New Worlds

by Edited By David Garnett

  Personal hooks were slung over the ceiling beams. They hung themselves there, hung like hams, jostling the festooned bats. Hot or not, they slept. Sleep was now a compulsory programmed six hours. After the first half of the sleep programme, they came down and assembled outside the hut. There the president’s body, bone and gristle, lay in its box. The box was decorated with a wreath of lead-encased dog skulls and chicken legs. Through the coffin’s oval window, the president’s face looked blindly up towards vacancy. His hair continued to grow. It patched him whiskery white and black like a badger, as if he was having a last joke on the world of men and clones.

  Chief Attorney Gyron scrutinised his compass, seeking magnetic south before giving his orders by high-decibel whistle. The clones shouldered the coffin. They stood mute, disconsolate, undreaming, eyes smouldering in blind mode. Gyron flashed the stinger at their backs to get them moving. They marched in ashen step. Gyron climbed into his walker and followed; its metal legs going clarp-clarp-clarp, like a psychotic band playing yakkahula.

  The Great Grave was half a day’s hike away—if they could reach it safely. There the dead president would be liquefied, turned into earth-libation.

  The eggs of day unscrambled. The Six Blinders glowed their red bars overhead in a pitch-black sky. No one heard their ringing.

  Chainganging onward, the clones in their skulls heard only the music of Happydrug. They rejoiced in their misery.

  Less than three verts from the sleepwalkers, an enemy force was converging on them, foul of mouth and body and mind, intent on seizing that box containing the decomposing figure.

  ~ * ~

  The singing sleet, the driving snow, the knife-edge mountains, the way forever ill-defined, the enemy soldiers wrapped in rags like mummies, their faces lined, veined, veiled like hags. Moving as if dead along narrow defiles, their old wounds opened and bled steam and shit. All, all bleak, open to frostbite, stones, cross-winds, ice. No comfort in nature and none in their minds. Their paralysed king was hauled along in a bamboo cage, up and down precipices. He screamed occasionally on a weak feminine note.

  Above the frowsty be-furred heads, banners waved, lugged with great effort against the streaming screaming air. These were the insignia of religion, lending their unction to the death patrol. Monks, heavy of crux and coat, laboured up the cliffs with coffers containing sacred relics of medieval kings, Pochavan, Destriney, Gravelbig, Gray the Ungrateful, Evalsh, now little more than gristle.... A foot here, a femur, shards of bone, a slice of pate there, parts unknown, bound in silver. Faith, institution, nought if not nation, saved over centuries. Fought over, prayed over, hoarded in times of destitution, furtively kissed. Bringing the bearers no good.

  But where the relics were, there ran tribal blood, thicker than serpent ichor.

  Soon now the ambush, swift attack, thrust of sword, death in a stained storm. Could they but seize upon the old president’s corse, no less!.... Maybe quantum basis of consciousness, brain’s season, could be restored....

  Unreasonably, they dreamed of reason.

  Bedevilled, they closed on the president’s procession with every step and slip. As a spur, the introit oft-repeated from frost-encrusted lips:

  “On, brave shaggers, together, alone! One more dose of death that we may have life.

  On, shaggers brave, brave to the bone! The thrill of the kill that we may have life.

  “Life, Meat, and Frig.

  Not, intoned the monks, Life Everlasting. Nothing so big.

  “Simply a moment of light, a lick of it to the heart, a finger up the rotten boghole of Time. Pain, pah, grasp the prick of it—that something forgotten as a fart might start up again.”

  Their tongues hanging out, panting like pye-dogs among the granites and scree. Minor-key stuff, every word snatched away into the howling gloom. Knowing nothing of the functionality of futurity, yet they were the very switchback of history itself.

  Now, high above their tawdry backs, the Six Blinders crossed. Blanket lightning turned the sky white as lady’s lace. Over the eyes of the ferocious marchers, nictitating membranes oozed into place. The count of twenty, then the phenomenon was past; all that prevailed was the starless black above, crossed by its dull red spirals.

  “One more pass, doom-drinkers, womb-shrinkers, one more abyss, then, Hell’s snatch!—dogs’ piss, weird powers, and down in a batch upon the clone stinkers! Then back to the towers of home, lustily, the president ours, in our custody, bony in his lone bower!”

  ~ * ~

  Dreamless, the six numb clones march onwards with their mute burden. Left right left right, moonlight in their calmed cerebra. Heaven is hailing down at them. The attorney goading them, they move through a valley bottom. A waterfall rushes from the ground, splashes against bare rock, bursts upwards to the peaks concealed in mist. The noise is a death rattle in its own throat.

  Gyron knew that the Great Grave was not far now. There the body of the old president would be dissolved in acid and poured into the barren soil. An ash tree would sprout from his remains. Presidents had an easy life, sheltered from birth. The symbolism of their last journey into the harsh lands appealed greatly to his mind. All was symbolism. He understood that now. In this world, reality was what he could never possess, grasp though he might at its trappings. He was himself a symbol of that greater thing which lay beyond, like a figure on an embroidered screen, crowded with other figures.

