The Book Of Ian Watson, page 22
So here goes. The first job I had today was a big one, the sort I pride myself on, nothing routine, something responsible. Of course Tillotson in the next cubicle might have been working on the same story as me, maybe dozens of us were all working on it, but that didnt matter.
times 4 apr 84 sov-premier speech malquoted rectify
I never told anyone I have an almost photographic memory. I dialled the front page of The Times on the telescreen and read “in Moscow yesterday Soviet Premier Kutuzov announced that the USSR is to reduce its nuclear arsenal unilaterally by 30 per cent. Said Kutuzov, ‘Our planet may be the only home of intelligent life in the whole universe. What criminal folly to imperil it! By switching arms spending into genuine space research I’m sure we can reach the stars.’ (Full text on page 7.) His speech was hailed in London, New York, Peking …”
Unfacts! Unfacts! Its the same every day at MiniTrue. Except for Sundays but then its twice as bad on monday mornings with two days unfacts piled up. Its been like this for years. Our memories arent tampered with, but history changes—the history of a hundred years ago, the history of yesterday—and we have to change it back. Sometimes Christ was never crucified and we have to crucify him again in the history books. Sometimes Hitler was never born and the holocaust never happened. Myself, of course, I specialize in contemporary unfacts.
Its one damn thing after another, it takes most of the resources of the world, which is why the cigarettes are so foul and the food so tasteless. If we let up, we wouldnt be free human beings, we would be characters in a fiction.
How does it happen? How? How?
If the Inner Party knew, surely theyd have put a stop to it. Maybe the real question isnt how, but who? Or what?
If all unfacts were really facts, could I reach the end of the golden lane where the golden age of truth begins? If I write down the unfacts, will that make them stronger, more enduring?
At this point his inkpencil dried up, and Winston had sat staring at the wall till the lights went out, as an economy measure, at twenty-two hours.
The next evening, with a new inkpencil, he continued:
April 5th, 1984. The proles live in a golden fantasy, they believe the unfacts that keep on appearing in the newspapers even though the printers print the truth. They believe them in spite of all the power cuts and the missile crisis and the Verity coffee. But we cant stop printing newspapers and books. WE CANT! That would be to give up entirely, to lose our roots in the past even if its only yesterday, to lose ourselves forever. And not all the news is changed, only some.
I dont believe in God, Idont believe Gods doing this because if he was, if he existed at all, it would make nonsense of being human, nonsense of free will. Maybe theres no actual cause, maybe thats the answer. Its an absence of cause, of cause & effect, like a creeping sickness, an epidemic.
Everyone in the Party is fighting back, but its a grinding wearying job. I see the future as a big foot stamping false events on the face of time, and that face, a human face with its mouth wide open, is biting back
Till the lights went out, Winston wrote down the unfacts he had rectified that day.
O’Brien was the man’s name, and he was a member of the Inner Party. Winston had seen him often enough at a distance in the labyrinthine corridors of MiniReal, but on April the 9th O’Brien turned up just before the Two Minutes Truth and stayed right through it.
Winston had left his work reluctantly to attend the Truth, resenting the interruption. According to that morning’s Times, Iran had declared peace on all her neighbours several weeks earlier, in violation of reality, and Winston had been ransacking his memories of recent Middle Eastern affairs when the buzzer sounded for the Truth.
Whilst everyone was settling in their seats in the assembly room, he still brooded about battles on the Khorramshar front, bombings of oil refineries, sabotage of supertankers. This was a ticklish assignment, and bound to end off upstairs in committee. The main trouble was that the Iranian fanatics accepted the false news much of the time, one of the reasons for the war being the Russian-backed Iraqi intervention aimed at imposing reality upon the Iranian government … This whole business was a nest of tangled snakes!
Trumpets sounded from the telescreen, and the Truth began; but not before O’Brien had slipped into a nearby seat.
