Descent (14 page)

‘So you’re offski,’ I would have said.

‘What?’ he’d have replied, still supercilious, but with a dawning suspicion.

‘Offski. You know, the famous Russian revolutionary?’

Well, it made me laugh. You had to be there. Except I wasn’t.

I was sitting in the Library Bar, marking paragraphs of extracted Derrida in the
Norton Theory
on my phone, turning half the screen a provisional yellow between lunch and the 4 p.m. seminar. The room’s furnishing was exactly what you’d expect from its name: old books on shelves behind glass around the walls; seats, benches and tables, niches and nooks, a big bar with carved posts and a fret-worked canopy. Mercy Fuck’s ‘Warriston Crematorium’ on the PA, for like the hundredth time. Someone sat down beside me. I saw, out the corner of my eye, legs in black leggings visible through a thin pale pleated skirt that went down to the ankles of likewise visible long black boots.

‘Oh, hi, Ryan.’

I looked sideways. A bonny lassie in a black leather jacket, half turning to face me, a glass of orange juice in her hand. Her hair was deep black, crinkly and long. Eye make-up. Musky perfume.

‘Sophie! Oh, heck, I didn’t recognise you for a sec.’

She smiled. ‘It’s been two years.’

‘Aye. Jeez. How’re you doing? What are you doing?’

‘Fashion and Fabric Technology at the College of Arts,’ she said.

‘Hence the, uh …’

‘Stylish look? Yes.’ She flicked her hair.

‘I always thought maths was more your thing,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m doing that too,’ she said. ‘I’m over at Informatics today.’

‘Must be quite a disconnect.’

‘Oh, they’re connected,’ she said. ‘It’s the new materials.’

‘New materials?’

‘Look.’ She took out her phone and flicked to a catwalk show. Models did their bold bouncing stride in frocks so elaborately flounced, embroidered and embellished that they looked like those seahorses that mimic seaweed. Colours flashed from jewels, flowed through fabrics and glowed around edges. The music changed and suddenly the models did front-flips and cartwheels and rolls, then sprang up – ruffles, so to speak, unruffled – and sashayed off to applause.

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Not very practical.’

Sophie plucked at a pleat. ‘I made this with an offcut.’

She stuck out a foot and tipped a gulp’s worth of orange juice on her skirt, splashing it down her shin. The fabric soaked it up, unstained. She wiped the glass on the side of her knee to mop the dribble, with the same result.

‘Practical, yes?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘This is going to be big. I’m thinking of going into the biz, maybe do an MBA after I graduate. And I’m fine. Enjoying uni. What about you?’

‘English, Sociology and Philosophy,’ I said. ‘I did Geology as an extra last year.’

‘I meant, how are you?’

I leaned forward and took a sip of cold black coffee to hide my reluctance to tell her the embarrassing truth. I was miserable, and I had no right to be. I knew I should be happy. The only rational reason I had for being unhappy was the dreams, the nightmares and false awakenings, and the occasional full-on alien abduction experience. I knew they were unreal but it wasn’t helping my sleep. No amount of reading refutations and arguing about the paranormal and the supernatural with any of their proponents who crossed my path seemed to make any difference. Apart from that, I knew I had nothing to complain about.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m sharing a decent wee flat near Tollcross with two engineering students who I don’t see much of anyway, I go home about once a month, I get enough fresh air and exercise on excursions with the Geo Soc and the Archaeology Soc, and I go to the Humanist Soc sometimes and the SF Soc and Skeptics in the Pub for drinks and chat and that, and I’ve got plenty of time to study, so I’m doing all right in the assessments …’

Sophie regarded me with amused, half-lidded eyes. ‘That bad, huh?’

I had to laugh. ‘I know it doesn’t sound very exciting,’ I said, ‘but I’m doing what I want.’

She looked away, then back. Maybe she frowned a little in between. ‘What
do
you want?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You haven’t said anything about your social life so, OK, you’re busy studying – fine, I can see that, but what’s also a bit revealing is you haven’t said anything about what you’re studying
for
.’

‘Well, you didn’t ask,’ I said, trying not to sound as if she’d touched on a sore point. ‘I’m studying for a humanities degree.’

‘And then?’