  And when his party had gained the place of the Great Grave, he too would enter it with his president.

  He rejoiced, and the sleet slashed down upon his shoulders, its blades on his blades.

  ~ * ~

  Kirpal Quarmless was born in Singapore. The Quarmless Theory was born when he was in exile in Europe. Quarmless investigated the nature of consciousness. He was curious to discover why the minute quantum level of particles, waves, and atoms hardly seemed to fit in with the classical picture of a unitary, Newtonian universe. Quarmless’s early mathematical probings investigated this discrepancy. Early on, he saw that mathematics itself—embedded in the old systems—was no more than a sophisticated tool of the discrepancy. A truthful view of the world was not to be gained through the faulty lens of its prevailing math.

  His findings were that the old classical theory of the universe, together with that of small reactions, was by its nature unable to explain the means by which consciousness had developed. His paper, Multi-World Understanding of the Quantum (2050), pointed the way to a new mathematics, beyond mere aggregates of computations— beyond which aggregative system even the most powerful computers had proved incapable of progressing.

  Quarmless’s proof that computation had led to a perceptual flaw in all scientific method was both difficult to comprehend and highly challenging. It overturned the accepted nature of the world. Finding his name vilified, Quarmless went into hiding.

  Unpalatable scientific findings in the past had eventually led to new levels of understanding. So it had been with Darwin and with Einstein. Now it was Quarmless’s turn. There were open minds who saw—with hope and trepidation—that he had opened the way to a revolution in thought. The universe had to be reinvented.

  When the early heat of denial had died down, it became apparent to mathematicians and scientists, most notably the Cochrane group working on MFD, Mental Functional Distortion, where that revolution in thought lay. Earlier attempts to explain the workings of the human brain in terms of probabilistic physical activity were dead as the rhino. The old precise mathematical laws on which the twentieth-century computer had operated were insufficient to explain the operations of consciousness. Certainly, those laws (man-made and not natural) had proved unable to explain a universe which necessitated consciousness. Pain, love, the appreciation of beauty, the delights of music, a thousand sensibilities owing no tribute to reason— these and other effects were explicable only in terms of a functionality beyond classical and quantum parameters. Quarmless’s multi-world math added a dimension to what had hitherto been the equivalent of
Flat Earth thought.

  ~ * ~

  “I’ll change the world,” Quarmless said, sheltering, growing a disguising moustache in a Bavarian village. “Descartes, Aristotle, changed mankind’s perception of the world. So will I.”

  He was bitter. He saw his tremendous idea slipping from his fingers. Others would develop what he had started. He was nineteen. The syonanto, the Singapore secret police, were after him.

  ~ * ~

  In search of new quarmless integers, the Oxford-based Cochrane nexus of scientist-philosophers began to perceive practical applications of MW math such as Kirpal Quarmless himself had never considered.

  “In five years, we shall hold within our hands a new understanding of reality,” announced Robert Penstimmon, the leading member of the group, in a perivision broadcast.

  It took them not five years but four. And the suicide of one member of the group.

  They found themselves staring into a reality which had barely been dreamed of.

  The quantum theory had offered an explanation for the nature of chemistry, the existence of planets, the phenomenon of heat and cold, and other familiar properties. Sentient beings such as humans had seemed to exist—had thought of themselves as existing—in a classical world. Yet consciousness, that mysterious quality, had originated on quantum levels. The new MW math showed mind to be a factor of something beyond, developing in what came to be called the quarmless universe.

  “What will we find in this so-called quarmless universe?” an early interviewer had asked Penstimmon.

  Penstimmon’s reply became world-famous. “Death, shit, love, transfiguration...”

  He eventually explained that, in layman’s terms, humanity was confronted by an entirely new perceptual breakthrough. No longer was brain conceived of as a function of algorithms projected from classical structures or quantum functions. It was rather the instrument of metamorphosis into another frame of being.

  As some acceptance of the new concepts dawned, there was a brief period when stock exchanges slumped, armies drew back, and governments hesitated to raise taxes.

  “We have long recognised that the phenomenon of consciousness is strangely at odds with the known universe,” Penstimmon said in a television interview. “We have mistakenly perceived it as a contradiction, a unique factor. It is rooted in the laws of Quarmless Theory which are the actual motivators of our universe. Only now can we actually formulate how our world operates. “

  “So there’s another universe we can see into? Can we—well, can we get into it?” asked the interviewer.

  “The question is one of new perception.”

  “So this quarmless universe isn’t real? You can’t walk in it?”

  “You must put the case the other way round,” Penstimmon said. “We should be there. We really are there. We have all been walking about here all our lives, within an illusion. Much like being trapped within a bubble. Ours is an unreal perceptual universe.”

  The interviewer permitted herself a wintry smile. “Countless millions of people are going to find that hard to believe, professor.’

  “Countless millions of people still find it hard to believe the Earth goes round the Sun, yet it is so.”

  “One last question before we go over to the Sports desk. Is this new place going to be heaven or hell?”

