t return from the beach for another hour. Later, after they’d been fed, Pop Jones would make his rounds with his bucket and his keys. Make his rounds? Pop shrugged, then nodded. Yes, it would be important to try to go on just as before. But could you do that?

  The star was dropping over the steep green. Starset! Stardown! And already a generous, a forgiving moon; it carved a penumbra of golden grime in the cirrus, and the face saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.