The House of Rumour (52 page)

We looked to the stars for utopian ideas; like Campanella and his cosmic
mutazione,
we drew down dreams from above of other worlds and other possibilities. I still believe in the essential idealism of science fiction. But it’s best when it doesn’t struggle too hard for meaning. Fantasy can be the most honest of literary genres when it doesn’t pretend to realism. Absurd speculation is a simple necessity and warnings from the future can be useful, but we should be wary of prophecy and cautious of that yearning desire for connectedness. Fleming saw the House of Rumour as the image of an intelligence service; we can know it now as an ancient vision of the internet. The haunt of credulity, rash error, empty joy and unreasoning fear. The world whispers stories to itself. This is what conspire means: to breathe with.

‘Let us inhale!’ declared Tommaso Campanella as he walked the French countryside in his last years. Despite decades of suffering and confinement, he was finally able to enjoy his liberty. An admirer from Dauphiné, Nicolas Chorier, records a joyful and light-hearted man strolling in happy recreation, calling out: ‘Let us inhale life from the life of the world!’ He thought of air as the spirit of the earth, the soul of nature.

Campanella was finally released from imprisonment in 1629. He never gave up his ideal of the City of the Sun, that great utopia and memory system conceived amid terrible agony and privation. At Louis XIII’s court he dedicated new writings to Cardinal Richelieu and implored him to build Héliaca, a French form of Heliopolis. His final work was to chart the horoscope and compose a sonnet commemorating the birth of the future Louis XIV: the Sun King.

Campanella saw the world as a book from which we learn; the world as a great animal, within which we are mere parasites. That the world is a living thing was, says Campanella, ‘first taught by Hermes Trismegistos’. Philip K. Dick claimed that this same Trismegistos tells us our universe is a hologram, the world a book in which we are read. Our dimensions are projected from a distant event horizon somewhere at the far reaches of the universe.

Weltanschauung
. A world-view. In 1990, Voyager 1 took a photograph of the earth from a record distance. Taking up less than a pixel, our planet showed up as a pale-blue dot in a grainy band of light. Up close, our world is overwhelming; at a distance, utterly negligible. A mote of dust in a sunbeam, a lonely speck in the enveloping darkness.

I still look up at its sky, its thin veil of atmosphere a delicate breath. I wait for darkness, a night full of stars, the pattern of our past. It’s 2011, and I realise this was the date for a story I set on Mars, which I tried to sell to
Amazing Stories
in 1939. I always wanted to live in the future. Well, here I am. Just. I remember Robert Heinlein saying, if you keep going for long enough they’ll find a cure for death. I’m very glad they haven’t. Of course I’d like to hang around a little longer just to see how things turn out. After all, that’s what I spent my working life trying to do. Some say that 2012 will bring a profound spiritual transition, a transformation of the consciousness, a
mutazione
or something like the ‘Age of Aquarius’ that was all the rage when I lived in that commune in Venice Beach in the 1960s. I’m not so sure of such grandiose notions any more. But then I’ve already had my future, in my work and in my imagination.

My son Martin has moved back to LA. He says he wants to be nearby now that I can’t get about so easily. We were talking about paradise the other day and he told me that the word comes from the Old Persian
pairidaeza
, meaning ‘walled garden’. ‘So,’ he said, ‘do you think the wall is there to keep people in or out?’ He still has nightmares about Jonestown, that Garden of Earthly Delights that went so horribly wrong. If the world is a book, we should be careful how we read it. Maybe we should stay out of paradise and be wary of what we dream of when we look up at the stars, hoping for something better.

As above, so below.

On the particular level, all is uncertain. Everything has the power to be in two places at once, but as soon as we observe it it stops happening. And we experience only a fraction of reality. We pick a card from a shuffled deck and make that one choice out of an infinite number of possibilities. Yet all the possibilities that can occur, do occur.

And we never face the direction of travel; like Voyager 1 we turn and send our tremulous signals back home. So with the past in front of us we can go backwards into the future. History is unpredictable. Any number of things might have happened. On parallel worlds or in counter-factual realities, at forking paths and at jonbar points, the world is a speculative fiction. A breath of conspiracy. Whisperings of Doubtful Origin in the House of Rumour. Utopia or dystopia are a moment away, just waiting for creation. At every point.

The world holds its breath.

Acknowledgements

Thanks and praise to Stephanie Theobald, Jonny Geller, Carole Welch, Jasper Stocker, Hamish Arnott, Michael Arnott, (all the Arnotts and those that dwell among them), Tanya de Villiers, Pablo Robledo, Melissa Pimental, Patricia Duncker, Michelle Graham, Mandy Colleran, Jeremy Reed, Ib Melchior, Cleo Baldon, Rodrigo Fresán, Stephen and Anastasia Webster, Geraldine Beskin, Mark Simpson, Lucy Foster, Celia Levett, Amber Burlinson, Alasdair Oliver, Simon Blow, Ben McManus, Barnaby Rogerson and the two lesbians who ran the illegal club by Beach 16 in Miramar, Havana in 1994.

In
The House of Rumour
, fiction is mixed with the truth. Some readers will note the similarities between Vita Lampada and real-life transvestite con artist Vikki de Lambray (
né
David Lloyd Gibbon), who died in suspicious circumstances after being involved in a sex scandal with a retired senior intelligence officer. ‘The Watchers’ flying saucer cult is partly based on
When Prophecy Fails
, the 1956 classic sociological study of a UFO religion by Festinger, Riecken and Schachter. Larry Zagorski and Danny Osiris share my wonder and confusion at Professor Leonard Susskind’s sublime and actual theory of the World as a Hologram. The poem in Larry’s story is an extract from John Addington Symonds’ translation of Tommaso Campanella’s sonnet ‘The Book of Nature’.

  Rudolf Hess’s flight remains the most puzzling event of the Second World War, and was a contentious issue throughout the Cold War and beyond. At a banquet at the Kremlin in October 1941 attended by Stalin and Churchill, the Soviet leader proposed a toast to the British secret services for their skill in luring the Deputy Führer to Britain. When Churchill protested that his government knew nothing of the flight beforehand, Stalin replied archly: ‘well, there are many things my intelligence service does not tell me about’.

  For further sources, bibliographies and other ‘whisperings of doubtful origin’ visit:
www.houseofrumour.com.