I shrugged. ‘Go for a PhD in philosophy, then further research if I can get a position and the funding. If all else fails, get a proper job.’

Sophie gave me an impatient look over the rim of her glass.

‘What are your
dreams
, Ryan?’

‘Dreams? Jesus!’ I flailed. I had a moment of horrible suspicion that Calum had told her about my abduction experience. I could feel myself blushing, to my shame. ‘I mean, what the fuck kind of question is that? A bit personal, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not asking about your
wet
dreams, Ryan,’ she said, witheringly, not at all taken aback by my vehemence, unembarrassed and unamused by my embarrassment. ‘I’m asking – what are your ambitions? What do you want to achieve in life?’

Aye, there was the rub.

‘Oh, that,’ I said. ‘Well apart from all the usual personal stuff I want to be a humanist philosopher.’

I fully expected Sophie to laugh in my face. A
humanist? Philosopher? You?

She looked puzzled. ‘Why humanist? I mean, isn’t that a bit wishy-washy? Like a sort of none-of-the-above thing?’

‘No … well, yes, it is a bit. But it doesn’t have to be. Think what we could be like if we took our real situation seriously.’

‘This is the only life we have, and all that?’

‘Yes, that, sure,’ I said, ‘but more important I think is to take seriously that we’re just at the beginning of history, that humanity might well have millions of years still to come. We’ve just about got over the idea from the Bible that we’ve only had a short past, a few thousand years, right?’

‘Half the Americans haven’t got over it,’ Sophie pointed out. ‘Plus there are lots of Muslims who seem to be taking it up.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said, laughing. ‘Look at this.’

I swung my rucksack onto my lap and hauled out a small stack of books and pamphlets, which I flicked through to show Sophie how I used them: a battered, black-bound, copy of the Authorized Version of the Bible, with verses I’d highlighted and annotated in four different colours of ink to cross-reference contradictions, unfulfilled prophecies, absurdities, and atrocities; Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of the Koran, in which I’d been careful to mark pages only with variously coloured tabs; a paperback
Origin of Species
, with the passages marked that were most often truncated in creationist quote-mangling; several copies each of booklets from the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, explaining evolution and the age of the Earth in the simplest possible terms for the benefit of creationists;
The Counter-Creationism Handbook
, conveniently indexing and debunking creationist claims; and a few other books and pamphlets doing the same for alternative medicine and UFOs.

‘I’ve got lots of similar stuff on memory sticks too,’ I added, reaching to the bottom of my bag and fishing out a fistful. ‘Quite often when I’m arguing with Christian Union or Islamic Society types they’ll take a memory stick when they won’t take a pamphlet.’

Sophie looked at me somewhat askance. ‘You do a lot of this?’

‘Well … I stop by the stall on my way to lunch, sometimes. Or when these people turn up at Humanist events, it’s always good to have refutations handy.’

‘Seems a bit of an … odd hobby.’

‘Maybe it is,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it isn’t my main thing. Like I was saying, my point is that even people who’ve got over the idea of a short past are still stuck in the idea of a short future, which also comes from Christianity – from the opposite end of the Bible, in fact, from Revelation. That we’re living in the End Times. We just have secular versions of it, like global-warming catastrophe or nuclear war or the final crisis of capitalism all being imminent in this century.’

Sophie smiled. ‘Some might say there are good reasons to think any or all of them are.’

‘Yes, but—’

She raised a hand. ‘Wait. I think I need a coffee.’

‘I’ll …’ I half rose.

‘No, I’ll,’ she said, waving a card. ‘You?’

‘Black, no sugar.’

‘OK. Mind my bag.’

While she waited at the bar I looked her up on my phone. She had an open-ended CV on a network that consisted of everyone else doing the same – brusque and business-like; a photo album of dress-design sketches, family and landscape pics, with the odd close-up of architectural detail; and the usual Splatter trail of thousands of cryptic remarks. I wasn’t surprised: like me and most of the more thoughtful of our cohort, she’d evidently acquired from older, sadder and wiser relatives an early wariness about online self-exposure. Were she and Calum still a couple? I didn’t know, and her online footprint showed no traces either way. I could have asked her, but it would have felt awkward.

