The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  But was it certain that, outside the program, the gorgonoid did not have its own independent existence, did not continue its existence there in precisely the same way as it had lived on our screens up to that point, with the sole difference that now we could no longer perceive it?

  “What do you think, Rolf, are they animals?” I asked once, as the project was beginning to near its conclusion.

  “Don’t animals have bodies? Mass?” he said.

  “They are not animals or plants, because they don’t really have bodies. You can’t touch them.”

  “Is that your criterion for an animal? That you can touch it?”

  They looked three-dimensional, but of course they were not. Our understanding was that their life was “apparent” life, it was completely superficial. They were objects, no more than objects, at any rate that’s what it—yes, appeared to be.

  I couldn’t have lived the “apparent” life of the gorgonoid, even if I had wanted to. And that was because I wasn’t “internally consistent,” for I had a quality that the gorgonoids only appeared to have—the state of materiality, a state of intentionality, self, and freedom that had spread inseparably through matter, had dissolved into it. It was this that kept the visible in existence, that gave it a recognisable form, discrete and relatively permanent. It was a state of choice that allowed changes of direction, but only of place, never of time.

  Would I really have exchanged my life for theirs? Would I have given up my materiality, my fleeting moment, for their disembodied seclusion, static even in its mutability?

  —

  What gave us the right to consider their life to be a mere shadow existence, pictures in a magic lantern? Our life differed from theirs in that we loved, hated, feared, and pitied—and were conscious of the events of our own existence. When we were no longer conscious of them, there was little to differentiate between our lives and their existence.

  There were times when I began to have the terrifying feeling that, in some ways, I was becoming like them. It felt as though the things that made my life human were beginning to wither and shrivel.

  During that winter, when I was spending my days in the company of the gorgonoids, I came home to his cold gaze, or did not see him at all. He spent his time in the town, in rooms I did not know, with people I did not know. I did not know which was worse: that I waited for him and he did not come home, or that he came home and it was as if there was nobody there. There was no connection. I looked at him as I looked at the gorgonoids, but he never looked at me. It was as though he was as unconscious of my existence as they were. And when I, too, ceased to look at him, we lived in separate programs.

  My life began to thin out strangely, to empty as if from the inside. I began to become detached, abstracted. I still had a body, and my body had mass, but I was conscious of its existence only momentarily. This state of affairs was not visible from outside. If someone had examined my existence as I examined the gorgonoids, they would not have noticed any difference. But for as long as I myself was conscious of it, I was not a gorgonoid, I only resembled one.

  I had a body and a voice, but I did not touch anyone with my body, and no one touched me.

  And my voice fell silent, even though I, too, desired to shout the ancient words: “My God, if you exist, save my soul, if I have a soul.”

  —

  Gorgonoids always stay in their own world. They cannot approach us, and we cannot approach them.

  For we do not associate with each other. We only program them; we are their gods. And they know as little of us as we know of our gods. But although we created the program, we cannot completely predict what they will do at a given moment. And they know nothing of our power and our weaknesses, for we do not inhabit the same time or the same space. At the moment when something in their world changes, they perhaps receive a hint of our existence, as if two-dimensional creatures were to see a ball sink through their surface-world, and then disappear.

  Is there any interaction? I am asking a straightforward question: In what sense do they exist? In what sense do they live? The gorgonoid, the tubanide, the pacmantis, and the lissajoune. These statistical animals that can only be seen. That are only two-dimensional, even though they appear three-dimensional.

  Did I say “only”? It is unclear in what sense they fail to be three-dimensional. For even if we cannot measure the mass of the gorgonoid, we are able to calculate its volume. And I was unable to rid myself of the following question, however irrelevant it seemed in regard to the institute’s project: Can behaviour exist without consciousness? Does the gorgonoid believe that it can influence its individual life in the same way as we do? And is there any way of proving that it does, or does not?

