by Ken MacLeod
He didn’t find it embarrassing himself. In his teens he’d gone along a few times, he knew what to expect. Other than the fine woodwork of pew and pulpit, the church was harsh in its simplicity: whitewashed walls, windows of frosted rather than stained glass, no choir or musical instruments to accompany the singing. So too was the service. Psalms dolefully sung sitting down, prayers nasally intoned standing up, a sermon expounding an Old Testament verse and offering the gospel in a take-it-or-leave-it manner, with a heavy hint that most of those present, despite hearing such sermons at least twice a week all their lives, would leave it, and be left themselves to the outer darkness, where there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth. The burden of the sermon was an explication of the imprecations against Babylon in one of the psalms, the Authorised Version of which the minister had read as his text and the Scottish metrical version of which the congregation had sung. The sermon seemed to be making some contemporary reference, but it was so coded in metaphor and allusion that Hugh wasn’t sure whether Babylon represented Moscow, Beijing, Washington, London, Brussels, the Vatican, or some hydra-headed multi-tentacled hallucinatory manipulatory illuminati behind all of them. His voice joined those of the congregation in the psalm’s uplifting cadence:
O daughter thou of Babylon,
near to destruction!
Blest shall he be who thee rewards
as thou to us hast done!
Yea, happy surely shall he be
thy tender little ones
who shall lay hold upon, and them
shall dash against the stones.
Afterwards, as the congregation crowded out, warm smiles and handshakes all round, a little confidential and not always spiritual chat, and then dispersal to houses or cars.
Hugh and Nigel walked back home in silence. The others were still out.
‘Better not boil the veg just yet,’ said Nigel. ‘But I can warm a wee pan of soup.’
He took the cold chicken from the fridge and cut a few slices, which he and Hugh ate with bread and bowls of chicken soup thick with carrots and rice. When they’d finished, Nigel stood up and took off his tie, then his fine leather shoes.
‘Shame to waste such a fine afternoon,’ he said, pulling on walking boots. ‘Fancy a stroll up the glen?’
Hugh did. He too left his tie, and beside it a note, saying where they’d gone. Just in case they worried. He was halfway down the drive when he remembered he’d left his phone behind, on the bedside table. The thought of walking up the glen without his phone made him a little nervous, not just because he’d be beyond emergency contact but because he’d be without GPS. His parents had dinned into him the rule about not going into the hills without his phone. It was like brushing your teeth and washing your hands.
* * *
They followed the road west, out of the village, past the bridge and up the glen. It seemed smaller than the glen that figured in Hugh’s childhood memories and haunted his dreams, but it was still impressive, steep-sided, almost a canyon. A little dark burn burbled along beside the road, its white noise only adding to the quiet. Now and again a car passed, or a sheep called, or a curlew cried, but after each interruption the feeling of silence came back. After a few hundred metres of silent strolling along the bottom of the glen, Hugh noticed a familiar gully by the side of the road. He tracked it by eye up the cliff.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You can still climb up there.’
Nigel looked upward. ‘You’ve climbed that?’
‘Yes, often, when I was wee.’
Nigel chuckled. ‘As well your mother and I didn’t know that.’
‘Aye.’
‘Care to try it again?’
‘Yes,’ said Hugh, surprised. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘“Bodily exercise profiteth little”,’ said Nigel, in an ironic tone. ‘But a little is better than nothing. Lead the way.’
Some of it was a scramble, but most of the ascent was like a rugged staircase. Hugh even remembered the steps. About forty metres up he found again a semicircular shelf, thick with heather and bracken, in which he had occasionally sat and surveyed the scene.
‘This is where I climbed to,’ he said. He squatted, shaking lightly clenched hands in front of him, miming firing a machine-gun. ‘Guarded the approach roads.’
‘Ah,’ said Nigel. He sat on the heather, legs hanging over the edge of the shelf. ‘Quite a view.’
They looked out over the glen and the loch for a while.
