And that word: angelmaker. That’s much less funny, here and now. One way of making angels, in cartoons and so on, is to kill people. He should mention it. But if he does, will they keep him for ever? And will “mention” equal “confess” in the watery eyes of Rodney Titwhistle?
The moment passes. Rodney Titwhistle claps his hands, very lightly, as punctuation.
“Taking myself as the example, Mr. Spork, the problem—and it’s a common problem in this debased age—” the faintest nod of the head towards the horde, still audible over the hiss of the tyres “—is that while I am known to be mostly infallible, I have also been known, very occasionally, to be quite wrong. Do you see?”
“We’re all wrong from time to time,” Joe says nervously.
“Even on matters about which we have absolute confidence, alas.”
“Even then.”
“This is the basis of René Descartes’ famous doctrine, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Rodney Titwhistle gives vent to a polite sigh of reproach.
“Debased, as I said. Well, Descartes realised that in his lifetime there had been any number of occasions on which he was absolutely certain and yet absolutely mistaken. He had dreamed himself in front of a fire attending dinner with friends when he was in fact at home in bed. He had seen what he took to be an eagle and discovered later that it was a buzzard, much closer than it appeared. Well, silly man, he was a mathematician rather than a naturalist.”
Mr. Titwhistle’s expression does not entirely conceal his personal feelings regarding this lack of ornithological nous.
“He therefore asked himself: ‘If I were held captive by a malign fiend which deceived my senses, of what if anything could I be certain?’ He inaugurated a method of doubting everything, and was finally reduced to the simple statement that because he was conscious, and aware of his own thoughts, he could not plausibly doubt his own existence. That’s the famous ‘I think, therefore I am.’ You see? It sounds so trivial, until you see it in context. Here is René, half-convinced that his soul is a toy of demons. His sanity hanging by a thread, he finds this one, simple nugget of truth, and he stands with it in his clenched fist and he says: ‘I’m real! I exist! And upon that rock, I shall build an edifice of reason!’ It’s magnificent, really.”
“And does he?”
“What? Oh, no. No, he was worried about being burned alive by the Catholic Church. He said actually God would never allow such a terrible ruse to be perpetrated upon a human soul. I don’t know where he found evidence for that. Seems to me … well. The point is that insofar as we are anything, we are things which think. Not Homo sapiens but Res cogitans.”
This seems to warrant a confirmation, so Joe ventures a noncommittal “I see.”
“In this case, my point is that truth is a slippery item. Hm?”
“Yes, it is.” Because he can think of nothing else to say, even though there are alarm bells ringing in his head.
“And although that slipperiness is a disadvantage in some situations, it is also vital to the way we live. The wrong truth at the wrong moment causes housing markets to plummet and nations to growl at one another. We can’t have too much of it running about loose. We’d have wars all over the place. Economic crisis, certainly—well, we’ve seen that, haven’t we?”
They share a little eye-rolling. The madness of bankers.
“And to make matters more troublesome, it has even been suggested that we human beings are incapable of knowing anything at all, in the absolute sense. We believe. We theorise. But we have no direct perception of whether our belief is matched by the objective universe.”
Mr. Titwhistle sighs deeply. Epistemology is cruel.
“But … what if an engine might be constructed which functioned as a species of prosthesis? Which extended our senses into the realm of knowledge? An engine which allowed us after all to apprehend truth.”
He nods as Joe’s eyes flicker at the words. “We would behold wonders. But then … Old atrocities would come to light, old promises would be revealed as lies … And if one were of a scientific bent, one might worry ever so slightly about such a power of observation accidentally destroying life on Earth for the rest of time, or possibly changing the nature of this universe to make it inhospitable to conscious thought in perpetuity. Scientists will go on so about the precautionary principle, won’t they?” He smiles benignly: boffins and their little ways.
“I’m sorry,” Joe Spork says, his thoughts rather focused by this addendum, “what was that last part?”
Mr. Titwhistle shrugs in his seat. “Arvin, you will help me out if I go astray, won’t you?”
