Alasdair Gray - A History Maker

Page 151.

About great-grandmothers: Their gossip has been the only government and police the world has needed for more than a century. Among modern folk the very calm healthy intelligences of old women had most leisure to ponder and exchange news about their families: families whose total sum (if the gangrels are ignored) was humanity. Even loving families bred people who could only bear life by changing their world or finding another. A poet called this state divine discontent because good new things are made or discovered by those who tholed it. In historic times, however, neglect steered many potential makers and discoverers into crime, insanity or that legal compromise between the two, remorseless competition for power and property. In modern time the great-grandmothers ensured nobody was neglected by distributing among their daughters and grand-daughters news and suggestions which brought friends and opportunities to the most lonely and despairing. This news only reached men through remarks made by aunts, sisters or lovers, so like Wat most fighting men did not notice the power of the grandmothers.

When Wat had been carried off to the circus Kittock ran at once to Dryhope house and told the great-grannies why she thought this might have dangerous results. As he shook hands with folk from six continents in a Selkirk meadow the old women began a worldwide enquiry which spread through the solar system. Starting with grannies and mothers it came to involve everyone who knew anything about Meg Mountbenger and her colleagues. It lasted fifteen hours, those who directed it dozing in relays.

Meanwhile Wat, with a mixture of boredom and perplexity, saw a creative evolutionary opera called Homage to Ettrick . The overture was a firework display representing the explosion which created the universe and the origin of species. Glancing at the programme Wat saw four acts would follow depicting the heroic, religious, industrial and modern periods. He fell asleep halfway through the heroic period and was nudged awake by General Shafto near the end of the modern. Lulu Dancy was projecting a mirage of his last battle onto the dawn sky. In a pause after a crescendo of organ, trumpet and bagpipe blasts a Russian Orthodox church choir chanted “Do you surrender?” and Wat saw a mile-high coloured shadow of himself sing a splendid “No!” stab another shadow and dive down into the globe of the rising sun, preceded by a shining golden eagle pulling after it a banner like the tail of a meteor.

Then came the breakfast banquet served in a vast marquee with more speeches, back-slapping, kisses from visiting soldiers’ wives, congratulatory speeches and toasts. Beside him in the place of honour sat Meg-Delilah-Lulu in a silk dress as scarlet as her lipstick. It seemed impossible to talk with her but she kept filling his glass with champagne and giving him such lovingly mischievous glances that he gazed at her in puzzled wonder and hardly saw anyone else. Shortly before the breakfast ended she whispered, “I’ll be back soon,” slipped away and never returned. She was never seen again by anyone who admitted to knowing her. An hour later the foreign guests flew home while Wat, drunk for the first time in his life, raved and threatened violence through the circus caravans in a search for Meg Mountbenger. He was overpowered and carried to Ettrick Warrior house by Archie Crook Cot and the Boys’ Brigade. He arrived there unconscious.

By noon the old women had informed the open intelligence of the following. Meg Mountbenger and two public eye people and three biologists in the lunar Clavius laboratory were the K20 clique who had killed Haldane. They were still morally stupid, having kept in close touch with each other while pretending not to. By using vast amounts of public energy, then drugging him, they had infected Wat Dryhope with a harmless-seeming, highly contagious virus which could spread to all who talked with him. This virus must be a host to something more sinister since there could be no good reason for spreading it.

As a result of this information Wat was visited by a team of scientists who took him to a quickly improvised quarantine hospital and laboratory on top of Ben Nevis. Before they isolated the nanomechanism, however, its target became obvious. In Dryhope house the powerplant started gulping and wheezing, the stem grew grey and blotchy, lost its transparency and power to synthesize anything, and finally began crumbling into powder from the summit down. A few hours later this plague struck homes of nearly all who had been close to Wat or close to people close to him. All over the world centres of light, heat, and nourishment died. Knowledge unique to these districts — music, stories and local records — only survived now in memories of the living and a few old books that were mainly read by gangrels. Meanwhile biologists discovered that, though quarantine would reduce the speed of the plague’s spread, it could never be finally eliminated. Animals could carry the virus, and windblown dust from withering powerplants.

Yet the worldwide panic and collapse into barbarism expected by the plotters never came, partly because wrist communicators did not depend on local power supplies so everyone stayed in the intelligence network. No military action to quarantine homes was suggested or needed. Infected families quarantined themselves. The uninfected raised their powerplant food production to a maximum while reducing what they ate to the minimum, leaving a surplus which was airlifted and dropped to deprived families. Since this could only be a temporary measure while the virus spread further, and since some time would pass before a plague resistant powerplant could be bred, men put their military discipline into planting crops, building wind and watermills to provide local energy supplies, building and manning fishing fleets — luckily the oceans were as throng with life as in prehistoric times, since for over a century only sportsmen had fished them. The enthusiasm with which men turned to such work looked like thankfulness for a world where women required their labour. The Council for War Regulation in Geneva had extended its moratorium on war games for the foreseeable future, pointing out that folk who enjoyed these had plenty of recordings to watch, yet public eye replays of these records were no longer popular.

“Warfare now seems a fatuous way of passing the time,” said the former commander of the East Anglian Alliance who now commanded a North Sea trawler, “Obviously our lives were so valueless then that we wanted to lose them. I’m glad the biology mandarins are developing a plague-resistant powerplant but in future I think women should use it as an auxiliary source of necessities — enough to keep them independent of us, not enough to make us dependent on them. I don’t know how family life will be reshaped by the present emergency — I hear that monogamous crofting communities of husbands and wives have started in Ireland and the Scottish west. It may not be a bad thing. Whatever the future holds it looks like containing less killing. I suspect that what some gurus now call the early modern period was just another bit of bloody history which spared the women and children. It’s a funny thing, but since the plague erupted nobody has died except of old age and unforeseeable accident. Those plotters deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”

When Meg Mountbenger’s fellow plotters were shown proof of their guilt they readily admitted it. One said, “We dislike modern life so wanted to make it exciting. We thought this required killing a lot of people, but everyone who has swatted a fly or poisoned a rat knows it is no crime to destroy inconvenient lives. You find us inconvenient — make your own lives exciting by having us gassed, electrocuted, guillotined, garrotted or hanged. Or revive the old English punishment for treason. Hang us by the neck, cut us down while still alive, rip out our intestines, burn them in front of our eyes, hack off our limbs and genitals. Tapes of the event will be replayed for centuries.”