  If someone asks, is it alive, what does he really mean? And I do ask. I ask, does it exist for itself. Because I believe that only that is true life. If it has no consciousness, but only an abstract and superficial reality, I do not consider it to be alive. It may be true, but it does not live. In that case, it is merely an object and—objectively!—it exists. And exists much more clearly and unequivocally than myself, who can never prove the existence of my internal reality and whose exterior form can easily be destroyed, but never transferred. But it is not alive. No, that I deny it.

  “You can’t,” Rolf said. “How can you dictate that artificial reality is less real than physical reality?”

  “Life is not a spectacle,” I said.

  —

  Gorgonoids always stay in their own world. People always stay in the human world. They cannot function without creatures of the same species. But even a solitary gorgonoid is still a gorgonoid, while a person stripped of all relationships is no longer a person. His life resides in them.

  Gorgonoids! Tubanides! Lissajounes! Nipponites mirabilis! In some ways we were like them, and in others—I thought—even more mechanical than they, like inorganic objects.

  But did they have even the slightest possibility of dreaming of choice as we do, day after day, again and again, and as we would continue to do even if it were conclusively proved that any chance of choice was over, and that it had never really existed? That was where humanity lay—not in freedom itself, but in the dream of freedom.

  I still say that I wish to raise my hand and step out—in that direction! And I raise my hand and take a step. Not knowing whether I have done so because I wish it, or because my will happens to be in harmony with what I must do.

  I still ask: In what sense do we exist? We, who are both visible and invisible? What level of reality do we represent? Is it always the same, or does it sometimes shift, without our realising it?

  How independent, and how dependent, are we?

  And how can we ever cease to exist?

  Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ

  KOJO LAING

  (Bernard) Kojo Laing (1946– ) is a notable fiction writer and poet from Ghana who attended school in the United Kingdom and graduated from Glasgow University in Scotland. Since 1985, Laing has served as headmaster at a school his mother founded in Accra. His early work was in poetry, much of it considered to be in the surrealism genre; he often uses Ghanaian Pidgin English alongside standard English. In his fiction, the surrealist impulse from his verse is often transformed into prose that exists within the territory of the speculative or outright science-fictional. His acclaimed novels include Search Sweet Country (1986), reissued by McSweeney’s in 2012; Women of the Aeroplanes (1988); and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992). His work has been awarded the National Poetry Prize Valco Award and the National Novel Prize in Ghana.

  In her review of the novel in Slate Book Review, Uzodinma Iweala wrote, “Reading Search Sweet Country is like reading a dream, and indeed at times it feels like the magical landscapes of writers like the Nigerian Ben Okri or the Mozambican Mia Couto. Each page delivers an intense blast of vivid imagery, a world in which landscapes come to life when inanimate objects receive human characterization.” Women of the Aeroplanes, meanwhile, is regarded as
a utopian fantasy of sorts, set in Africa and Scotland, and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars is a complex set of experimental fictions set in 2020 in “Achimota City,” an environment indebted somewhat to cyberpunk conceptions of the future.

  Although Laing hasn’t written much short fiction, “Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ” is a kinetic and clever take on the alien contact story that also interrogates organized religion and general human nature. It originally appeared in The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Stories (1992), edited by Chinua Achebe and C. L. Innes.

  VACANCY FOR THE POST OF JESUS CHRIST

  Kojo Laing

  When the small quick lorry was being lowered from the skies, it was discovered that it had golden wood, and many seedless guavas for the hungry. As the lorry descended the many layers of cool air, the rich got ready to buy it, and the poor to resent it. The wise among the crowd below opened their mouths in wonder, and closed them only to eat. They ate looking up while the sceptical looked down. And so the lorry had chosen to come down to this town that shamed the city with its cleanliness. The wheels were already revolving and, when they shone, most of them claimed they were the mirrors of God. The lorry was quick but the descent was slow. So many wanted to touch it. A whole morning had passed leaving its dew behind long ago; and yet the lorry had not reached the earth. The wooden gold was easy with its birds landing and unlanding. And when the great gust of African rain came down, the wise still kept their eyes up, the poor huddled, and the rich shut their purses small. But nobody left. Come down, lorry of golden wood, with your cleanest exhaust ever seen, they said.