A feverish euphoria soon gripped Winston, mounting to ecstasy, an almost sexual delirium, as the announcer’s voice proclaimed the plain truth: of hijackings, minor massacres, missile tests, natural calamities. However, at the climax a little voice seemed to whisper inside Winston’s head, ‘Are these events any truer than the unfacts? Need they be any truer?’
Just at this point he noticed O’Brien observing him. O’Brien alone seemed remote from the ecstasy of the Truth. The man sat like granite. And Winston understood: O’Brien was the man waiting at the end of the lane, the man that Winston could become!
After the Truth Winston felt wrung-out emotionally. Yet now he saw an ingenious way to rectify the Iranian situation. It was as if somehow those two minutes had rewired the frayed strands of logic and feeling in his mind. He even whistled as he walked back along the corridor.
A body brushed past, knocking him softly. For a moment a girl’s face came very close to his, her dark hair swirling against his cheek. It was that girl from Unpersec, the Unperson Section! Unpersec’s job was to scan all history books and edit back into existence persons who had vanished from the texts: persons such as Torquemada, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler. Obviously this was a vital job, yet it was common knowledge that Unpersec was staffed by people of low moral calibre: sadists, perverts and drug addicts who alone could edit such persons back into existence with equanimity. Momentarily the girl stared into Winston’s eyes as if to plumb the depths of his own depravity. She winked, then hastened on ahead whistling a parody of Winston’s tune.
Winston felt befouled. He wanted to shear her long hair off, wash the greasy red lipstick from her mouth, then strip her roughly and scrub her all over in a cold bath with gritty carbolic soap and pumice stone.
It was a week later that the same girl sat down opposite Winston at a table in the canteen. No one else was at the table yet, so this must have been a deliberate choice, however casual it seemed.
A fat woman wheeled a trolley past, collecting greasy plates, cracked tea mugs, empty gin glasses, humming a tuneless refrain to herself. Probably she was a TruPol officer; and Winston had no doubt that several of his colleagues eating in this very room supplemented their ration coupons by acting as informers for TruPol …
When the skivvy woman was safely past, and before anybody else could join them, the girl apparently was seized by a coughing fit. She leaned right across the table. Her head lowered, she whispered, “I love you—spiritually. I fantasize about you. You’re the most unreal person I know!”
Incredibly, three weeks later the two of them were sitting together demurely holding hands in a clearing amidst young elm trees and hazel bushes—at the end of a golden lane.
Julia had found this country hide-out on one of her outings with the Junior Truth League. She had whispered the route to Winston amidst a dense crowd milling around the foot of Verity Column, whipped up by a rumour that some truth saboteurs had been caught.
The hide-out seemed a paradise—and Julia was not a pervert or sadist or whore at all. She only pretended to be. Actually, she was sweet and pure and simple.
With a laugh she dismissed her work in Unpersec. “Oh, it’s all such nonsense! Who cares if those filthy people existed or not? We just have to cram our little heads with Hitler and the Marquis de Sade in case they disappear overnight, that’s all.”
“If they did disappear,” Winston said cautiously, “this wouldn’t be the real world any more.”
“Poo to that! Then the whole world could be just like this: a golden dream.”
“And it wouldn’t be true. We’re the guardians of evil, you and I, Julia. That’s what is really meant by the slogan ‘Truth is Evil’. If all the evil truths get washed away, then we’re lost. We’d have lost ourselves. Ah yes indeed, we’re the guardians of evil.”
“Really? I’m afraid that’s way over my head. Look, Winny, if there was a great flood that washed every book and document away, we could start out again all clean and simple. Wouldn’t that be nice?” She shrugged. “Since that isn’t going to happen, who cares?”
“There’s a flood all right, Julia. It’s a flood of unfacts. Don’t you ever wonder how it happens?”
“Of course I don’t. That’s boring. It’s just a fact of life like the weather.”
“I think maybe there’s a secret organisation—which is tampering with reality. Its members are savants with superhuman powers, using tools we can’t comprehend.”
