Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  Marcus says, “You were doing good where you were, in the children’s ward.”

  “Oh yes, but that is a place of death and despair. A terrible place, where I couldn’t go out. With the help of the Children I can be much more use—we can help each other, and the sick and the unhappy, we can show people. We can heal. Gideon can heal. I’ve seen him. We can work together.”

  “Vows?” says Daniel.

  “Oh, not like vows used to be. New vows. I can’t tell you them, but they’re simple, fidelity to the community, perpetual watchfulness, complete trust.”

  Jacqueline says, explosively, “You can’t do this, Ruthie. It’s dangerous. You can’t.”

  “It isn’t dangerous. It’s saving. I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Gideon Farrar may have charisma, but you know, Ruthie, he’s dangerous—you know and I know you know.”

  Ruth rises to her feet again, and smooths the gingham dress carefully.

  “I knew you’d be like that. I won’t let you upset me. I know you don’t understand. I know—I’m afraid—you won’t understand. That’s why I came—now—to say good-bye—where everyone could see—so you couldn’t—make it hard. You don’t understand and I know you don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I,” says Marcus.

  “I know. I thought you might. You so easily could. But you don’t. I think I’ll go now. There’s no point in letting anyone upset me.”

  She stands. She shakes hands with Bill, who looks gloomy, and Winifred, who smiles mildly. She tries to kiss Jacqueline, who turns away, kisses Daniel, who says, “Look after yourself, Ruthie,” and attempts to kiss Marcus, who suddenly takes hold of her wrist.

  “Don’t go, Ruthie.” It is not clear what he means, don’t leave now, or don’t go to the Children of Joy.

  She pulls her hand away. She walks quickly away, into the house. Her head is bowed. It is possible she is crying. Marcus goes after her. She begins to run. They both disappear into the house. Jacqueline stands up, sets off, thinks better of it. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock appears at the back gate, from the moor, dressed for walking. Jacqueline pays no attention. She says to Daniel, “You know Gideon Farrar. You know what he does. Stop her.”

  “I can’t. What do you know about the Children of Joy?”

  “Nothing. The whole thing is entirely distasteful. But I do know Gideon, and where Gideon is, love means sex. He uses his—his presence—his separateness—all those young girls—he works them up—I’ve been there, I know—”

  “Does he hurt them?”

  Jacqueline thinks about this. She says, “I think so, yes. I think he makes a kind of horrible fantasy of sacrifice and communion and really it’s just lust—”

  “Those are all just words.”

  “Are you trying to excuse him?”

  “No. I know him, as you say. I think your words are accurate words.”

  “Well, then, stop Ruth.”

  “It’s hard. She’s grown up. She’s made a choice.”

  Marcus reappears. He walks past his family, past Luk, out on to the moors. He begins to walk away, fast. Jacqueline stands up and runs after him. She catches him up at some distance; they can be seen as they embrace. Marcus bows his head on her shoulder, they walk on, arms entwined.

  Luk Lysgaard-Peacock comes into the garden and is offered coffee, which he accepts.

  Frederica and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock find themselves alone in the garden. Bill has gone to sleep; Marcus and Jacqueline have vanished; Daniel is taking Will to visit a friend, and Mary has gone along for the ride. Winifred is stacking dishes. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock does not ask about the drama, but Frederica tells him, briefly.

  “Ruth came in and announced she is going off to live in a holy community and take vows. They are all upset. Jacqueline went off to cheer up Marcus, or vice-versa.”

  “In that case, I will save my own news.”

  “Your own news?”

  “I have been invited to be head of a research institute in Copenhagen. It’s an honour.”

  “So you’re going?”

  “I’m thinking. There are reasons for and against.”

  He considers the now empty moor beyond. Frederica has seen him look at Jacqueline. She wants to tell him, waiting never works. This would be impertinent. So she says, “Are there Helix hortensis—or should I say Helices hortensis—over there?”

  “I imagine so. Not the particular population I am studying. And not my two slug populations on the moors, which are so strangely different.”