“Of course, Rodney.”
“I get lost among the quanta.”
“Leave ’em out.”
“This won’t compromise our strict scientific integrity at all?”
“Needs must, Rodney,” Arvin Cummerbund says, and philosophically puts his fat hand on the horn for quite a long time. A late drinker bangs on the bonnet of the car, raises two fingers, and staggers on.
“You see,” Rodney Titwhistle resumes, “it seems that if all that extraordinary Heisenberg stuff is literally true, we as conscious beings have a sort of role in the ongoing creation of the universe. We cause tiny indecisions to go one way or another, just by looking at them. So one has to ask, if one’s a responsible person: if we learned to appreciate the universe directly and without the possibility of error, would we inaugurate a sort of cascade? What if our way of existing is contingent on these little uncertainties in the fabric of our world? And what if knowing this entails knowing that, which implies that, and so on and so on until there are no open questions any more, and every choice is made as a consequence of every other, and finally we become little … well, to employ a metaphor, little clockwork people. Pianolos, Mr. Spork, rather than pianists. And wouldn’t that rather mean the extinction of intelligence? Don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I grant,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “that it’s a little tricky. Arvin?”
Arvin Cummerbund glances in his rear-view mirror. “Let’s say what we are now is like water, Joe,” he says gently. “Our minds. All right? And this machine might—just might—be like a freezer. It’s possible that it might freeze everything, anywhere, ever. And then we wouldn’t be liquid any more, we’d be solid, and we might never notice, but we’d be following a pattern laid out in advance, feeling we were making our own decisions. Right now we have choice, you see, Joe. A man might decide one thing or another in a moment of stress. It’s not random and it’s not fixed. It’s conscious. But after the freeze … There’d be no escape, ever, from a path set from before we were born to the day we die, which takes no notice of what we do along the way, except in that we are part of the mechanism creating more inescapable paths. We’d be no different from any other chemical reaction. Salt has no choice about dissolving in water, does it? We wouldn’t be special, or conscious, we’d be so much rust. Clockwork men. See?”
“Oh,” Joe says.
“Indeed,” says Rodney Titwhistle gently. “ ‘Oh.’ I quite agree. And now you are wondering how such a thing was ever built, and the answer ultimately is desperation. Or a species of carelessness—something which is, I’m afraid, rather a feature of the history of weapons of mass destruction. Suffice to say it is an old project. It doesn’t really matter now.
“The Apprehension Engine is a device which would allow one to know the truth of a situation, without fear of error. You can see how that would appeal—to deceive the enemy and know that the deceit was successful; to recognise his lies infallibly. A massive strategic advantage.
“That wasn’t its creator’s interest, of course. She was an idealist. That’s a term which has come to mean someone who is foggy and naive, but back then big ideas were still very much in fashion. Better living through science, knowledge will make us gods … and here she was, with her truth machine. Deception would be a thing of the past. The Appr
ehension Engine would usher in a new age of prosperity, economic stability, scientific understanding, social justice … But used unwisely, as it transpired, it could do other things less wholesome. And, well, as I say—do we really want to know the truth of everything? Of everyone? All our loves, our desires, our fears uncovered at a glance? Our weaknesses and petty gripes? Our sins?
“History is a well, Mr. Spork, a deep well driven into the strata of the past, through the bones of madness and murders. When it floods, we do well to run for the high ground. This machine, this Apprehension Engine which you so cavalierly reactivated … it is a hundred days of rain. A thousand. It is a flood and I am not Noah. I am Canute.”
Rodney Titwhistle has turned in his seat and now his face is urgent and beseeching. At any moment, he will point his finger like a recruiting poster. Join up! Your country needs YOU! To save the world.
And Joe Spork is not unmoved. Of course he isn’t. But he has no answers, and knows that he is, if not in the belly of the beast, surely in its maw and rolling towards its throat. He does not wish to encourage it to swallow.