  And the old woman was crying. They asked her whether she was crying for a wasted age, or she was crying for the coming lorry. “Come and cleanse me, divine owner of this mammy truck, take my heart now, for I eat too much cassava to be good, I break too many proverbs.” They stared at her, then forgot her, for the lorry’s golden rope had slackened, and was coming down a little faster. If only it could send down some shea butter for the strained necks…and tell the birds to stop their singing so loud, for they wanted to hear the engine and place the range of its power. “But we don’t want material power, we want miracles and the healing of the spirit.” The sceptical looked at the poor for the poor to share the slander of what had just been said. As if to say: when was material bread never needed? But the lorry did not mind the large curiosity below it. The songs of birds changed their direction small, and the seedless guavas rolled against each other. The soft touch came from the sky of fruit and love.

  At first no one saw the gigantic message being lowered from the wheels of the lorry. The dancing and jumping of the children had continued under the intense afternoon sun. There were scores of dark glasses shined for greater shade. The message on the big card, having folded over after the sudden rain, opened out with the sun: VACANCY FOR THE POST OF JESUS CHRIST. The consternation among the crowd spread even at its different intensities: the sceptical felt vindicated, and snorted at the sky, saying that the eternal laws never favoured the wonder-prone, nor the innocent, and that if the heart was closed today, it would be closed tomorrow. And what was joy anyway but a movement of brain energy. What a pity the African scientists were no different, they said! And the wise grew in stature in their own eyes, for the coming of mystery increased the questions and decreased the answers, thus leaving the space between for them to move confidently in. The poor waited and the rich wrote hundreds of cheques in advance. They were all preparing, preparing. And the old woman said as she grew in remembrance for them, “Look at the shame of the children, dancing when they should be kneeling, they don’t train them to respect these days.”

  Among the dotted neem tree copses, among the generous savanna beyond the city, the old gnarled palm tree refused its birds, the weight being too heavy for any more landing; and the rejected wings had risen and joined the golden birds on the descending machine. “If we have birds going and joining the visitation, then we are in trouble,” whispered a brash young man with a girl on his hand and a cap on his head. “You, Boy Kwaku, I knew you had no sense in that tangerine head of yours. Can’t you read? The lorry is coming to advertise and then collect applications for the post of Jesus Christ from both black and white. We have never heard of anything like this and I can’t even eat…but you, such new times will pass you over with nothing showing in you!” screamed an old man with his beard woven around to the back of his head. The old man looked with scorn at the old woman of remembrance, wondering when she was going to be prophetic again between the mouthfuls of roasted cocoyam. Boy Kwaku laughed to his adoring girl, but the old man ignored him and patted his black beard in the sun.

  Even in this time of upward eyes you couldn’t understand why the sun and the rain changed places so often. You ate atua out of season in the rain, and sho in season of the sun. And the shades were stolen rests from the hot valleys. Turn your eyes sideways, you crowd! For the golden lorry with its divine vacancy was getting bigger as it descended. “It is coming to kill us!” shouted a little girl running from one shade to another. Dogs, sheep, goats, and hens moved about with a curious stiffness, kokrokoo. “Daddy, buy the lorry for me, Daddy, buy the lorry for me now now now!…”

  It wasn’t long before the priests and the policemen came; for the simple reason that rumours had grown that there was a deep-bronze man in the golden lorry. “We can talk to something we can touch then,” enthused the two groups. Before the priests came they had insisted that half the town fill the churches, since if this was a divine presence, it would certainly visit a church first. Furthermore, if the sons and daughters of men were to believe in the big VACANCY sign flapping above the valleys, then surely the search indicated would be in a church. But Bishop Bawa asked Father Vea, “Is there anything in the gospels that speaks of a vacancy for the Son of God?” Father Vea, a man that followed his own ways, had entered the valleys with a huge karate jump that he had been trying to teach the bishop to do. These unusual clerics had arrived before the usual ones, and they had also arrived before the herbalists and the traditional priests. “My Lord, we are in unusual times…and I love it!” There was a loud but short-lived cheer for the jump. But the wise were sarcastic about these visitational acrobatics.

