by Adam Roberts
Our saviour took to his feet and walked out of ruined Jerusalem.
‘Look upon this,’ he said, to the whole of the world. ‘He was your child and I have taken him from you.’ And this, although we did not realise it at first, was his revenge. It was this action that was his punishment.
At first we held our breaths, and barely believed it. Satan himself had been defeated, and we could only rejoice.
The United Nations voted him formal thanks. But he refused all money, or reward, and slipped away from the world. Who knows where he has gone?
In a year we had rebuilt many of the world’s broken structures. With a decade there was a spike in the birth rate, as we began to replenish the world with a new generation. For Satan was gone, and the skies no longer rained blood, nor did locusts swarm, or the Santamanga afflict us, or the zombies or the Frankenstein beasts. All that was magical passed away from the world.
There is an inertia in the ways of the world. Many people continued religious practice and ritual. But the destruction of Satan had immobilised God, of whom the Devil is a portion. At a stroke all the faiths of the world were emptied of meaning. Over time most people abandoned temples and churches, and lived in a purely material cosmos. For those of us, such as I myself, who had lived through the horrors of the last era of the supernatural, this was a blessing. But a new generation was born, without the savour of transcendental meaning, who came into the world as mere sophisticated automata. There is no light in their eyes - when I talk with them, they talk logic and sufficiency, and the world has grown grey from their breath.
This, as we now understand, is how he has punished us - and punished us justly, for we promised to reward him for his actions and then we reneged on our promise. So this is what he did: he took away the causes of our suffering, and therefore he took away the wellspring of our souls. There is no God without the Devil. The world had once been pied, as all beauty is; but he removed the contrast, and he muted the colours, and we are to blame. It is no longer a pied place; it is uniform. Our children succeed us, and they are tall, and strong, and rational. But they are without spirit and without faith, and they are without the capacity for wonder. The colour has gone. I tell children today stories of the old days and they are neither enchanted nor terrified, for enchantment and terror have gone out of the universe. That is what he took away. He came to a particoloured world and left it monochrome.
On the other hand, our new world does possess a great deal of ergonomic and splendidly functional civic architecture.
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~ * ~
Constellations
The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Kant
1
‘You know how it can be with teenagers,’ said Strong-in-the-Lord.
‘Teenagers,’ The-Unerring-Word replied, nodding.
Strong-in-the-Lord adopted a higher, more nasal voice to speak the part of his son, ‘But why Dad, what’s wrong with nostrils? God made them - didn’t God make them?’ He shook his head, and resumed in his usual tone. ‘And so on. Just wouldn’t leave it alone. I said to him, God may have made them, but that’s no reason to flaunt them around. God made other holes in the body - if you see what I mean. Mouths. Ani. Urethral holes. You wouldn’t go about displaying those for everybody to see.’
‘Which, surely, convinced him?’
‘But that’s what I’m saying,’ said Strong-in-the-Lord. He slid a finger underneath his faceveil to scratch an itch on his lower lip. ‘Teenagers. They’re slippery as - I don’t know what. Oh, he didn’t agree with me. He carried on arguing. He said There’s your eyeholes, Da, you don’t think they’re obscene?’
‘I know,’ said The-Unerring-Word, ‘you don’t really believe in it, but if I were you, I’d belt him. Chastise. Sometimes you can’t reason with kids like this. I mean, we love our kids, and all that, but, hey - spoil the rod. You know?’
‘‘Spare the rod, Un?’
The-Undying-Word considered. ‘Yeah. That. Not what I said. But whatever. The point is that you can’t reason with teenagers.’ ‘But reason is the point,’ urged Strong-in-the-Lord. ‘Isn’t it? Why deny the rational thing? God’s there, in the sky, in the arrangement of the stars, in the mortal soul inside. I said to him, “Be logical, that’s all I’m asking. Be logical. We cover ourselves for modesty, not for arbitrary reasons. If a hole produces faeces, that’s not nice - you can’t pretend it’s nice. So we cover it up, modestly. It’s the same with the nostrils, unless you think . . .” ‘ he coughed discreetly, adding in a lower tone, ‘Excuse me Un, but. . .’ and carried on ‘ “snot is a pleasant thing? I don’t think so. The same with mouths, unless you think somebody else’s saliva is wholesome? Your eyes are different. God has plugged them already, veiled them we might say. With the eyeballs. It follows logically that we do not need to pursue modesty to the extreme of covering the eyes - they’re covered already. Your mother, for instance,” I said to him. “Her eyes are blue, and they’re prettier than any faceveil I’ve ever seen in a shop.” So he started whining, and I’m afraid I lost my temper. I don’t see why God would be upset if we showed our nostrils and people always used to do it and all sorts of nonsense. I told him to shut up - I used those words. I told him people used to do many things. People used to worship pagan devils and sacrifice children, and that didn’t mean they were good things to do.’
‘He’s not arguing, not really, Stron,’ The-Unerring-Word told his friend. ‘He’s not interested in the reasonable case, the logical thing. He’s just arguing to be difficult. Teenagers.’