Mr. Titwhistle lowers his voice to convey gravitas, and issues his most earnest plea. “So let me ask you again, with all my heart: how do I switch it off? How do I control it? How did you switch it on? And what did you hope to achieve by it all?”
Joe, looking at him, knows that Mr. Titwhistle believes everything he has just said. Yet at the same time, the whisper of the Night Market within him notes bleakly that all that truth could be assembled artfully to produce a most elegant, most deceptive lie.
“Supposing,” Joe says, to Mercer’s imagined strenuous objections, “hypothetically supposing all this is as you say: can you not just unplug it?”
Rodney Titwhistle nods. “We might try. But how would we recall the bees? And how should we know that we had succeeded absolutely? In my uninformed tampering with the machine, might I increase the power and wreak havoc, destroy my nation and my self? Or activate a dead man’s switch and bring about Armageddon? No. Better, by far, to have your help. This must be got right.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe says again, “I just don’t know anything.”
“No, Mr. Spork. You need not be sorry,” Rodney Titwhistle says. “I am. I am.”
They don’t speak again until Arvin Cummerbund turns the car into a narrow street and through a set of modern steel gates, into the front court of an anonymous, sandy-bricked block with wide swing doors.
“Well. Here we are,” Rodney Titwhistle says, in his “unpleasant necessity” voice, as he helps Joe out of the back seat. “I’m sure it will all work out for the best.”
The phrase is familiar and pro forma, but on his lips, here, now, it is a funeral oration. It is a prayer for the dying. As they walk towards that bleak, ugly little door and the lino’d official rooms beyond, Joe can feel his life coming to some kind of watershed. He steels himself for the kind of testing Rodney Titwhistle might unleash upon him, and wonders what he will say or do, and whether he will come out of here with all his fingers and teeth. He whimpers, deep in his chest. He wants to say “Don’t do this,” but is embarrassed, and knows, anyway, that while Mr. Titwhistle doesn’t want to do this, he will absolutely not relent, and even if he did, the time-serving Arvin Cummerbund would be there to see it through. Arvin Cummerbund the bureaucrat, who knows the value of everything, the better to take it away.
Joe glances to his left, and sees a long grey-black Mercedes bus, windows tinted very dark, and beside it three tall figures all shrouded and veiled, waiting in silence. More vampires, and that thought isn’t half so funny or so easy to get rid of as it was in his shop, during the day. Three faceless heads turn slowly to watch him as he walks. Rodney Titwhistle does not look at them, and from this Joe realises with a nauseating jolt that it is to them that he will be given.
“Who are they?” he asks quietly.
“Ghosts, perhaps,” Rodney Titwhistle answers, uncharacteristically whimsical, or perhaps a little unnerved. Joe glances at him, and he waves the moment away. “Technically they are contractors. The interrogation techniques they deploy are a matter of commercial confidentiality, of course, and in any case beyond our competence to assess. They assure us that everything that happens to you will be compatible with the law. It is not our job to pry. In fact, we would be breaching your rights under the Data Protection Act to do so. Do you understand? No one will ask. If they did ask, no one would answer. I have the option of rendering you to them under a piece of recent legislation. Do you wish to know its name? I have it written down somewhere. Alas, much of the detail is redacted.”
Joe looks at the ghosts again, and sees that they are not alone. Behind the bus, a strange, armoured Popemobile is sitting, and in it is one more, familiar, figure: a man, sitting stooped, somehow recognisable as the first Ruskinite he ever saw, the one who came to the shop.
The man’s face is in shadow, but he has slipped the spiderweb veil back onto broad shoulders so that he can see clearly in the dark, and from him emanates a stark, rigid malice and a terrible anticipation.
“They’re called Ruskinites,” Rodney Titwhistle adds, “a benevolent order of monks. They’re just around the corner, as it happens, nice old manse. They have a vested interest in the Apprehension Engine. When we have switched it off, they will study it. They are concerned with encountering the divine. Unfashionably sincere, of course, but they have considerable expertise. Inspired by John Ruskin. Although I understand they’ve changed a lot in the last few years—so much so that the term ‘benevolent’ may no longer be entirely accurate. Still, they look after the orphans of a particular accident. That must count for something.”