  Frederica becomes mildly interested in both Lysgaard-Peacock and his snails. She is interested because she suspects him of being another laminated being, a creature capable both of giving his entire attention to small, pearly, convoluted crawling lives, of thinking thoughts about genes and DNA of which she has no conception, and of furious but not incapacitating sexual devotion. She is trying to turn the jottings of her own Laminations into a coherently incoherent work. She has had the idea that she is many women in one—a mother, a wife, a lover, a watcher, and that it might be possible to construct a kind of plait of voices, with different rhythms and vocabularies. But it will not work. The story of Stone is one thing. The legal cut-ups are quirky new objects. But the moment she tries to write anything tinged with her own feelings, she is disgusted, as though she had touched slime, a metaphor she undoubtedly finds because of her temporary contact with Helix hortensis. If she writes what she feels truly—Leo’s strangling arms, the memory of Nigel’s blows, John Ottokar’s blood-stained belly, disgust overcomes her at its falsity; it is false because it is banal, a cliché. She looks again at Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. He is a watcher, a collector, a thinker, a walker—he is “in love” with a brown girl who is “in love” with her brother, Marcus—inexplicably, to Frederica’s mind—and this love makes him, too, more banal, more ordinary. She dare not speak these thoughts to him—he has a great deal of reserved dignity. But she does observe that the sex lives of the snails are no doubt less complicated, less anguished than those of human beings. She says she believes snails are hermaphrodite, and can manage the whole business by themselves. Lysgaard-Peacock replies that there is still some dispute about whether they do, in fact, ever keep themselves to themselves. The general belief is that they require another snail to reproduce—there is, as he puts it, some courteous dispute and jostling about who shall put what where. Snails, he says, are equipped with a curious organ, known as a gypsobelum, or love-dart, with which they apparently excite each other. Indeed, the differences between these organs are one of the clear ways of distinguishing Helix hortensis from Helix nemoralis. He describes the work he has done on two populations of large slugs, Arion ater, one on the moorlands and one from the valley lower down. These creatures, he says, are interesting because the moorland population, although identical in appearance to those of the valley, are self-fertilising, and genetically identical, whereas the valley slugs are sexually propagated, and genetically diverse. Odd, he says, that the upland, hermaphrodite, celibate slugs have preserved, over presumably thousands of years of disuse, enormous genitalia. Not in line with Darwin. Frederica asks him whether all this genetic science has changed his attitude to human behaviour. He thinks.

  “I was going to say, no. But I think, yes, when I think about it. Love, and all that, is human, like language, which is purely human. I’ve never liked the idea of teaching apes human language—it diminishes them, in some way, like putting them in knickers and bonnets. But when you begin to understand how we are all constructed by the coded sequences of the DNA—hermaphrodite slugs, sexed slugs, Cepaea hortensis and ourselves—when you realise all the things that go on busily in your cells all the time with which your language-consciousness appears to have nothing to do—I think it does change you, yes. I think it does diminish your sense of your own importance rather comfortably Love is love, and all that, but sex is a blind drive, like—oh—antibodies breeding round diseased cells, or viruses hurrying along our blood.”

  “I thought that m
ight be comforting.”

  “Oh well. At times. To the head.”

  “Perhaps one has to make do with that?”

  “Ah, but the luck, if one didn’t, if things went well.”

  “In my experience,” says Frederica, “they don’t go well. Or not for long.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “No. Well, no, not really.”

  “Nothing I don’t know.”

  Frederica copies part of an article lent by Luk Lysgaard-Peacock into her Laminations, partly because she likes the idea of the snails wearing their genetic code for all to read on the spiral of their shells. She also copies out a description of the love-dart of Helix hortensis and its difference from that of Helix nemoralis.

  Laminations

  Habits and habitats. Helix hortensis is described as a somewhat indolent yet moderately sensitive animal, carrying its shell obliquely upright, when crawling. It is less nocturnal in habit than its congener, though said by Nagel to be deeply skioptic or responsive to shade, and does not conceal itself so deeply and carefully during the day.

