Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

“How do you people live?” she asked. “You can’t live just on raiding, and some day soon, according to you, there’ll be nothing left to raid. Like, who pays for these anti-missile missiles?”

“We all do,” Jordan said. “We don’t have taxes, that’d be a laugh. We—not just this village, all of the free people—have a couple of simple economic principles that have been applied in communities like this for nearly a hundred years now. One is that we don’t have rent, but land ain’t free—God ain’t making any more of it, but we keep right on making more people. So we apply the equivalent of rent to community purposes, like defence. The other is that any individual, or any group, can issue their own currency, backed up at their own risk. No landlords, no usurers, and no officials.”

“Oh, great,” said Myra. “A peasant’s idea of Utopia.

Single tax and funny money! Now I’ve heard everything!”

“It does work,” Jordan said. “We, as you can see, flourish. We’re the future.”

Jordan,” she said, “you know I found some clips of you on my encyclopaedia? Well, from them I’d never have figured you for going over to the Green Slime. Or for a preacher, come to that.”

Jordan laughed, unoffended. “The world will fall to the barbarians or to the machines. I chose the barbarians, and I chose to spread some enlightenment among them. Hence the preaching, which was—to begin with—of a kind of rationalism. I can honestly say I have led many of my people away from the dark, heathen worship of Gaia, and from witchcraft and superstition. But I also found, like many another missionary, that I preferred their way of life to the one from which I’d come. And along with loving nature, I came to love nature’s God.”

“You were an atheist.”

“So I believed. I later realised that I was an agnostic. A militant agnostic, if you like. All theology is idolatry, all scripture is apocrypha. All we can say is that God is One. God encompasses the world, there is nothing outside him, and nothing opposed to him. How could there be? So God approves of all that happens, because all that happens is his will. God loves the world, all of it, from the Hubble to the Planck, from the Bang to the Crunch. God is in the hawk hovering up there and in the mouse that cowers from its claws in yonder field. God is in the sickle and the sheaf, the hammer and the hot iron, the sword and the wound. God is in the fire and in the sun and in the holocaust. God was in the spy I had killed today, and in the man who killed him.”

Antinomianism was, Myra knew, a common enough heresy in periods of revolution or social breakdown. Four hundred years ago, these same words could have been ranted forth on those very hills. There was nothing new in what Jordan said, but Myra felt sure it would not disturb him in the slightest to point this out. He had probably read Winstanley and Christopher Hill for himself.

“You seem to know a lot about this unknowable God of yours.”

That I do.”

“Is God in the machines, in the AIs that you fear?”

“That too, yes.”

“What’s the difference between a God who makes no difference and takes no side and no God at all?”

They had reached the crest of the hill. Jordan reined in his horse. Myra stopped too, and looked down the hill at the grey ribbon of the motorway and the white blocks of a service-station.

So close, all the time.

“You can walk from here,” Jordan said dryly. He took her horse’s reins as Myra dismounted. He soberly returned her holstered weapon, her passport and her phone.

“Oh, and to answer your question. There is no difference, in a sense. But to believe that God is in everything, and is on your side whatever you do and whatever happens, gives one a tremendous access of energy.” He grinned down at her. “Or so I’ve found.”

And with that, the agnostic fanatic was gone, swift on his horse.

Myra slogged down the hill to the service area, cleaned up, made some phone calls while she ate in the cafeteria, and hired a car to take her to London.

She arrived, through all the obstacles thrown up by the small battles on the way, on the evening of the following day. She had long since missed her appointment with the Foreign Office; she had told them that in advance, and they’d asked her to call back when she arrived, to make another.

But, after all she had seen along the way, and all she had not seen—such as any evidence that people like Jordan’s band, and worse, operated with anything other than insolence and impunity, give or take the odd gunship attack—there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot of a point.

iVaiiin drummed on the roof of Menial’s house. The view outside was dreich. I’d looked out the window earlier, down the glen and the loch; ranks of cloud were marching in off the sea, and one after another shedding their loads on the hills. Inside, it was warm: we sat huddled together, backs to the piled-up pillows, sipping hot black coffee.

“No work today, thank Providence,” I said.

“Not at the yard anyway,” said Menial. She waved a hand at the soldering-iron and seer-stones and clutter in the corner of the room.

“You start learning a different work, here.”

“Aye, great,” I said.

“What is this Providence you talk about, anyway?” she asked.

“Urn.” I stared at the slow swirl of the coffee. “It’s… the helpful side of Nature, you might say. When things work out as we would wish, without an apparent cause.” I looked at her. “You must know that.”

“But that’s just coincidence,” she said. “All things come by Nature.”

“Some things are more than coincidence, and Nature is more than—” I was going to say “more than Nature” but stopped and laughed. “You really don’t know any Natural Theology?”

“No,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve always just taken for granted that the outsiders have strange beliefs. Never gone into the details.” She put her empty mug down at her side of the bed and snuggled up to me. “Go on. Tell me the details.”

“Oh, God. All right. Well, the usual place to start is right here.” I tapped her forehead, gently. “Inside there. From the outside we see grey matter, but from the inside we think and feel. We know there are billions of cells in there, processing information. So thinking and feeling—consciousness—is something that information does. It’s what information is, from the inside, its subjective side. Where there’s information, there’s consciousness.”

“But there’s information everywhere,” she said. “Wherever anything affects anything else, it’s information. The rain falling on the ground is information.”

“Exactly!” I slid my arm around her shoulders. “You’ve got it.”

“Got what? Oh.” She shifted a little and looked straight at me. “You mean there’s consciousness everywhere?”

Yes! That’s it!”

“But, but—” She looked around. “You mean to tell me you think that clock, say, has thoughts? ”

The ticking was loud in the room as I considered this.

“It has at least one,” I said cautiously.

“And what would that be?”

“ ‘It’s later… it’s later… it’s later.’ ” She laughed. “But the whole universe—”

“Is an infinite machine, which implies an infinite mind.” I put my hand behind her head, cradling the container of her finite mind.

“ ‘And this all men call God’,” I concluded smugly.

Menial punched me.

“And the computers, I suppose you would say they are conscious too?”

“Aye, of course,” I said.

“What a horrible thought.”

“They may not be conscious of what we see from the outside,” I said. “They may be thinking different thoughts entirely.”