Julia yawned and stretched her limbs in the sun. “Maybe the moon’s made of green cheese, dear.”
What if, wondered Winston, there really was such an organisation: one composed of supremely wise sages possessing extraordinary powers, operating out of a secret headquarters somewhere remote such as the Himalayas? If the Inner Party knew this, why didn’t they atom-bomb the Himalayas or the Andes or wherever? Maybe they had tried, and failed.
What if these savants were more-than-men: a secret race who would one day supplant the human race? With a guilty thrill Winston contemplated this notion. Perhaps, perhaps he had himself already taken one small step towards joining this superhuman band. And perhaps one of this band, operating undercover, was none other than O’Brien!
Winston told Julia about his diary, his own humble chronicle of Utopian unfacts. She seemed not to see the point of it, beyond murmuring, “What an unreal fellow you are, to be sure!” Soon she drifted off to sleep in the drowsy sunshine. Presently he slept too.
Later, after waking and tidying twigs from their clothes, Julia and Winston kissed each other chastely on the cheek before retracing their steps.
It was two months later, and they had started meeting in a rented back room in a prole district of the city. There Julia would wash off her lipstick, tie her hair up in a tight bun and occasionally permit Winston to kiss her upon those cleansed lips. “My unreal lover,” she would whisper, giving the word its ancient, modest sense, “my fantasy friend. You are Abelard and I am Heloise. You’re the Prince and I’m Snow White, though my hair is dark.”
“Snow White slept in a coffin, Julia. That’s where we’re bound, too, on the day that TruPol finds out.”
“Yes,” she would sigh.
That particular evening Winston told Julia how O’Brien had stopped him in a corridor at MiniTrue. At last. At long last.
“I’ve been observing your work on The Times, Smith,” O’Brien had said, loudly so that anyone could overhear. “With approval, I might add. It so happens that I chair a committee concerned with micro-untruths.”
“With—?”
“Ah, but you wouldn’t know about those, would you? Micro-untruths is our technical term for seemingly petty, trivial falsifications—as opposed to unfacts, which are gross distortions of major events. We believe that the force behind Untruth is stalemated—though not beaten—by our efforts. Now it is trying a different and more subtle ploy, namely the forgery of very minor banal details. This may seem mere pawn play, yet en masse it could link up into a deadly attack. I thought you might care to be co-opted on to my committee? Perhaps you would be so kind as to call at my flat one evening to discuss it?”
“I’d be delighted.”
Excitedly Winston related this encounter to Julia; for obviously O’Brien’s words concealed a very different message indeed. Julia nodded, and yawned.
A lone spider was dangling down from the ceiling, as if aiming for her open mouth.
“Ugh!” cried Winston, and threw his shoe at it.
A week later Winston and Julia worked up their courage to call on O’Brien in his Inner Party flat. A servant ushered them in: a little man with beetling brows, who might have been a deaf mute for all the noise he made.
The couple stood waiting across the shag-pile carpet from O’Brien’s desk, while the man continued dictating top-level memoranda. As soon as the servant had left, however, O’Brien looked up.
“Shall you say it, or shall I?”
“I’ll say it,” said Winston. “I believe Untruths are caused by a secret society of savants who have evolved beyond the human race. I believe you’re an agent of this society, risking your life at MiniReal for the sake of a future Utopia when the human race will have forgotten all its tragedies and villainies, forgotten all our history, forgotten Auschwitz and Genghis Khan and the Inquisition. I want to help this society. I love Untruth.”
“So do I,” added Julia, though less firmly.
“And what would you do to help this, er, society?”
“Anything!”
“Would you be prepared to obliterate Shakespeare and Dante and Homer? Shakespeare for his tragedies, Dante for his Hell, Homer for his wars?”
“Yes!”
O’Brien asked several questions in like vein, to all of which Winston answered ‘yes’ enthusiastically, with Julia nodding along.
“Very well,” said O’Brien at length. “There is a society of supermen who are behind the amelioration of the news and history.”
