Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

Afterwards, as the congregation crowded out, warm smiles and handshakes all round, a little confidential and not always spiritual chat, and then dispersal to houses or cars.

Hugh and Nigel walked back home in silence. The others were still out.

‘Better not boil the veg just yet,’ said Nigel. ‘But I can warm a wee pan of soup.’

He took the cold chicken from the fridge and cut a few slices, which he and Hugh ate with bread and bowls of chicken soup thick with carrots and rice. When they’d finished, Nigel stood up and took off his tie, then his fine leather shoes.

‘Shame to waste such a fine afternoon,’ he said, pulling on walking boots. ‘Fancy a stroll up the glen?’

Hugh did. He too left his tie, and beside it a note, saying where they’d gone. Just in case they worried. He was halfway down the drive when he remembered he’d left his phone behind, on the bedside table. The thought of walking up the glen without his phone made him a little nervous, not just because he’d be beyond emergency contact but because he’d be without GPS. His parents had dinned into him the rule about not going into the hills without his phone. It was like brushing your teeth and washing your hands.

They followed the road west, out of the village, past the bridge and up the glen. It seemed smaller than the glen that figured in Hugh’s childhood memories and haunted his dreams, but it was still impressive, steep-sided, almost a canyon. A little dark burn burbled along beside the road, its white noise only adding to the quiet. Now and again a car passed, or a sheep called, or a curlew cried, but after each interruption the feeling of silence came back. After a few hundred metres of silent strolling along the bottom of the glen, Hugh noticed a familiar gully by the side of the road. He tracked it by eye up the cliff.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You can still climb up there.’

Nigel looked upward. ‘You’ve climbed that?’

‘Yes, often, when I was wee.’

Nigel chuckled. ‘As well your mother and I didn’t know that.’

‘Aye.’

‘Care to try it again?’

‘Yes,’ said Hugh, surprised. ‘You don’t mind?’

‘“Bodily exercise profiteth little”,’ said Nigel, in an ironic tone. ‘But a little is better than nothing. Lead the way.’

Some of it was a scramble, but most of the ascent was like a rugged staircase. Hugh even remembered the steps. About forty metres up he found again a semicircular shelf, thick with heather and bracken, in which he had occasionally sat and surveyed the scene.

‘This is where I climbed to,’ he said. He squatted, shaking lightly clenched hands in front of him, miming firing a machine-gun. ‘Guarded the approach roads.’

‘Ah,’ said Nigel. He sat on the heather, legs hanging over the edge of the shelf. ‘Quite a view.’

They looked out over the glen and the loch for a while.

‘Sometimes,’ Hugh said, ‘on a quiet, hot afternoon like this, climbing in the glen, I used to feel in the silence and the sunlight a sort of… a sense of presence. You know, like in an empty room when you feel someone’s there?’

‘I know the feeling,’ said Nigel.

‘Could that be what people mean by God’s presence?’

‘Nope,’ said Nigel, with a brusque head shake. ‘It’s your brain’s agency-detection module resonating. Like the noise you hear in silence, or the colours you see in the dark or with your eyes closed. The nerve keeps on firing, you see.’

Hugh laughed. ‘Very materialist!’

‘You could say that,’ said Nigel. ‘Or you could say scientific. I’ve looked up the neurology of it myself, and it seems conclusive enough to me. And I’ve listened closely to what people say about feeling the presence of God, and I can’t say it’s anything I’ve experienced myself, though I’ve experienced the feeling you mention often enough.’

He took his pipe and pouch out of his jacket pocket and slowly filled the one from the other.

‘What I take from that feeling is absence, because I know what causes it. The only presence is the rock, the sheer non-human immensity around us. I believe it was once called the sublime. It is not to be mistaken for a spiritual experience.’

‘Now you’re sounding like the minister.’

‘There’s that,’ Nigel said. ‘They are very careful to distinguish odd feelings from the marks of grace.’

He lit the pipe with a match, took a few puffs, then blew out a long stream of smoke, which the breeze caught and wafted instantly away. Then he turned to Hugh with a dry smile. ‘I have none of the marks of grace.’

‘Well,’ said Hugh, uncomfortable, wishing he hadn’t said a word about God, ‘I never thought…’

‘We can speak freely here.’ Nigel flourished the pipe stem at the horizon. ‘We have no phones with us. We are off the radar, so to speak. No doubt we are visible to satellites and drones, but I doubt they have capacity to spare for the likes of us.’

Still sitting, he pushed himself backwards and leaned against the rock face, careless of the back of his suit jacket. ‘I want to say some things to you. I was going to arrange it at some point, but you’ve given me the opportunity to talk in a place where no one else can hear what’s said.’

‘Not even God?’ said Hugh, unable to resist the prod of the old imp.

‘Not even God,’ said Nigel, in a firm but complacent tone. ‘In this world we are almost certainly beyond the reach of God, if indeed he exists at all.’

‘Never heard you say that before!’

‘Never had occasion to say it.’

Hugh shook his head. ‘How could we be beyond the reach of God, even if he exists?’

‘Och,’ said Nigel, ‘this is something I’ve thought for a long time. Every world that is logically possible feels just like a real world if you’re inside it. Now, not even God can make a logical possibility not a logical possibility. Not even God can make two plus two not four. Not even God can make a triangle with four sides. Not even God can make a valid conclusion not follow from a premise. So even if God were to intervene from outside, as it were, into a world, and change events, the most he could do would be to spin off a new world. The logically necessary original world would continue on its merry way, implication after implication’ – he made chopping motions with his hands – ‘ca-chung ca-chung ca-chung, you see?’

‘Mathematical universe theory,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ve come across it. At university, I think.’

‘Did you now? Well, I worked it out for myself, looking at Maxwell’s equations late one night long ago, and pondering how it could be that they so unreasonably matched the world. And then, you might say, the light dawned. I had no idea there was a name for it. Anyway, that is what I think.’

‘So why,’ Hugh asked, ‘do you go to church, and behave accordingly? I’ve never understood that.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ said Nigel. ‘It is not all pretence, you know. Like I said to you at the time. And like Spinoza said a few centuries earlier.’

‘You read Spinoza?’

Hugh had tried, once.

‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘I rummaged the minister’s discarded books long before you did. And what I took from Spinoza was a consequence of the way I already saw the world. Religion is philosophy for beginners, you might say. At its best, it teaches you to live at peace with your neighbours and to reconcile your own will with what can’t be changed, whether you call that the will of God or the course of Nature, which according to Spinoza are two ways of saying the same thing. These are no small matters to accomplish. And besides – there was another reason, a more pressing reason, for my outward conformity.’ He tapped out his pipe on a stone, then looked up at Hugh. ‘I did it for you, and…’