Descent (15 page)

‘No, no!’ I said, alarmed. ‘I wasn’t thinking that at all, you can’t go sacrificing lives in the present for the sake of the future—’

‘But we do,’ she said. ‘Well, states do. All the millions the US and UK and their allies killed in the war – all right, most of them not directly, so let’s say caused to die if you want to be picky – and all the thousands of their soldiers who died, it’s all justified in terms of reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy and girls in school and women with jobs and cars and all that, right?’

‘Are you winding me up?’

‘It’s what you believe, right?’

‘Well, not—’

‘You supported the war, didn’t you?’

I had, much to my embarrassment and shame now. I couldn’t even blame my parents: they’d always been opposed to it, in a passive, resigned way that had annoyed me and provoked me to my mid-teen pro-war pose. Only now, as a result of supplementary reading around my Sociology and Philosophy courses – the Ethics module had been gruesomely specific on torture, terrorism and the supposed justifications for both – had I come to see how deep and bloody was the pit from which we had so recently begun to climb.

‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘I was just a kid.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So what’s your mature, considered view?’

I shrugged. ‘Now that it’s all over? I don’t know. I wouldn’t justify it in these terms anyway. Maybe self-defence—’

She laughed in my face.

‘Let me
finish
,’ I said, testily. ‘That was how it was officially justified in the beginning – against nuclear and chemical and terrorist threats and so on. All I’m saying is that if they’d been telling the truth, they’d have had a point. All the humanitarian justifications came
after
it turned out they weren’t.’

‘All the same,’ Sophie said, ‘that’s how it’s justified now, isn’t it? And the Second World War, too. So I’m not going out on a limb about how your idea about humanity’s vast and glorious future might let us off all sorts of moral hooks now.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Even if that justification turns out to be only made after the fact.’

‘Yes, you are,’ I said, feeling more secure. ‘Out on a limb. Honest, Sophie, you’ve got even utilitarianism all wrong. Well, maybe first-order …’ I stopped and sighed at the thought of re-treading the first-year Ethics module. ‘Anyway, look, the point is—’

‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘You look, and let me tell you what my point is, OK, Ryan?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m not—’

She took off her black leather jacket with a sinuous shrug and leaned forward a little, a movement that set the shiny material of her sleeveless top quivering. I made a polite and belated effort to keep looking at her in the face, which was itself fascinating enough, her dark-outlined eyes bright.

‘The question I asked to start with,’ she said, ‘is what you want to achieve in life. You haven’t answered that and to be honest I think you’re evading it. I mean, all this stuff about the glorious future of humanity is all well and good but what’s it got to do with the future of you?’

She said all this in a light, friendly tone. I found myself frowning, and opening and closing my mouth a couple of times.

‘Well, all right,’ I said at last. ‘It’s … important to me because … everything we do or don’t do matters a heck of a lot because we’re at the beginning of things, the ground floor so to speak, the foundation or maybe just the hole in the ground. And we’ve got all that responsibility – it’s terrifying. But instead of living up to it and realising we’re building this vast civilisation and maybe making ourselves fit to be part of it, whether we live into it or not, we’re still squabbling about stupid shit like whether evolution happened or the climate is changing or which religion if any is true and so on.’

‘No, we’re not,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s just the bloody nonsense of American electoral politics and in countries where Islamism is still a problem. Religion just doesn’t come up anywhere else, and certainly not here, apart from a minority of students. So why does arguing about it matter to you?’

By now it was mid-afternoon. The coffee was cold, the Library Bar had gone quiet.

‘Well,’ I said, feeling painfully self-conscious, ‘I think religion and cults and so on are being artificially stimulated in a very deliberate way to distract people from the economic crisis and all that. And I think my … what I want to do is fight that, help make people see what is really going on.’

‘Artificially stimulated?’ Sophie looked interested. ‘How?’

‘I think some of the UFO phenomena are secret aircraft and UAVs and so on, and that they have some kind of electrical effects that stimulate the temporal lobes – the parts of the brain that can give people religious experiences.’

