And there was Olympus, monstrous and enigmatic. It was never far from our thoughts. Like life itself, it seemed imponderable, its laboured progress somehow a paradigm of the approach of illness.
It was in this glum mood I looked in on the C of E, the Committee of Evil, holding its weekly meeting. The rather comical title had been dreamed up by Suung Saybin, but the purpose was serious enough: to try and determine the nature and cause of evil, with a view to its regulation. ‘Perhaps the humour lies in the fact that they haven’t a hope,’ I thought to myself. Maybe the committee was just another way in which people kept themselves amused.
Suung Saybin remained as chair and Elsa Lamont, she of the orthogonal figures and an Adminex official, as secretary. Otherwise, members of the panel changed from month to month. As I entered, John Homer Bateson rose to his feet.
‘The previous speaker wastes our time,’ he declared. ‘We cannot eradicate evil by religion, or even control it, as history shows. All history is a demonstration of the workings of evil. Like Thomas Hardy’s Immanent Will, “it weaves unconsciously as heretofore, eternal artistries of circumstance”. Nor will reason work. Reason is frequently the ally of wrong-doing.
‘Here we are, stuck on this little dried-up orange of a planet, and we plan to banish this monster? Why, we’re in its clutches! What are the component parts, the limbs, the testicles, of evil? Greed, ambition, aggression, fear, power … All these elements were integral to the very nature of EUPACUS, the conglomerate that dumped us here.
‘What impossibly naive view do you have of the nations that stranded us? The United States is by no means the worst of them. But it seeks to extend its empire into space – apologies, matrix. All the grand designs we may have about exploring this matrix mean nothing to the absconding financiers who backed matrix exploration. All this talk of Utopia – it means nothing, absolutely nothing, to the greedy men in power. Power, money, greed – if you kicked out the present set of slimebags, why, more slimebags would fill the breach.
‘I’ll tell you a story. It’s really a parable, but you’d distrust that term.’
‘You have five minutes, John,’ interposed Suung Saybin.
Ignoring her, Bateson continued, ‘A man was stranded alone on a planet that was otherwise uninhabited. He lived the blameless life of a hermit, befriending bats, rats, slugs, spiders – anything that amused him. That way, you attain sainthood, don’t you? One day, a vessel came down from space – pardon me, from the matrix – to rescue him. A grand sparkling ship, from which emerged a man in a golden space suit with long wavy blond hair and a manly tan, bearing a large picnic hamper.
‘”I’m your saviour,” he exclaimed, embracing the hermit.
‘The hermit got a good grip on the man’s throat and strangled him. Now he owned the spaceship. And the picnic basket.
‘What, I ask you, were his motives? Hatred of intrusion on his privacy, hunger, envy of the golden suit, aversion to this intruder’s display of hubris, greed to possess the ship, ambition to enjoy power himself? Or all these things? Or had solitude driven him mad?
‘You cannot resolve these questions – and I have offered you a simple textbook case. The promptings to evil are in all of us. Evil is not a single entity, but a many-splendoured thing. You’re wasting your time here if you think otherwise.’
I crept from the room.
Being unable to take lunch, I went to a remote upper gallery in search of solitude. Fond though I was of Cang Hai, I hoped to avoid her endless chatter. But there I happened upon my adopted daughter, sitting with her child playing at her feet. Alpha ran to me. I hugged her and kissed her cheeks. Cang Hai, meanwhile, picked up her sheets and assumed a pose whereby I was to take it she had been studying them.
‘I’m surprised to see you up here, Tom. How are you?’
‘Fine. And you?’
‘Trying to learn some science. I’m trying to understand about superfluids. Apparently they are called Bose-Einstein condensates.’