  True, there was a dark bronzeman with very clear eyes at the wheel of the lorry. The murmuring in the crowd grew, as the untidy but immaculate-eyed man of ropegold presented one expressionless look after another. The old rain came back and wet the lorry. But the crowd remained dry. Father Vea was jumping about and praying at the same time, as the lone traditional priest, now come, poured libation at great speed. He was trying to beat the golden lorry to Asaase Yaa before it landed. The cries of goats were stuck in the mouth, and Father Vea was going round the mouths of goats trying hard to unstick the sounds. He shouted, “The more apocalyptic we appear, the easier it would be for the divine to pass us by! Let the goats be normal!” “Go back to your African Gonja karate, Father!” someone shouted back. At the edges of the small ponds the guinea grass was motionless with the cries of doves. Bishop Bawa had been told of what was happening while he was in his vast rice and pepper farms. He had been strolling up and down just behind his open-air raffia altar. He and Father Vea had jumped in surprise together, but Father Vea had jumped higher.

  And then the lorry of wooden gold began to shake violently as it prepared to land. The expression of the bronze lorry man had now changed to one of intense concentration. The police moved back, their weapons unconsciously at the ready. Oddly enough, the crowd surged forward instead of back. Father Vea held his hands high in an unknowing triumph….

  So unknowing that the speed of the bronzeman was not even witnessed as he raised a thick arm and gave Father Vea a massive blow on the neck. Before Vea fell, the bronze-black giant had already collected the rifles of the police, with the same lightning speed, and this done without leaving the lorry. And long before the army’s three armoured vehicles could move the bronzeman had already neutralised their wheels and guns. The
old woman of remembrance was sobbing and tending Father Vea. The poor were ready for any old order to be broken, while the rich were inching slowly away, their chequebooks hidden; how could you buy a truck with such a violent driver masquerading as the keep of the vacancy of Jesus Christ? “Didn’t I tell you he was coming to kill us?” shouted the little girl again, with all her shades finished. The cheque keepers must be sobbing, thought the bearded old man.

  The quick African dusk had come as the bronzeman finally jumped out of the woodgold. He stood there staring at the earth, with utter concentration. The heavens were dragging away at the last of the red sunset, and the ropegold hung uselessly out of the sky. The crowd couldn’t bear the man’s concentration as small branches caught fire, and birds flew away from smoke.

  “I fear nothing!” shouted the dark bronzeman suddenly. “I am the master of the skies, and I am the one that killed Jesus Christ behind the millionth galaxy of stars. I have come to seek a replacement for the Lord, because the galaxies have never been the same since his death. I am a violent man looking for peace.” Bishop Bawa looked with more scorn than pity at the strong skytraveller towering above the rest of them. The sceptical looked with dismay at what was happening; they wanted clarity rather than mystery. The wise threw out different questions: “If you have killed the Lord, why should you be allowed to seek a replacement?”

  “You have given me the chance to forgive you,” mumbled Father Vea, trying to rise to his feet under the hands of the forgotten woman of remembrance. Bishop Bawa beckoned to Vea to continue to rest, as he himself moved forward to speak, his rice and pepper farms echoing in his head; he always felt nearer to God through mundane physical images, seen in crises. “If you have killed Jesus,” asserted the little girl of shades, “then this is the town where you too will die.” The animals scattered as the skytraveller combed dust out of his thick hair. The wise wanted miracles to liberate their wisdom…but miracles on whose behalf? “Shame to the sky of murder!” someone shouted against the hard forehead of the bronzling. The first sky of descending love had changed to this. There were now brusque orders and there was violence. But Bishop Bawa spoke all the same, “Did you kill the Lord’s son or did you kill his body?” The bronzling snorted at the bishop, but answered, “Show me the three most important places of the neighbouring city, and I will tell you the secret of Jesus Christ.”