Joe Spork, looking at the shadowed, alien trio waiting to take him away into the dark, can well believe it. He recalls the strange, heron steps and the featureless cotton face, and feels like a small boy being left on the steps of a very frightening school. He will tell them everything. Even though everything is not very much, and when he is dry, they will continue to wring him out. He will be crippled by their benevolence. May die of it. He breathes the wet night air and determines he will treasure every second of his life. He promises himself that he will not cry.
And then, as he mounts the moulded concrete steps, the door opens and a yellow shaft of light from the reception hall picks them out. Three figures step through the breach, in perfect counterpoint to the trio coming up. On the right, a gnarled, angry youth in a tracksuit, and in the middle a dapper outline with a Savile Row suit. On the left is a security guard or a soldier in civvies, looking vexed and hurried. Some manner of apology is already emerging from his lips, but his protestations of innocence are utterly overwhelmed by a glad yodel which echoes off the surrounding buildings, and Mr. Titwhistle hunches as if struck with a plank.
“Joshua Joseph Spork, by all that’s holy! Good gracious, you’ve been bound, what appalling brutality! A client of mine … I’m shocked. And you’ve been so cooperative in the face of such gross provocation. In this age of chat-show rage, Joseph, I believe that makes you a paragon of virtue. Isn’t he a paragon of virtue, Mr. Titwhistle? How do we spell that, by the way, for the writ? ‘Titwhistle,’ not ‘paragon.’ Joe, congratulations, you’re rich. Rodney here is going to give you all his money, or at least, all of his organisation’s money. What organisation is that again? I suppose, ultimately, the Treasury? Well, then there’ll be plenty, won’t there? How very fortunate, although if you wouldn’t mind having a word with the Chancellor, Mr. Titwhistle, and letting him know not to buy any nuclear missiles or bail out any banks until we’ve settled, I’d be grateful, one wouldn’t want there to be a shortfall. Yes, Mr. Titwhistle, I am aware that you believe you are beyond such mundane considerations but allow me to assure you that, if we marked lawyers the way we do military aircraft, I would have painted on my fuselage the outlines of a number of untouchable government departments now defunct. I am Mercer Cradle of the old established firm of Noblewhite Cradle, and I can sue anything. And is this y
our henchman? Do you know, I’ve always wondered what that means. How exactly does one hench? Is there a degree in henching, or is it more of an apprenticeship? Good evening, Mr. Cummerbund, I declare I never saw a finer figure of a man; Mr. Spork is my client and a very respectable one at that, please desist from giving him what our forebears would have called the fishy eye. Which of you would like to be the happy recipient of this paper ordering him released immediately into my care? But where are my professional manners? You must think less of me: do you consider Mr. Spork a suspect and how does it come about that you’re interrogating him when he specifically requested that I be present, and before you have clarified his rights and status in the investigation?”
Rodney Titwhistle looks reproachfully at Joe as if to say “This person is your friend?” and “You didn’t have to do this to me, I was only asking.”
“Good Lord,” Mercer says, with rising glee, “I happen to have my client’s shoes here. Joe, you lemon, put these back on, you’ll get muscle cramps in your toes and then where will the compensation end? Joseph! With me, please … He is often absent-minded under pressure,” Mercer Cradle avers as he helps Joe into his shoes. “Suppressed guilt relating to his father’s heinous acts, I shouldn’t wonder. Why, he once went on a date with a lady officer of the police service and proposed to her over dessert, quite extraordinary, of course she said ‘no,’ well, who wouldn’t when there was still coffee and petits fours to come? Tell me, Mr. Cummerbund, how long has it been since you saw your ankles …?” Mercer keeps up his barrage until they’re out of earshot and in the street, and Mercer and his mute companion are hustling Joe into the car.
The Ruskinites watch from behind their veils, silent and motionless as lizards on a wall. One of them takes two bobbing, birdish steps, then draws back. They make no sound.