‘Sometimes,’ Hugh said, ‘on a quiet, hot afternoon like this, climbing in the glen, I used to feel in the silence and the sunlight a sort of… a sense of presence. You know, like in an empty room when you feel someone’s there?’
‘I know the feeling,’ said Nigel.
‘Could that be what people mean by God’s presence?’
‘Nope,’ said Nigel, with a brusque head shake. ‘It’s your brain’s agency-detection module resonating. Like the noise you hear in silence, or the colours you see in the dark or with your eyes closed. The nerve keeps on firing, you see.’
Hugh laughed. ‘Very materialist!’
‘You could say that,’ said Nigel. ‘Or you could say scientific. I’ve looked up the neurology of it myself, and it seems conclusive enough to me. And I’ve listened closely to what people say about feeling the presence of God, and I can’t say it’s anything I’ve experienced myself, though I’ve experienced the feeling you mention often enough.’
He took his pipe and pouch out of his jacket pocket and slowly filled the one from the other.
‘What I take from that feeling is absence, because I know what causes it. The only presence is the rock, the sheer non-human immensity around us. I believe it was once called the sublime. It is not to be mistaken for a spiritual experience.’
‘Now you’re sounding like the minister.’
‘There’s that,’ Nigel said. ‘They are very careful to distinguish odd feelings from the marks of grace.’
He lit the pipe with a match, took a few puffs, then blew out a long stream of smoke, which the breeze caught and wafted instantly away. Then he turned to Hugh with a dry smile. ‘I have none of the marks of grace.’
‘Well,’ said Hugh, uncomfortable, wishing he hadn’t said a word about God, ‘I never thought…’
‘We can speak freely here.’ Nigel flourished the pipe stem at the horizon. ‘We have no phones with us. We are off the radar, so to speak. No doubt we are visible to satellites and drones, but I doubt they have capacity to spare for the likes of us.’
Still sitting, he pushed himself backwards and leaned against the rock face, careless of the back of his suit jacket. ‘I want to say some things to you. I was going to arrange it at some point, but you’ve given me the opportunity to talk in a place where no one else can hear what’s said.’
‘Not even God?’ said Hugh, unable to resist the prod of the old imp.
‘Not even God,’ said Nigel, in a firm but complacent tone. ‘In this world we are almost certainly beyond the reach of God, if indeed he exists at all.’
‘Never heard you say that before!’
‘Never had occasion to say it.’
Hugh shook his head. ‘How could we be beyond the reach of God, even if he exists?’
‘Och,’ said Nigel, ‘this is something I’ve thought for a long time. Every world that is logically possible feels just like a real world if you’re inside it. Now, not even God can make a logical possibility not a logical possibility. Not even God can make two plus two not four. Not even God can make a triangle with four sides. Not even God can make a valid conclusion not follow from a premise. So even if God were to intervene from outside, as it were, into a world, and change events, the most he could do would be to spin off a new world. The logically necessary original world would continue on its merry way, implication after implication’ – he made chopping motions with his hands – ‘ca-chung ca-chung ca-chung, you see?’
‘Mathematical universe theory,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ve come
across it. At university, I think.’
‘Did you now? Well, I worked it out for myself, looking at Maxwell’s equations late one night long ago, and pondering how it could be that they so unreasonably matched the world. And then, you might say, the light dawned. I had no idea there was a name for it. Anyway, that is what I think.’
‘So why,’ Hugh asked, ‘do you go to church, and behave accordingly? I’ve never understood that.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ said Nigel. ‘It is not all pretence, you know. Like I said to you at the time. And like Spinoza said a few centuries earlier.’
‘You read Spinoza?’
Hugh had tried, once.
‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘I rummaged the minister’s discarded books long before you did. And what I took from Spinoza was a consequence of the way I already saw the world. Religion is philosophy for beginners, you might say. At its best, it teaches you to live at peace with your neighbours and to reconcile your own will with what can’t be changed, whether you call that the will of God or the course of Nature, which according to Spinoza are two ways of saying the same thing. These are no small matters to accomplish. And besides – there was another reason, a more pressing reason, for my outward conformity.’ He tapped out his pipe on a stone, then looked up at Hugh. ‘I did it for you, and…’
‘What? For me?’ Hugh shook his head. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘…and to protect myself,’ Nigel went on. He stared straight ahead, at the cliffs on the other side of the glen. ‘You see things, don’t you? And the boy does, I know that, I noticed it when he was two years old.’
Hugh said nothing. Involuntarily, the tip of his tongue moistened his lips.
Nigel sighed. ‘I see things too.’
‘Oh,’ said Hugh. He laughed. ‘I didn’t see that one coming.’
Nigel laughed too, but by way of showing he’d got the joke.
‘Och, whatever the old folks used to say about the sight, it’s not a great deal of use. The day before your grandfather died, I saw him dressed in a suit and laid on the ground out the back of the house. And you know what my first thought was? “The old man never wears a suit except for weddings and funerals.” And then I came to myself, and blinked, and it was gone. I called him straight away, and he was pottering about on his allotment, hale as ever. I didn’t say a word about my premonition. Next day, bang, heart attack, down he goes, felled like a tree. Maybe if I’d warned him… told him to see a GP right away… or maybe the surprise of that would have struck him down then and there.’ Nigel sighed, drew on his pipe and blew out smoke. ‘Who knows? Not me, for sure. And other times… now and again over the years… I’ve seen events that came to pass, but… I don’t think it ever shows you something you can change. Which it couldn’t do, I suppose, if it really showed the future. The future can’t be changed, no more than can the past in my view. It’s not always even personal. There are times when I see the glens full of life, not like now with tourists and wind farms and the like, but as it was in the days when our ancestors built the brochs and the drove roads, smoke coming up from the wee bothies, folk in the fields and boats on the sea, and the lowing of cattle. Now – would that be the past or the future I’m seeing, eh? Answer me that if you can!’
‘I can’t,’ said Hugh. He looked away for a moment. ‘I’ve seen the like myself. Uh… how did you know about me?’
‘I’ve known since I overheard you talking to yourself, as it seemed, when you were five or so, and I put it out of my mind, until that day years later you asked about it. That was when I got alarmed, you see, that you might be interested, that you might talk, and that word might get around, and… you know. And now…’
Nigel got to his feet. He gazed down at Hugh with a curious intensity.
‘That is what this is about, isn’t it? The business with Hope not taking the fix? She wants to keep the gene for the second sight.’
Hugh shook his head. ‘She was against it long before I ever told her.’
‘I bet that was an interesting conversation.’
‘It was that,’ said Hugh.
‘Hmm,’ said Nigel. ‘But why did she object to it in the first place?’
‘She never says why. That’s half the trouble.’
Nigel shot him an understanding smile. ‘And no wonder she doesn’t know. If she has the gene herself, it’s recessive. It’s not expressed, so she can’t express it, so to speak. But she feels it in her bones.’
‘I doubt that’s how it works,’ said Hugh.
Nigel shrugged. ‘“We walk by faith, and not by sight”, as the man said.’ He stepped carefully to the edge of the shelf. ‘Let’s go down.’
As they picked their way back down the gully to the road, Hugh realised that he hadn’t asked his father to say more about what it was he saw, though he was burning with curiosity. He recalled that Nigel hadn’t asked him to elaborate on the little he’d said himself. Maybe it was a subject like one’s sex life, about which you could volunteer information, but to enquire of it would be indelicate, a breach of tact.
And yet it had all been unspoken. Out of such moments, such hesitations and reserves, might there not come habits, then manners, then customs, then traditions, then a way of life?
They reached the road and walked back towards the village. They’d just come in sight of the house when two jet fighter-bombers flashed into view around the shoulder of the hill on which it stood, screamed overhead, banked just behind them, the starboard wingtips almost scraping the road, and hurtled away between the narrow walls of the glen.