Something buzzed past my ear as I put away my phone. My head jerked reflexively and I saw a camcopter the size of a bee, hovering above the next table for a second or two, then darting away above the bar and zooming out of the open door to the patio. I saw an arm swipe above a head, heard a laugh. Usually the little buggers moved too fast to see properly, let alone to swat. In the glass tower of Informatics, no doubt, some engineering student was having a laugh.

Sophie returned, balancing cups on saucers. She sat down with them still in her hands, in a smooth movement that vaguely disturbed me because I found it sexy and because it reminded me of the actions of the mysterious minister.

‘You were saying. Millions of years?’

‘Billions,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s more than that. Trillions. Look. We all know there’s a deep past, right? But we’re still thinking about it in the wrong way. Stephen J. Gould or somebody’ – I resisted the impulse to look it up – ‘came up with a nice image for the past. Do you ever smooth your nails?’

She waggled her fingers and gave me a look.

‘OK. If you were to stand on tiptoe or’ – I glanced at her boots – ‘in high heels, say, and stretch up your arm as high as you could above your head, and we take that as representing the age of the Earth, then you sit down, I guess, and take the end of the nail of your middle finger and give it one swipe across with the, uh …’

‘Emery board?’

‘Yes. Then you’ve just wiped out what on that scale is the whole of human history.’

‘Cool,’ Sophie said, leaning forward and blowing on her coffee. ‘Sort of puts things in perspective.’

‘That’s the idea, yes,’ I said. ‘Or there’s the other example with the whole four and a half billion years represented by a twenty-four-hour clock, and our history is all in the last second or the last tick or whatever. But that’s all wrong. I mean, it’s right as far as it goes, but what people usually take from it is like “Oh, we’re so insignificant!”, because they forget what it leaves out.’

‘Ah!’ Sophie said. ‘Yes! It leaves out the scale of the changes we’ve made.’

I was momentarily thrown. I hadn’t thought of that.

‘That’s a very good point,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t the one I was thinking of. What the tippy-toes and the clock things leave out is
the future
. All the ages to come, in the immense future of the universe. That’s the real deep time, and on that scale four point five billion years is a very small thing.’

Sophie laughed. ‘So we’re even
more
insignificant!’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Don’t you see? We’re just at the beginning of things. There’s no reason why we couldn’t – as a species and as our successors, whatever they are, machines even – survive into a very distant future and affect it.’

‘But we’re so small.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But … but, look’ – I was waving my arms, I was trying not to raise my voice – ‘the scale of the universe is so unimaginably immense, in space as well as in time, and in all that we’re the only thing that even knows it’s there. There this … this enormous, practically endless expanse of mindless matter doing its meaningless thing, gas contracting and fusing and exploding and all that, over and over, and here we are, a tiny, almost infinitesimal flaw in it all. A tiny, tiny crack of meaning and purpose and mind in an endless plane of meaninglessness. In fact, a crack is … You know what happens when a single atom is out of place in a crystal?’

‘Yes,’ said Sophie, with the look of someone trying hard not to laugh. ‘I’m doing materials, remember? Any force that’s applied to the crystal gets concentrated on that atom, and soon there’s another atom out of place, and so it goes on. That’s how cracks get started. And once they start, they propagate. That’s how scissors work and fabric rips.’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘I don’t see what this has to do with our significance.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if even one atom out of place in a sheet of glass, say, can end up cracking the whole pane, just because we’re small doesn’t mean we can’t have big effects.’

‘You want us to crack the universe?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Or maybe, thinking about it as fabric, cut it into a shape more suited to ourselves.’

Sophie’s cup rattled as she put it down. ‘I see where you’re going with this,’ she said, looking me intently in the eye. ‘If there are all these billions of years and lives to come – my God! It’s like God! If you weigh it up like that greatest happiness of the greatest number thing—’

‘Utilitarianism?’

‘Yeah, OK, if we were to count in the happiness of future people, and we do … Jesus fuck.’

‘What?’ I said, slightly shocked. I’d never heard her swear.

‘It means anything we do to make sure humanity survives into this far future is right, no matter what so long as it works. Jeez.’ Her smile glowed, as if from the back-light of trillions of happy future faces in the sky. ‘I mean, even if ninety-nine per cent of the human race got wiped out, as long as there were enough left to have all these descendants, it would be worth it.’