She just stared at me. ‘That seems a bit … far-fetched,’ she said, in a tone that suggested she was keeping careful control of her voice. ‘And a bit redundant as an explanation, seeing as the social and psychological reasons why some people have these weird beliefs and experiences are … pretty much well understood, you know?’

‘Uh, yeah, but—’

‘And anyway,’ she added, ‘even if it
is
happening, what makes you think
you
can do anything about it – by arguing with spotty-faced fundy students at stalls on your way to lunch?’

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I didn’t know what to say.

This wasn’t because I didn’t have an answer. I had one, right on the tip of my tongue. It was this: because the Space Brother and the Space Sister told me.

Don’t get me wrong – I knew very well that the Space Brother and the Space Sister were figments of my imagination. But my private explanation of those figments seemed, now that I was on the verge of uttering it, even more bizarre: they were planted there by a secret faction of the rational elements of the secret rulers of the world.

Jesus H fucking Christ, I thought. My one-man mission to promote rational thought against religion, pseudoscience and the paranormal was rooted in a UFO encounter, a single vivid dream that still seemed real in a way my frequent nightmares and abduction experiences didn’t, a phone-camera pic allegedly of a page in a conveniently inaccessible book, and a conspiracy theory that curled up and died on my lips out of sheer embarrassment the moment I found myself about to expound it.

Suddenly the whole thing stank with the squalor of the occult.

‘Well, now that you mention it,’ I said, with a half laugh that I hoped sounded self-deprecating, ‘it does seem a bit disproportionate, doesn’t it? And my UFO theory – well, it’s not just mine, and I think it’s worth looking into, but you do have a point. I mean, if something like that was going on, the best thing I could do would be to encourage people to wear tinfoil hats.’

‘Tinfoil hats,’ Sophie said. ‘Yes, that just about sums it up!’

‘Oh, well,’ I said. ‘Fancy another coffee? Let me get it this time.’

Sophie shook her head. ‘Nah, thanks, but I’ve got a lecture in half an hour, and I need to nip into the library first.’

‘Aw, right. I owe you one, then.’

She shrugged into her jacket and gathered up her bag and books. Just before she left she turned to me and said, ‘You look after yourself, Ryan, OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘I mean that,’ she said. ‘Look after
yourself
. Stop worrying about saving the human race. Get a bit better acquainted with a few more of its members, right?’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I see what you mean.’

What she’d said sounded like good advice. It would be easier to take than most such, because she’d just pulled the rug from under my entire sense of purpose in life.

She looked at me quizzically for a second or two, blinked, shook her head slightly, then smiled and left, leaving a faint trace of her scent and a nagging sense of a missed opportunity and a missed point. Had she been suggesting that I get better acquainted with her? For a minute or two I contemplated running after her, catching up with her before she’d walked the hundred metres to the library, and asking her … what? Out for a drink? And what if she turned me down? And what if she were still with Calum? And what if …? By the time I’d war-gamed the possibilities in my head, the moment for the action in reality had passed.

I looked at my watch. The time was a quarter to four. I had a seminar on
Middlemarch
at four in the David Hume Building, less than five minutes’ walk away. I had made extensive notes for it on my phone.

Fuck you, George Eliot, I thought. I needed time to think. I strolled to the bar and ordered a double single malt.

‘Let me get that,’ said a voice behind my shoulder. ‘And the same for me, please.’

I turned, and saw a man a few years older than myself wearing a black suit with an open-necked blue denim shirt.

‘Good to see you again, Ryan,’ he said, sticking out his hand. As I shook it, he grinned and added, ‘You look a little perplexed. Perhaps you don’t remember me.’

‘Oh, I remember you all right, Reverend Baxter,’ I said.

‘Call me James,’ said the man in black.

He waved a card to pay, and took his turn with the glass jug of water, tipping a careful quarter measure into the double. Then he fingered a cigarette packet from his pocket and nodded towards the door to the patio.

‘Shall we?’

‘I’ll just get my bag,’ I said.

I stuffed the books into the backpack, feeling his eye on me as if he could see every scornful, sceptical scribble in the margins of my King James.