‘Training exercise,’ Nigel explained, as Hugh’s ears rang from the sonic boom. ‘I don’t know what they’re training for, but if they ever have to bomb Lewis, it’s a fine job they’ll make of it.’
Hope and Mairi and Nick had returned, hungry and sandy. The vegetables were simmering. Nick’s drysuit was in the sink, getting wet. Hugh went upstairs to recover his phone. He switched it on, stepped out of the bedroom and, on impulse, into the office. He stared out of the window at the hill.
Up there…
He took his phone out and went back through its memory, passed on like a gene from chip to chip through generations of technology. There it was: the map of his and his pals’ route up to the culvert.
He stood there thinking about GPS, and tracking. Then he pointed his phone at the printer on the side of the desk. The device whirred. He picked up the sheet of A4, folded it twice, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. He was about to go downstairs when it struck him that a map wasn’t much use without a compass. He went into the bedroom and rummaged in the bedside cabinet. All sorts of boyhood junk fell out, among it a small transistor radio and a Silva compass. He opened the back of the radio, and found to his relief that no battery had been left inside to corrode it. He stuck the radio in his pocket, hung the compass by its lanyard on the dressing-table mirror, and went downstairs.
19. Workaround
Geena sat on her stool in the corner of the lab and gazed listlessly out of the window at the bright blue June sky and the fluffy white clouds above the skyline of Hayes. She felt depressed, and there seemed no rational reason for it. The flash-backs had stopped, and she now had a nightmare only about once a week. She no longer flinched visibly at the sight of a police vehicle or uniform, and the sound of a siren no longer made her jump, though it made the hairs on her back and the nape of her neck stand up as if cold water had been poured down her spine. On the whole, she was quite glad that she hadn’t opted for trauma counselling. According to her cursory online research on clinical outcomes, she was recovering better by herself than she would have done if she’d sought professional help.
Her notes were all written up and her field observations were almost complete. She really had more than enough data now to work with, and she already had reams of outline written on the theoretical questions she had posed to herself when she’d set out on the thesis. All that remained was to integrate them, to match her observations with (or pit them against) the var
ious contending-but-compatible theoretical frameworks – she could already see, to take an obvious example, that the all-male composition of this particular dry-lab team raised interesting questions about the extent to which the self-understanding emerging from their practices was gendered. The developing crash-and-burn, trial-and-error style of work was, you could say playfully, penetrated by masculinities, undoubtedly macho. And the precise location of value production within the intellectual process would be fascinating to pinpoint. A critical-ecological and non-anthropocentric approach to the animal and plant products (aha!) that provided what was so revealingly called the raw material for genetic manipulation, even in the case of pure synthetic biology, promised to yield some fruitful (so to speak) lines of investigation.
Lots to be getting on with.
And yet, and yet… she couldn’t, now, revisit the texts or her own preliminary theoretical notes and queries without seeing, like barbed wire woven through a flowery, fecund trellis, the actual functioning of those theories and texts, as explained to her by the estimable Dr Estraguel, as well as the point that had been brought sharply to her attention by the ministrations of the police. She had lost the taste for theory; in fact, thinking about it nauseated her, quite literally: it gave her actual physical nausea. Rereading the notes she’d written when the project had been all shiny and new and exciting, on the other hand, merely made her want to cry.
The cause that she’d taken up in dogged retaliation for her enhanced interrogation and in expiation of her earlier unwitting and recent coerced complicity in the whole system of ideological and physical repressive apparatuses – her support for Hope Morrison – that too had lost its savour. It had run into the sand last week, when Hugh Morrison had dismissed her suggestion for how to get his wife off the hook. She’d tried calling him, but his phone had given her an even more unceremonious brush-off. She was thinking of somehow getting around that, of appealing to Hope directly, over her husband’s head or if necessary behind his back, just in case he was standing in the way of or distorting the truth about what Hope might herself seize on as the exact solution she was looking for, her get-out-of-jail free card, and would jump for joy and weep with gratitude on Geena’s shoulder for its delivering.