‘Which is exactly what I’m saying. Exactly.’
The two of them sat in silence for a while on their bench. They had finished their coffees, and each had wiped his straw with a sanctissue, and now they just sat. They were sitting out the remainder of their break.
The work was continuing day and night, and theirs was a night shift. Below them, at the foot of the hill, the machines were roaring and grinding under floodlights, cranes swinging like giant robot metronomes, diggers creeping forward on the chunky metal reel-to-reel of their tracks. Out at sea the many ships sparkled with their various glinting lights, stern and aft white, port and starboard green and red, boathouse lights creamily visible against the black water in a random, messily scribbled array of dots and gleams. But lift the eye upwards, and the splendour and the glory of the heavens were displayed. On this cloudless night, through this still air, all the stars could be seen: rank and rank, row and row - the perfectly regular and uniform spread of white stars. You could read their pattern in terms of verticals and horizontals, or you could let your eye detune the image a little and it would become a diamond-shaped pattern of diagonals intersecting diagonals, on and on, patterning the whole sky. How glorious it was, how glorious.
Strong-in-the-Lord sighed a holy sigh and brushed his gloves absently against the thighs of his pants. He stood up. ‘Back to work, Un,’ he said. ‘Back to the great work.’
~ * ~
Strong-in-the-Lord had decided early in his life that he wanted to be a coastal engineer. Or, to be precise, at first he’d wanted to be a coastal architect, but a few words with his teachers had disabused him of that ambition. The architects had dull jobs, he was told. After all, coastal redesigning hardly requires architects! - or, to speak more precisely, it was mathematics that was the true architect. The Divine Order was the architect. Take a crinkled, wobbly coastline on a map, and redraw it as a straight line, or as a smooth arc; redraw this knobbly promontory as a circle. A child could do it. But the engineers (the teacher put awe in his voice) - oh, the engineers! They do the actual work! They supervise the diggers, they scour the land, or fill in the bays, or reclaim land from the sea. Work with a thousand challenges, and a thousand rewards! And all the time (the teacher’s voice acquiring a misty, awestruck tone) making God’s harmony and perfection prevail. ‘So,’ the teacher had concluded, slapping his hips with both his hands simultaneo
usly and afterwards rubbing them together. ‘So which is it to be? Architect or engineer?’
‘Oh, engineer! Engineer!’ he had squealed. ‘I want to be an engineer!’
After seven more years of school, and four years of specialist study, and fifteen years of work, he had come to realise that the architects’ lot was not as dull as the teacher had said. Their work was much more than simply drawing a line on a map. They had to consult geological surveys, to work out the path of least engineering resistance. It was their job, not Strong-’s, that provided a thousand challenges; turn this messy, scuffed-up stretch of coastline into one of the designated pure mathematical shapes - how to do it? Thesis: We should erase this. Counter-thesis: But it’s largely granite, and will take years and billions of dollars. Solution: Very well, redesign the map, and fill around the granite with broken sandstone taken from across the sea. More cost-effective! The Elegant Solution!
Engineers, on the other hand, had much less imaginative jobs. They did what their supervisors told them. They blasted, dug, moved, loaded trucks, loaded barges, laid down rubble, piled up rubble, shoved rubble aside, and just when they had a sense of achievement, just when they’d made a smooth and perfect vista out of the fallen mess of nature - why, then they had to move on. It was frustrating, but Strong-in-the-Lord had learnt not to let his frustration poison him. He was working for a higher goal after all. They were all working towards a higher goal.
His brother, Courageous-in-the-Lord, had had different ideas. ‘I want to be an astronomer,’ he had told the family one Sunday when they were both still kids.
This was a very odd thing to say. None of Ma and Da’s friends were astronomers. Strong- didn’t know anybody else who wanted to be an astronomer. He consulted his memory; when they had all studied astronomy at school, the class had not ended - as almost every other class ended - with a recruitment talk about the career possibilities. And come to think of it, what would an ‘astronomer’ actually do? The stars were there - everybody could see them. The State didn’t need to employ special people to look at the stars. Anybody could do that. Row and row, rank and rank. Scientists had already listed every star, named each of them, looked at them with special machines to determine their spectronomy, their chemical composition, how many light years distant they were, their respective sizes, all those sorts of things. What else was there left to do?
As a child, he had been unable to express his incomprehension at his brother’s choice except in mockery. ‘Astronomy? That’s the most stupid thing I ever heard. Isn’t that the most stupid thing you ever heard, Ma? Isn’t it, though, Da?’
‘Now,’ Ma had said. ‘Don’t bait your brother.’
The family was eating: a large steaming Masson-in-slaw, with luscious looking plentrails, green and shiny with butter. It was a Sunday dinner. All four sat at table in the dining room, the tallest, the most elegant room in the house. Precisely seven dark-wood boards to each wall. Four curtains drawn across four windows, each in the exact middle of each wall. The faint odour of burnt sandalwood, mixing with the smells of the meal.