  Diagnosis. H. hortensis is distinguished from H. nemoralis by its smaller size, more globose shape, white aperture and thinner and more glossy shell; moreover there is much less band variation, there is a larger proportion of bandless and 5-banded shells, and the commonness or rarity of the band formulae is quite different in the two species.

  Internally, the differences are striking, the chief divergence being the structure of the gypsobelum or “love-dart” which in place of presenting the four simple longitudinal blades with connecting crescentic films, as in H. nemoralis, has the four blades deeply cleft and widely reflected along their entire length, forming thus eight sharp, divaricating blades; there are also no crescentic films between the blades, which terminate abruptly at the base, and not gradually, as in H. nemoralis; the vaginal mucus glands are also usually more branched than in nemoralis, and instead of being simply and uniformly digitate, are swollen or sacculate at the extremities.

  Frederica cuts Luk Lysgaard-Peacock’s information into her reading of the documents of the counter-culture.

  Timothy Leary, The Molecular Revolution, lecture delivered at LSD conference sponsored by the University of California. Extracts.

  Lecturing to a Turned-On Audience

  If any of you have smoked marijuana in the last two hours, you are listening not just to my symbols. Your sense organs have been intensified and enhanced, and you are also aware of the play of light, the tone of voice. You are aware of many sensory cues beyond the tidy sequence of subjects and predicates which I am laying out in the air. And there may even be some of you in the audience who decided that you’d put over your eyes that more powerful microscope and find out, “Well, where is this fellow at, anyway?” Perhaps you have taken LSD tonight, in which case my task is not to wake you up but rather not to pull you down. I have often had the experience in lecturing to psychedelic audiences of having my eyes wander around the room and suddenly be fixed by two orbs, two deep, dark, pools, and realise that I am looking into someone’s genetic code, that I have to make sense, not to a symbolic human mind, not to a complicated series of sense organs, but I have to make sense to many evolutionary forms of life—an amoeba, a madman, a mediaeval saint.

  Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded. At night plumes of vapour steamed from the vents, lit from beneath with red light, or blue, or venomous green.

  There stood a tower of marvellous shape. It was fashioned by the builders of old, and yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of Men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills. There upon a floor of polished stone, written with strange signs, a man might stand five hundred feet above the plain. This was Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman, the name of which had (by design or chance) a twofold meaning; for in the Elvish speech orthanc signifies Mount Fang, but in the language of the Mark of old, the Cunning Mind.

  Helix hortensis—Scalariform and sinistral monstrosities

  Irregularly grown and anomalous shells.

  Helix hortensis monst. scalare Ferussac [picture]

  Shell with elevated spine and partially dislocated whorls.

  Monst. sinistrorsum Ferussac

  Shell reversed or sinistral in coiling.

  We must realise that evolution is not through, that man is not a final product, and just as there are many species of primate, there may be just as many species evolving from what we now call man, Homo sapiens. It may well be that we’ll have two species. One species, which is the machine species, will like to live in metal buildings, and skyscrapers, and will get their kicks by just becoming part of a machine. That species of man will become an unnecessary, easily worn-out part of the whole technological machinery. In that case, man will become anonymous—just like the anthill or the beehive. Sex will become very depersonalized. It will become very promiscuous. You won’t care who you make love to because they’re all just replaceable parts. You know, she’s the new pretty blond girl who runs the electronic typewriter; so that we may well get a new species who will be technological. But I do know that our seed-flown species will continue. And we may hang out in new pockets of disease which the machine people haven’t cleaned up with their antiseptics. And we’ll be somewhere out in the marshes, or somewhere out in the woods, laughing at the machine and enjoying our senses and having ecstasies and remembering where we came from and teaching our children that, believe it or not, we’re not machines, and we weren’t designed to make machines, and we weren’t designed to run machines. I think you have to be a very holy man to appreciate and understand and run a machine because the machine is a beautiful yoga and a beautiful ecstasy. I’ve nothing against machines; it’s just incredible that the DNA could produce us and then produce those machines.

