Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Under the weight of their enormous white backpacks, the two holographic astronauts stood stiffly to attention in front of the real television cameras, like a couple of ghostly polar bears.

‘I know why we’ve come to the Moon,’ murmured Gates. ‘But I can’t imagine why they bothered. There’s nothing here.’

‘For one priceless moment,’ said the fruity, self-important voice on the sound track, ‘in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one.’

‘Priceless, yeah,’ sneered Cavor. ‘It hadn’t happened before, and it certainly hasn’t happened since.’

‘One in their pride in what you have done.’

‘Still,’ Cavor added grudgingly, ‘it was a hell of an achievement.’

‘And one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.’

‘Thank you, Mister President,’ said the voice of Neil Armstrong. ‘It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations.’

‘Peace,’ chuckled Gates. ‘People used to talk about that a lot.’

‘Men with a vision for the future,’ said Armstrong.

‘He sounds a little choked,’ observed Gates. ‘Like he’s going to cry or something.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said the president. [111] Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, 1969–1974. ‘And all of us look forward to seeing you on the Hornet on Thursday.’

‘That’s the name of a boat,’ explained Cavor. ‘Back in olden times, they used to land spaceships in the ocean.’

‘I look forward to that very much, sir,’ said the second astronaut, Buzz Aldrin.

The two holographic astronauts saluted, then turned away from the camera, and promptly disappeared. The show was over, and the crowd around the dome started to applaud.

‘That was interesting,’ said Cavor.

‘I suppose,’ shrugged Simou. ‘But hardly worth the trip.’

‘All sorts will be here on July twentieth,’ said Gates. ‘World leaders, company chairmen, commissioners, you name it.’

‘More fool them,’ said Simou.

‘Haven’t you got any sense of history?’ demanded Cavor.

‘Nope, can’t say that I have,’ admitted Simou. ‘I’ve always been too concerned with the future to give the past much thought. My future. Such as the small matter of whether or not I’ll still be alive in a year’s time. History’s a luxury I could never afford.’

‘That’s why we came,’ said Gates. ‘To get a lot of things we could never afford.’

‘Yeah, well, a sense of history’s well down my list,’ said Simou. ‘Right now I’ll settle for one of these lunar ladies. Thanks to all this one-sixth g, my cock has been floating around in my pants like one of those command modules. Since we arrived on the Moon I don’t think there’s been one time when it’s ever been pointed at the ground.’

‘Me too,’ grinned Gates.

‘This place does have its advantages,’ said Cavor. ‘My prosthetic arm has never felt so light. I hardly notice it at all. It’s almost as if it was the real thing.’

Simou clapped his hands enthusiastically. ‘Whaddya say, Gates? Shall we go and find ourselves some lunar ladies?’

Gates shook his head. ‘No, I’m not in the mood. I think I’ll go back.’

He waved them off and walked in the direction of the hotel. Gates didn’t feel he could leave Lenina alone for too long. There was no point in telling anyone yet, not until he was quite sure, but in truth he was worried about her. What with her breathlessness and the way she covered her torso whenever he came near her, Gates had the idea Lenina had entered, or was about to enter, the active Three Moon phase of the virus. He knew he had no alternative but to ask her about it. But exactly how did you ask the girl you loved if she just happened to be dying?

What was it that the president had said on the sound track? ‘... in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.’ Gates had never been in a church. He wasn’t even sure if he even

believed in God. But he was beginning to wish that he knew how to pray.

VI

If men and women did not die, they would have little need of a divinity to engineer human beginnings and endings. The belief in God and the elevation of the total personality to a thing in itself that must endure forever — such ideas continue to persist because of the preposterous fear of death and the false antithesis that exists between body and soul. Death is still perceived as the great mystery.

The key to understanding death is, of course, the same key that unlocks the mystery of human beginnings. But there’s no reason either of life’s bookends should be treated as a mystery. It’s absurd to argue that an existence with an identifiable beginning should have no end, for that would be to argue the logical impossibility of there being two different states of nonexistence or nothingness. Real revelation comes not from a book, nor from a series of commandments, but from a true understanding of the function of life.

Everything makes sense when the meaning of life has been grasped, and this is nowhere near as slippery as it sounds. The question may have exercised philosophers, alchemists, and scientists for several thousand years — an abiding sense that life has some purpose has been the curse of Homo sapiens — but the answer to this putative riddle is quite a simple one: All life-forms are merely vehicles for DNA survival; and genes are little bits of software that have but one goal — to make copies of themselves. Men, marsupials, and mollusks are just sophisticated conveyances that their respective duplicating programs have created to help them reproduce. This is the only true meaning of life, and the most successful DNA sequences are the variants that are better than others in competing for the planet’s scarce resources. We call this process of the survival of the fittest natural selection. Thus it may be seen that human beings are nothing more than a highly successful vehicle for one particular DNA message.

Life is in no way devalued by this analysis; rather it is strengthened. Man may be very like a computer that has been programmed to replicate the original lines of genetic program code. But DNA’s performance and capacity to preserve a message is vastly superior to any known or anticipated computer. The mathematics of the DNA archive is nothing short of staggering. Each gene in your body has been recopied as many as twenty billion times with 99 percent accuracy. Just imagine how degraded any other method of preserving a valuable text for the archives would be by such repeated copying. For this reason alone life cannot be too common in the universe. Indeed it is arguably a cosmic principle.

But the success of the DNA sequence is not limited to producing the most effective vehicular bodies for reproduction. The long-term survival of a DNA sequence is not limited to the replicator’s own body. A corollary of DNA success is the way in which genes affect the world at large — successful genes reaching beyond their bodies and changing the world around them. Spider genes spin a web, bird genes build a nest, and bee genes construct a honeycomb. Most successful of all, the human gene reaches out to invent the wheel — and anything else that may contribute to its chances of successful reproduction: the longbow, the plow, writing, the saddle, the printing press, the telescope, the camera, the electric light, penicillin, ad infinitum. It is not long before the most successful replicator, man, has invented himself another replicator — the computer. As digital programs are copied many times over, it is no time at all before the survival success story that is synthetic code sequences can affect the world around them. Computers build other machines. Computers build better computers. And with the creation of the first computer virus — which acts very like a biological virus — a new era in evolution is born: artificial replication. Viruses mutate. They find a way of ensuring their survival, of manipulating the world beyond the computer. Replicators are by definition opportunistic. That is the foundation of their success.