‘Sorry, Ma,’ said Strong-in-the-Lord.
For a little while Strong- ate his food. Courageous- was a quieter boy than he was himself: contemplative, inward. He scored highly at school in the meditation classes, and poorly in the practical work. Because Strong-’s own results were exactly the other way around, he found it hard to take his brother’s mooniness seriously. Couldn’t the dolt see that practical work was so much better than sitting around thinking and praying? Nobody remade the world by meditating.
After a while, Courageous- spoke, his voice calm but with a worrying, subversive edge to it, as if he were practising some obscure, wicked little practical joke of his own. ‘It’s no more stupid than wanting to be a coastal engineer,’ he said, his face angled down towards the plate from which he was eating.
‘What?’ snapped Strong-.
‘The whole coastal engineering project is crazy.’
‘You can’t say that!’ Strong- chimed. ‘Ma, tell him!’
‘All that effort?’ Cor insisted. ‘It’ll be hundreds of years before it’s done, and why? Smoothing out the coastlines. We could only see the results if we was in space. What’s the point in that?’
‘—if we were in space, Cor,—’ Da corrected, holding his fork up like a wand. ‘The subjunctive is used for unfulfilled wish or condition.’
The boys knew better than to challenge this. ‘If we were in space,’ Cor adjusted his sentence. ‘But what’s the point in it?’
‘That’s not true,’ said Strong-. ‘About only being able to see the results in space. There’ll be maps, as well. And high places, like mountains.’
‘But I don’t see what the point is,’ Cor repeated.
‘Da,’ said Strong-. ‘Ma. Tell him.’
‘We’re making the world a better place,’ said Da. ‘More harmonious, neater. Maybe you can’t see that from the dining-room, but God can certainly see it.’
‘But God made the countries and the continents the way they are,’ said Cor in his quietly insistent voice. ‘How is it right to meddle with that?’
‘Meddling,’ said Da, with a hint of severity, ‘as you dismissively call it, is what God put us here to do. Every person is born with an animal nature every bit as ragged and rough-at-the-edges as the coastline of a continent. But God expects us to smooth our natures down, to control and tame them, to bring them into proportionate and harmonious relation with His will. The Great Project is an expression of the same impulse. Look at the sky and what do you see? The heavens; the perfect order and regularity of the stars. Look down on earth, and do you see the same order? Alas no. Alas, you do not. You see disorder, and chaos, and irregularity. Accordingly, mankind is saving this world, making it orderly. That’s what the coastline project is about.’
‘I was in the library,’ said Cor, ‘and I looked up some books. They said it’s the most expensive thing humanity has ever done.’
‘Expensive?’ repeated Ma.
‘In money terms, in terms of man-hours, the labour, the machinery. Do you know, fourteen hundred people died last year of industrial accidents working on coastline projects around the world?’
A distinct chill had settled on the dinner table now. ‘So when you go before God,’ Da said, his voice now very stern indeed, ‘will you say to Him, I’m sorry I did not perfect my soul, it was too expensive? Do you think He will be convinced by that argument? Do you think He cares for dollars and cents?’
‘What,’ Ma chipped in, ‘would you rather we spend the money on, if not on making the world more perfect?’
Still looking at his plate, Cor said, ‘Sorry.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘I’m disappointed in you, Cor,’ said Ma, in a withering tone.
‘Sorry,’ said the boy again.
Strong-in-the-Lord could only feel grateful that he wasn’t the one suffering under the parental displeasure. He finished his Masson with a quiet, selfish glee. But later that night, in their shared bedroom, after the lights had been put out, he started baiting his brother again.
‘You want to go to the window and look at the stars?’ he whispered. ‘If we do it together we’d both be astronomers.’ He sniggered.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Cor. ‘You need to do more than that to be an astronomer.’
‘Oh, there’s no such job,’ Strong- insisted. ‘Why should the State pay for people to stand and look up? That’s just crazy.’
To Strong-’s disappointment, Cor didn’t rise to the teasing. Instead he spoke in a hushed, careful voice. ‘I was in the library,’ he said, as he had done at dinner, ‘and I looked up some books. Did you know the stars didn’t use to be so orderly in the sky?’
‘What you talking about?’
‘Long ago,’ said Cor, ‘they were scattered as randomly as if I threw a handful of sugar from my hand, and the grains landed higgledy-piggledy on the floor.’
Strong- snorted a little laugh, and ducked his head under the blanket. ‘That’s just crazy.’
‘It’s a myth, you see,’ said Cor. ‘The myth is that God arranged the stars, and then the Devil came and mussed them up, and so God rearranged them for us. It’s clever of him, because the stars are not all the same distance from us, they’re all different distances, and great distances, like billions and quadrillions of miles away, so to get them all lined up so that they appear neat and in rows from earth is clever.’
‘Of course God is clever,’ said Strong-, still under the blanket.
‘I’d just like to know more about them,’ said Cor. ‘That’s why I want to be an astronomer.’