  (Timothy Leary, Soul Session, p. 221)

  Frederica’s thoughts run uneasily on genetic similarities and differences, machine-men and seed-flower species, stones, paper and scissors. She thinks that the DNA which is the fetish of the turned-on has probably very little, though not nothing, to do with the DNA of Helix hortensis, in the food-processor, on the slides, under the microscope, of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She would rather know what Lysgaard-Peacock knows, but is closer, even when trying to understand the snails, to the language of Leary.

  • • •

  Long legal envelopes continue to arrive, even in the summer, even in Freyasgarth. Frederica opens one and finds a thick document, with a covering letter from Arnold Begbie, who says, with studied neutrality, that it appears that, upon reflection, “your husband, the respondent” has decided to add to his Answer, already filed, “a prayer for counter-relief” on the grounds of desertion, mental cruelty and frequent adultery. The respondent has applied to the registrar for leave to amend his answer and to enter the cross-petition, and this leave has been granted.

  Mr. Begbie says that he wishes to point out to his client that her husband is required to make specific allegations of her own misconduct, but is not required to divulge the evidence upon which he will rely to prove this misconduct. The question of desertion is clear, and the question of mental cruelty is related to this and to the removal of the child, Leo Alexander. The allegations of adultery are numerous and precise. Mrs. Reiver has not elected to include a discretion statement in her own petition, and has assured Mr. Begbie that the question did not arise. He would therefore be grateful to know how she would like him to proceed. She will note that the new prayer for counter-relief does include a prayer for the court’s discretion in the matter of the cross-petitioner’s own adultery.

  Mr. Begbie also wishes to inform Mrs. Reiver that all the persons cited in the cross-petition’s allegations of adultery must be named as co-respondents and served personally with notices of the petition; they may then choose whether to enter an appearance, if they wish to defend the proceedings, or take part in any other way. If these persons do not wish to contest the proceedings, they need d
o nothing.

  Mr. Begbie will be grateful to receive Mrs. Reiver’s further instruction as soon as possible.

  Frederica looks at the counter-petition. It is long, and detailed. It is fact and fiction. It names Thomas Poole, Hugh Pink, John Ottokar, Paul Ottokar and Desmond Bull, and speaks of acts of intimacy, public embraces, and nights spent under the same roof. It claims custody of the child of the marriage, Leo Alexander. It is a snake of black language, tied with red tape in an impeccable bow. Frederica’s first, easiest, simplest emotion is that she has made a fool of herself in not telling Arnold Begbie about what she calls, to herself, “the end of my celibacy.” Her second is rage that Begbie, whom she neither really likes nor really trusts, should need to know where she has lain down, whose skin she has touched, by whom she has been penetrated. It is private, she thinks. She then takes in the implications of the serving of the petitions on Thomas Poole (who may simply be ruefully sensible) and on the Ottokars. Can Nigel claim damages against John Ottokar? Can Paul be called to give evidence? They have vanished into the Spirits’ Tigers: she cannot see John wanting to maintain their uncertain, delicate, tentative love or liking in a witness box before a judge. He is not ready, and may never be, and she may not want him to be, now, or yet, or ever, how can she tell, but the law and Nigel will make it be solid, be cut and dried—cut, and dried—gone … And some, though not all, of this, is true, and will the court, whose ways are not her ways, suppose she is a woman sensible enough to keep Leo? It is the Swinging Sixties, but the courts are run by old men in eighteenth-century wigs, with nineteenth-century outward morals, and she will be pulped, mashed, humiliated, destroyed.

  She has taken the horrid envelope to her bedroom, to read in peace. She cannot speak of this to her parents. She begins to weep, blindly, uselessly, furiously. The door opens. It is Daniel.

  “What is it, Frederica?”

  “Look!”

  He looks.

  “Half of it’s lies. Lies.”

  “You’ll get your divorce, one way or the other.”