  “We have all had to live in both Heaven and Hell, in this perceptual bubble of a universe. When we escape all illusion, the quarmless place is bound to be either one or the other. As yet, it is too early to say which it will be.”

  END

  ~ * ~

  This story is, as far as I know, unique in the history of fiction. It was written over several generations, constantly revised, updated, never finished.

  As I have related elsewhere, an ancestor on my mother’s side was a Chinese of humble origins. He lived as a simple indentured labourer in Capetown, and was moved about Cape Province at the will of his master, Ben Moshe Joel. When the Boer War broke out, Joel presented him as a cook to the British 4th Hussars. It was a patriotic gesture.

  My ancestor’s name was Jiang Office, or so it had been entered in the records of the Joel Exportation Company. Jiang’s expert cooking made him a favourite with the Hussars, who corrupted his family name to the English first name of John. John he was, and John he remained. During the battle of Omdurman in 1898, John saved the life of a young English officer, by name Winston Leonard Churchill. In gratitude, Churchill freed John Office, buying him from the regiment and taking him back to England as a personal servant.

  The erratic Churchill soon grew tired of John’s limited English. He locked the man up in a stable block and gave him four weeks in which to write a piece of prose of not less than one thousand words in perfect English.

  John failed to do this, and was sacked from Churchill’s service. He took with him the prose piece he had written, entitled “Trafficration” (his English still falling short of perfection). He found his way to London. There, a poor Irish family in London’s East End took pity on him, giving him a floor to sleep on.

  The prose piece John wrote in Churchill’s stable marks the beginning of a story entitled “Transfiguration.” It was a tale of the suffering and exodus of a whole people. Setting the piece to one side, John proceeded to teach himself idiomatic English. Perhaps he hoped that by so doing he might again find a place in Churchill’s employ. Instead, he fell in love with an Irish girl who had a room in the same lodging house as he. Her name was Rosie Mulvihill. Her father, Pat, was a brutal drunkard from whom she had escaped.

  Unfortunately, Pat caught up with his daughter and hauled her back to Ireland. John was heartbroken.

  Winston Churchill became newsworthy at this time. He had been a Conservative MP. His switch to the Liberal Party created a scandal. The sensation was fully reported in the Daily Mail. It gave John an inspiration. He wrote an article entitled, “How I Saved Churchill’s Life,” which was immediately accepted by the newspaper.

  The article was published under the name John Orldiss. On the proceeds of his sale, John could afford to sail to Ireland in search of Rosie Mulvihill.

  She was easily found. Pat, her father, had murdered her mother in a drunken fit, and was up for trial. It was in all the papers.

  John married Rosie, living on her slender earnings as a singer while he tried to break into journalism. They produced three children in quick succession, Brendan, Boyce, and Bryan. Only Bryan survived infancy.

  John sometimes acted as messenger for a man whose business he never knew, who went by the code name Bugle. He also turned again to revising his first prose piece. To him the story was talismanic, a sign of his freedom. He now diverted the theme of exodus into an account of armed struggle between two gangs of bandits in the mountains of western China. He had read a brief outline of an actual encounter in a South African paper.

  Although he never managed to complete the story, he wrote other ephemeral pieces of fiction, some of which were published in ephemeral Irish magazines.

  However, luck came his way, for Rosie’s singing in a Dublin pub attracted the attention of James Joyce, the poet and novelist. Rosie and John became quite friendly with Jim before he went abroad.

  John made his son Bryan run messages for Bugle. Bryan disliked the man who called himself Bugle, and he disliked the job. Once when he had an urgent message with which he was to run to deliver to a butcher’s shop, he threw the note into a waste bin instead. Two days later, Bugle was shot dead behind an hoarding advertising Nivea Vanishing Cream.

  John arranged for young Bryan to sail over to Europe with the Joyces. Jim got fed up with Bryan and left him in Paris with a man called Jacques Latourette, a Belgian who had lost a leg in the first world war. Latourette had been a sapper; he possessed considerable scientific knowledge, which he perverted into distorted cosmological theorising. His theory that Earth was a satellite of the Moon, rather than vice versa, won many adherents world-wide.

  The Belgian was slightly unhinged. He could talk o
f little but the war and what he and his friends had suffered on the western front. He had secured a considerable advance from the French publisher Gallimard for his story (and was in any case a man of independent means, keeping as he did two mistresses and a parrot called Colette). After the first sentence of his account, ‘“God, it’s crazy cold in this trench,’ Desrolles said, as he and his soldier mates huddled together on the duckboard,” Latourette ran against a writer’s block which had lasted six years. When young Bryan Orldis (as his name was given on his passport) came along, Latourette took a gamble.

  “It’s a wonderful story, but I don’t know how to proceed with it,” said Latourette. He chewed his fingernails.

  Bryan, immature as he was, had taken a liking to Fifi Fevertrees, the Belgian’s Anglo-French mistress.

  “I could write the story for you,” he said.

  He got the job. He lived in Latourette’s house, where Fifi soon taught him to, as she put it in her genteel English way, “kiss her between the legs.”