The patio was below ground level, a long draughty roofless room furnished with rough, weather-greyed wooden benches, rougher tables, rusty umbrella poles and dusty saplings. Tiny camcopters hovered and darted like unseasonal wasps. I followed Baxter to a vacant table and sat down opposite him, taking care to be on the side of the exit steps in the far corner.

He raised his glass. ‘
Sláinte
.’

‘
Sláinte
.’ I sipped.

He lit up, keeping his gaze fixed on me through the Zippo flare and the first puff.

‘I reckon I owe you an apology,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘The last time I met you,’ he said, meditatively blowing smoke in my general direction, ‘I was extraordinarily rude and gauche, even for a newly ordained minister.’

‘Were you really a minister?’ I asked.

He raised his eyebrows.

‘Indeed I was,’ he said, with a sort of forced joviality that in itself almost vouched for his claim, ‘and I still am, despite having got rid of the dog-collar, for which relief much thanks! That’s because, in fact, I’m the Church of Scotland chaplain here. Why do you ask?’

‘Because the local churches had no trace of you, and neither did the Church of Scotland.’

‘You checked up on me?’ He sounded amused, as well as bemused.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As soon as you were out the door.’

He waved a hand. ‘Go ahead then – check up on me again.’

I did. I went to the university website on my phone, and there he was.

‘This isn’t what happened last time,’ I said, looking up.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I can see how that might have been a bit disturbing, especially in the, ah, troubled conditions of three years ago. I can only assume there was some problem with the Church’s websites – apart from the revolutionaries and all their monkey business back then, I know for a fact that our IT was, and still is come to think of it … well, pretty much what you’d expect from an outdated institution in terminal decline.’

‘That’s what you think the Church is?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It’s dying on its feet. That’s not just my opinion – it’s the conclusion of the Church and Society Council’s report to this year’s General Assembly.’ He gestured vaguely over his shoulder, I guessed towards the Mound about half a mile away, where the Church held its annual synod. ‘Plenty more where that came from. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Talk to me?’

‘Yes,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another. ‘In fact, I came into the bar especially to have a word with you half an hour ago, but you seemed to be deep in conversation, so I bought myself a pint and waited.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘I thought it best not to interrupt. Nice girl, by the looks of her. Close friend of yours?’

‘I knew her at school,’ I said, irritated. ‘Have you been keeping an eye on me, or what?’

He waved his hands cross-wise. ‘Not at all, not at all. Your name came back to me, from an argument you had with a student who later came to me in some confusion. And of course I remembered you from Greenock. You were such an intense young man that you were hard to forget, especially since the recollection was so embarrassing to me. Smoking in the sitting room, accepting a cup of instant coffee as if I didn’t have a clue what it cost in those days. And now, here on campus …’ He shrugged. ‘You’ve built up quite the reputation – pillar of the Humanist Society, eloquent debater, fire-breathing rationalist, scourge of the fundamentalists.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I’m flattered.’

‘Yes, really,’ he said. ‘And I’m delighted. Those fundamentalist dingbats are the absolute bane of my life, let me tell you. Most of them are engineers, you know. Have you
seen
the posters they stick up? A picture of a Bible with “When all else fails, read the instructions”. One of them even ran off copies of the same poster with “RTFM”.’

I’d seen the first, but not the second.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

Baxter leaned forward a little, and spoke in a low but vehement voice: ‘It’s an old programmer joke. Stands for “Read the Fucking Manual”. God help them if that’s how they see the Bible! Nit-picking, pluke-faced, world-building nerds – they’d be better off in the SF Soc, if you ask me, applying their exegetical skills to the
Silmarillion
and
The Lord of the Rings
. If you can prise them out of their literal-minded stupidity you’d be doing their souls a service.’

I had to demur. ‘The only people I’ve had any effect on with that sort of thing, and it’s only been one or two, have ended up becoming atheists. Surely not what you want, is it?’

‘Obviously I’d prefer that they didn’t, but they do a lot less harm as atheists than as supposed Christians. And in any case, who am I to say? Atheism may be part of their spiritual journey.’