“Amelio …?”
“The bettering, Julia. Aiming at a bettering of reality itself—a world without war, cruelty or intolerance, without futility or tragedy. These supermen work from a distance to change the texture of the world, using meditation and mind-trance. Events themselves they cannot alter, but the record of events they can.”
“Yet people still remember, and set the record straight,” said Winston. “Is that because the society won’t allow itself to tamper with people’s minds directly? Otherwise people would cease to be people, cease to be free?”
O’Brien nodded gravely. “You yourself will never meet any of these supermen personally. Nor will I. Neither you nor I can betray them, nor even prove the fact of their existence.”
“Because they hide in the Himalayas?”
“Don’t ask.” O’Brien spread his hands expressively. “You mustn’t ask, nor may I answer. But some day—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in ten years time—you will receive a message to commit some act of sabotage inside MiniReal. Afterwards, possibly—just possibly—the society may be able to spirit you away to safety.”
“In the Andes or the Himalayas.” It wasn’t a question.
“In the Andes,” O’Brien echoed him, ironically, “or the Himalayas. And now you must both go.”
“Will we talk together again?” asked Julia.
O’Brien regarded her thoughtfully.
“Only … only at the end of the golden lane!” exclaimed Winston in a rush.
“Only,” agreed O’Brien, “at the end of the golden lane.”
When they were arrested subsequently, Winston discovered what he had known all along in the core of his being: namely that the golden lane was one of the floodlit corridors deep in the basements of TruPol, …
Room 101 seemed to him the deepest chamber yet, as though the whole world weighed down on it, compressing even the air. The room was bare, but for a heavy metal chair and a table with something bulky hidden under a cloth upon it.
To Winston, strapped immobile in that seat, O’Brien said, “The worst thing in the world varies from person to person. Sometimes it is death by impalement on a stake through the anus. Sometimes it is death by burial alive. Occasionally it is something trivial, not even fatal. In your case, Winston, the worst thing …” And O’Brien whipped away the cloth.
Sick at heart, ice in his bowels, Winston mumbled helplessly, “Spiders … No, you can’t do that to me, O’Brien, you can’t. Can’t, can’t.”
“Observe the construction of this box. It fits over your head thus. When I pull up this plate, the contents of the box will crawl all over you. Some will enter your nostrils; others will make their way into your ears. They’re overcrowded in the box. They’re in a bad mood. They’re hungry. They’ll spin webs. They’ll sting and wrap. To them, your head is one big fly.”
Winston heard a distant screaming. It was himself.
“One word of advice, Winston. Don’t think too hard. Thinking won’t save you.”
Don’t think? How could he possibly think anything? He had to stop the spiders. He had to put something between him and them. Something. Someone.
“Don’t do it to me!” he heard himself begging. “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” remarked O’Brien sadly as the box was lifted over Winston’s head.
“What do you want? Anything! Tell me!”
“Our Enemy is subtle.” O’Brien’s voice sounded very far away now. Much closer to Winston’s ears was a soft, gentle sound of infinitely many legs all moving. “Thought and science have failed to combat the Enemy. Our Enemy hides from us, masquerading perfectly. Perhaps the Enemy is ourselves, without our knowing it. Perhaps it is our own minds acting in concert, dreaming unfacts into existence, eating holes in human history …”
Words bleated inside Winston’s brain. To be or not to be! But there is no fixed reality! To be and not-to-be!
Spiders. He was a big fat fly. Suppose the spiders didn’t know that? What if he didn’t know it? What if the spiders thought he was something else? What if he thought so?
I’m not a fly! I’m not a man! I’m a spider too! A very big spider that no other spider would dare mess around with!
Winston felt hairs twitching all over him. He felt his limbs tip-tapping—how many limbs, four, six, eight? He honestly didn’t know. His spinneret unwound silk from his bowels, his mandibles clicked.
He heard another click too—and he realized that the box over his head had not been opened. It had been closed. Forever.
