Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“And your lawyer friend,” Venn continued, “for all his moaning, is he really acting like life is under threat? Or is he just sitting there, grumbling on his blog? Underneath it all, people trust in progress. Scientists will cure their lifestyle diseases; the Internet will fix their love lives; technology will solve the oil crisis. Because technology is progress, and progress goes on forever. But progress played a trick. It presented the ultimate gluttony of all: those double clicks that turned everyone into rodents pressing buttons for the next sugar pellet. People who used to deride the losers for watching ten hours of TV a day won’t hesitate to click a mouse for longer. ‘Did she answer my email yet?’ That’s the new obesity. And nobody admits it even happened,” he said. “The sci-fi movies got it wrong. No robots marched in to enslave humanity. What happened was far more ingenious: the servants became masters by their perfect affability. No microchip was implanted in any human head. People just handed over their brains. The real clash of civilizations wasn’t between Islam and the West, or China and America. It was between what people had been and what they’ve become.”

“You make it sound nightmarish.”

“Not really.” He tossed the egg, caught it. “Just like it’s always been. A huge majority of fools; a tiny minority that runs the show.”

“If that’s what you think, why aren’t you worried?”

“Because I’m not part of any of this. I just watch.”

“Me, too.”

He shook his head. “You joined in. As you should, duck, as you should. It’s exhausting standing outside forever. I’ve been working at it my whole life. You can’t blame yourself for having been swallowed by your times. They eat nearly everyone.”

“Except you’re not outside society anymore,” she said. “You’ve got a family. The very fact that you married and had a kid is amazing to me, given what you always used to say about cutting ties.”

He sidearmed the egg at her. All she could do was dodge. But instead of exploding on the wall it bounced off intact, rolled along the chicken-wire flooring, stopping at the toe of his rubber boot. Niftily, he kicked it up into the air, caught it, peeled the shell. “I always keep boiled ones in my pocket,” he said, biting down. “Care to try?”

She nodded uncertainly.

He underarmed a second to her, and she snatched it from the air. It burst in her hand, raw egg dripping. He laughed, threw his arm around her, cleaning her off with a linen handkerchief, and continued with their tour of the grounds.

As they drove through the estate, Tooly told him about Humphrey, how they were back in touch and how she’d been caring for him. “It’s bizarre,” she said. “But he doesn’t even sound Russian anymore.”

“Why would he?”

“Well,” she responded, even more confused now. “Because he is one.”

Venn did a three-point turn, heading back toward the house. “That man is as Russian as we are.” Humphrey had indeed been born in one of those places in Central Europe they’d erased, Venn said, but he left as a small boy and was raised in safety in South Africa. He’d trained as a pharmacist there, owned a couple of shops, looked after his father, never married. When his father died, Humphrey went traveling. But the world proved a lonelier destination than predicted: all these people and none approached his café table. Even the waiters found him a bore. So he’d concocted a fresh self, the Russian exile, mimicking how his father spoke. People caught him out early on, so he kept moving cities, refining the act. “He wanted to stop for years, but was petrified you’d be upset with him! He got stuck, the old fool.”

“I guess he gave it up after I left.” She had further questions about the old man’s life, and Venn answered them all, reveling in the comical biography of Humphrey Ostropoler. She smiled at the account — Venn expected that response, and she obliged. But to do so stung; she felt protective of the absent Humphrey, his private life bared despite decades of secrecy.

Abruptly, Venn pulled up at the edge of a field. “This is where you get out.” He sent her squelching back to the house and reversed away to complete his farmerly chores.

When Tooly stepped inside, Harriet was in the kitchen, watching tennis on her iPad. “Can I get you anything? Glass of wine?”

“Please. Thanks.”

Tooly took a large sip, and considered Harriet, who seemed kindly disposed toward her, not because she was Tooly per se but because Harriet was favorable to all human beings (and ferrets), and Tooly fit one of these categories. People had to be demonstrably evil to constitute rotters for Harriet — until then, they were jolly nice. Whenever Tooly encountered that mind-set, she was baffled. Surely experience eroded faith in human beings. Then again, some people trusted and thrived because of it. She watched Harriet with the baby in her arms, a scene of contentment that Tooly couldn’t conceive of inhabiting, and it was hard to insist that she was the wiser.

Venn cooked goose for dinner, a bird taken from their own stock. As they ate, Tooly found her mind drifting. “I keep thinking about what you told me before. That stuff about Humph.”

“Let’s not bore Harriet with talk of old friends,” he interrupted — evidently, she wasn’t supposed to introduce their past into his present.

Chastened, Tooly sipped her wine. “You two have lived here a while?” she asked, since Venn had evaded the question earlier.

“ Do we even live here?” Harriet asked Venn. “Technically, I suppose. But we seem always to be elsewhere, don’t we, darling. Disgraceful to say, but we’re here largely because of taxes. The Irish, mysteriously, charge hardly any of them.”

“That’ll change,” he said.

“Yes, with the market things and so on. Turns out it’s frighteningly easy to become an Irish resident, or to claim you’re one. My husband is an absolute master at that sort of wheeze, aren’t you. We still spend a fair bit of time in London. And I love Tokyo. My parents have a place in Scotland, where the whole Beenblossom clan descends like some sort of pestilence this time of year. Which is why we’re hiding out here. All right,” she said, rising and handing the baby to Venn. “You cooked, darling, so I clean up. Those are the rules. Begone, both of you. Reminisce boringly — I insist.”

Venn and Tooly retired to the library. He placed his daughter on the carpet, where the infant practiced crawling, flopping intermittently onto her belly, gaze fixed on her father. The four dogs slept, each in a different corner of the room. From an antique-globe bar, he extracted a Cognac decanter and two snifters. Books lined the walls, each volume identically bound in Bordeaux leather, silver letters imprinted on the spine, gold paint on the page edges. Classics, poetry, essays. They didn’t have the smell of reading books; they were furniture. She knelt beside the baby, who looked glassily around. “I’d like a one-piece outfit like yours. Most convenient,” she told the child, then turned to Venn. “Shouldn’t she be sleeping now?”

“Lots of life left for that. Everything is too interesting to sleep if you’ve not been alive a year.”

The child goggled open-mouthed at her father, oblivious of anything else in the room.

“You’re surprisingly credible as the family man, Venn,” she remarked. “I’d be a disaster as a mother — I couldn’t trust myself to look after a brood. Don’t even know how to hold one of these properly.” She leaned over to try, then thought better of it, took another sip of Cognac, finding herself more uncomfortable with each remark. “Mind if I help myself to another drop?”

“You drink fast these days.”