R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

My scruples are few and far between, I admit. But they draw a lot of power.

Too much for my line of work, truth be told.

Stevie’s brisk stride carried me back to the same courtyard where Baars and I had taken tea on my previous visit. The table had been moved from the shadowed portico into the sunlight. Tea steamed from two freshly poured cups. Xenophon Baars sat on the far chair facing the entrance, his expression as avid as before, his white suit fairly incandescent in the sunlight, which also dazzled the assortment of porcelain across the tabletop.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Manning,” Baars said, coming to his feet to greet me.

“I’d ask you to call me Disciple,” I said, staring directly at Stevie, “but I’m afraid you would find it confusing.”

Baars laughed-the guy always seemed to be laughing. “I would never confuse someone as singular as yourself, Mr. Manning. Not even in my dotage… Come. Join me for some tea.”

Stevie withdrew with a fluid, oriental air that I found menacing. I don’t much care for imperturbable people-my job pretty much depends on rattling cages.

Baars had leaned back to sun his face. The lines of reflected light made him seem a plastic mould of himself. I wanted to say something clever or, failing that, something snide, but part of me was still humming the squalid notes Anson had struck just moments before…

“He says we’re supposed to affirm…”

Rules. With belief come rules. But more on that later.

“Tell me, Mr. Manning. When you stare into the sky, what is it you see?”

“Sky.”

He smiled a blind beach smile. “I see the sun.”

I imagine he was hoping this would be a Zen moment, profound for its one-hand-clapping simplicity. I just thought it was stupid. I almost told him he should start a show on the local cable access channel, call it Zen with Xen.

I stuck to the stubborn point instead. “So I’ve been canvassing,” I said. “Going door to door, looking for scraps regarding Jennifer. The Framers don’t seem to be very popular…”

“You don’t take notes, do you?” Baars asked, eyes still closed.

This gave me pause. I decided to ignore it. I also decided to ignore the fact that no mention had been made of the severed finger Nolen had found.

“So that got me wondering whether there was anyone in Ruddick who didn’t like you-I mean really didn’t like you. You know, vandalism, threats, harassment in town, that sort of thing. I have it on good authority that cults… or, ah, new religious movements like yours, experience their fair share of bigotry and, well… discrimination.”

I assumed from the way Baars lifted his head to regard me that I had garnered his attention. Most everyone likes to think they’re persecuted. Almost everyone jumps at a woe-is-me opportunity…

“Where do you think your remarkable memory comes from, Mr. Manning?”

For the first time, I revealed the hard eyes of my suspicion.

“Don’t look so shocked,” he said with a good-natured chuckle. “You googled me, didn’t you?”

I shrugged. I had to admit, Xenophon Baars was a hard man not to like. All that charisma. I wondered if he was, like, the Obama of the cult world.

“Bet you thirty bucks my hit count is higher.”

Baars laughed. “I’m sure it is! From the looks of it, there are more than a few researchers who would love to make a lab rat out of you.”

“Yeah, well. Those days are over.”

“But your memory remains the same, doesn’t it? In the New York Times piece, one researcher described it as ‘miraculous.’ Is that what you think it is? A miracle?”

“No more than any other aberration.”

“Ah, a happy deformity, then. Is that it?”

“I prefer to think of it as a ‘joyous birth defect.’”

His sun forgotten, Xenophon Baars fixed me with a peculiar gaze. The shadow of his nose fell across his lips, and for the first time I realized how ridiculously small his mouth was.

“No system is perfect, Disciple. The law of unintended consequences applies as much to our future as it does to what you call ‘now.’ And with so many billions of people-”

“So… I’m like in a pod or a vat, somewhere, is that it?”

A sad smile. “No. In point of fact, you are a machine. A kind of quantum computer, dreaming of its mammalian past.”

“We’re dreaming, huh.”

I tried to imagine him eating a hamburger-couldn’t do it.

“Hallucinating would be a more accurate term. This is the real world, only systematically skewed to simulate the way things were roughly five billion years ago. Think of the way schizophrenics incorporate elements of the real world into their psychotic delusions.”

I blinked. How do you reply to something like that? Fawk. I reminded myself that Jennifer was the only point here, not Baars’s whacked dogma. Discipline, Disciple.

“So what does this have to do with my miraculous memory?”

“Because sometimes, Disciple, our true selves leak through, shine as inexplicable gifts-gifts like your memory-given our ignorance otherwise. We see only slivers of the Frame, so like psychotics we continually misinterpret, claim to see ghosts or to remember past lives or to talk to God or to attain enlightenment. The list goes on, I assure you!”

That was the ninth time he had said, “I assure you.”

I found myself wondering whether anyone had bothered to count up all the ways people can make stupid sound smart, when, like a bolt, I grasped the out-and-out genius of Baars’s little story. It quite literally contained nothing spooky. Using it, he could pretty much rationalize anything paranormal, anything that seemed to signal some beyond, in mundane terms. A little technology and a lot of time was all it took…

“Transcendence,” I heard myself murmur. This old girlfriend of mine, a philosophy student named Sasha Lang, used to blab on and on about how humans hungered for transcendence, for something beyond the miserable circuit of their existence. I would just say something glib, like how Cheerios were more filling.

But Baars, the clever boy, had invented a way at once to feed that hunger and to explain it away.

The man fairly erupted in gleeful laughter. “Yes!” he cried. “Yes!” In an avid rush he explained how he used to teach classes on Transcendence back in his Berkeley days, how he even wrote a book on the topic before his “awakening.” After pondering the issue for more than fifteen years, he apparently realized that the best way to understand paranormal experience was to look at normal experience, not as some kind of baseline, but as a diminution of a much broader spectrum of possibility. It was exploring this insight through hypnosis that led to his discovery of the Frame, the true present, where humanity had become indistinguishable from its technology.

It all came down to shrinkage.

“The world we see is but a sliver! But because it’s all we know, we confuse it for the whole!”

I sat back and soaked in it: the stink of someone smoking his own ideas.

He must have caught a whiff of my disgust in my expression, because he caught himself, eventually. “You must forgive my enthusiasm,” he said, beaming like someone who had asked for the letter E on Wheel of Fortune.

“No worries,” I replied. “It’s just us stoners.” The guy was a fucking first-class wanker, no doubt about it. The weird thing was that the more he talked, the more harmless he began to seem, the more my suspicion began to wane. Sure, I wanted to grab him, shake him, scream, Are you fucking kidding me?

But…

He had convinced me he was a believer. Albert’s drunken revelation from the previous night, that he had taught a course on cults at Berkeley and so knew too much about cults to honestly participate in one, had me convinced the whole Frame thing was nothing more than a self-serving fraud. So the enthusiasm which should have implicated him-the man, after all, had just learned that his missing lover was in fact dead-actually had the opposite effect. Xenophon Baars was a true, talk-you-blue-in-the- face believer.