The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (7 page)

The Emperor, who believed he had more knowledge than anyone else of exactly how trustworthy the East was, took the young man to his heart. ‘I will retire and support you for the succession’, he said, ‘on condition that as soon as you become Emperor I may see you in strict privacy. I have something to tell you.’

‘I don’t like deals between politicians,’ said the young man. ‘It may surprise you, but I’m not a cynic. I truly believe in trusting the people.’

‘The belief does you credit,’ said the old Emperor. ‘But as this concerns the security of the Empire, indeed of the world, I must insist.’

The young politician agreed and, with the now ex-Emperor’s
help, was elected.

The ex-Emperor was about to remind his successor of their appointment, when he was summoned to the Palace.

He found the new Emperor pale and furious.

‘I’ve already discovered,’ the new Emperor said. ‘I move fast. And a more despicable, catastrophic betrayal of the people I never—’

‘But you don’t know the whole of it,’ the ex-Emperor said. ‘There is a secret arrangement—’

‘I will have no truck with secret arrangements. I am for honesty, sincerity and open discussion with the people. I shall tell the people at once that they have been left without a shred of protection. I shall tell them it was you who left them so. I’m having you arrested at once.’ The Emperor pushed a button. ‘I’ve summoned the armed guards.’

Emperor and ex-Emperor waited three minutes in silence.

‘You see,’ said the ex-Emperor gently, ‘there
are
no armed guards.’

‘A trifle like that won’t stop me,’ said the new Emperor, and he threw up the window.

The ex-Emperor tried to warn him of the effect on the air conditioning.

But the new Emperor pushed past him and yelled through the window: ‘I want three hefty loyal citizens to arrest a traitor!’

Heavy footsteps rushed up the stairs outside.

‘It won’t take as many as three,’ the ex-Emperor was
murmuring
when five strong louts burst in.

‘Take this traitor to prison.’

‘Certainly, sir. But could you tell us where the nearest prison is? It’s one of those secrets no unauthorised person knows.’

‘I’m not cognisant of details,’ said the Emperor. ‘Ask the secret police or someone.’

‘As a matter of fact, there
are
no prisons,’ said the
ex-Emperor
, ‘any more than there
is
any secret police. We have been living as free human beings for some time now, though we didn’t know it.’

‘Things have even more indescribably gone to pieces than I’d realised,’ said the Emperor. ‘But I tell you, trifles won’t stop
me. Put him’, the Emperor commanded the louts, ‘in a cellar. We still have plenty of those. Indeed, everyone drinks too much these days. The whole concept of discipline is vanishing.’

In the Palace cellar where he was rapidly thrust, the
ex-Emperor
was, as a matter of fact, comparatively happy. He thought about syllogisms by day and drank claret by night.

He was probably the only person in the Empire who did not hear the urgent broadcast in which the new Emperor told the people that they had been left defenceless and called on them for a superhuman effort to remedy the lack.

The broadcast was of course monitored in the Empire of the East.

No one in the East was unduly worried. Defence was believed to be adequate to meet any threat – particularly if the Western Emperor’s broadcast had been not a ruse but the truth, in which case there could not be much threat.

Without urgency, however, the Eastern Empire’s Committee of Six, against the wishes of their Emperor, thought it advisable to check up, as a matter of routine, on the defences available.

On the second day of the check-up, the Eastern Emperor was deposed and the tough official who had not taken part in public life for some years replaced him.

In both Empires paradise was demolished.

It went amazingly quickly.

The new flats were commandeered for improvised barracks. The new schools and theatres were turned into weapons factories and arsenals.

Both sides were in such haste, their commanders in such panic and their technicians so out of practice that, on one side or the other (or perhaps on both simultaneously), there was error and a weapon was detonated by mistake.

The other Empire believed the accident to be an act of aggression, and retaliated. Counter retaliation followed
automatically
.

The Western Emperor’s Palace, a prime target, received one minute’s warning from the improvised alert system. The occupants rushed to the cellar, tripping, in their rush, over the ex-Emperor, who was sitting drunk on the steps inside, happily mouthing that he’d at last seen a way to refute John Stuart Mill’s aspersions on the syllogism. However, the cellar was not
protection enough. All the occupants perished when the Palace, and with it most of the capital city of the Western Empire, was obliterated.

Certain retaliatory devices continued to be despatched, on both sides, automatically; and in consequence the human species became extinct.

It is possible that some of the weapons continued to shoot about in the depopulated world after the species which had designed them had ceased.

The resulting world-wide fallout soon extinguished the other animal species – the more rapidly because the other animals, during mankind’s brief bout of tolerance towards them, had given up shunning human habitation.

Only a plastic dolphin, floating at the remote centre of an ocean now emptied of mind and instinct, bobbed on, its gay and silly nods slandering the intelligent animal in whose
likeness
it was shaped.

However, the stopper in its inflation valve, constructed to allow for the presence of a tiny machine, was no longer, in the absence of that machine, completely airtight. Little by
immeasurably
little, as the years passed uncounted, the only
unpolluted
air in the world leaked away. The dolphin shape collapsed, and the plastic eventually shrivelled.

Pausing in his daily task of sweeping the miles of intricate intersecting and redoubling corridor, and leaning for a moment on the handle of his broom, the Minotaur said:

‘I've been in this Labyrinth now, man and beast, 30 years.'

When Theseus saw him, he commented:

‘I don't mind having a fight with the human component in him, but I'm not going to harm the element that's bull.'

‘Toh!' Ariadne scoffed: ‘I thought you were a hero.'

‘So I am,' Theseus replied. ‘That means I'm all human, and no bully.'

‘Bad puns will get you nowhere with me,' Ariadne said. ‘I thought you'd want to avenge your fellow Athenians – all those Athenian youths and maidens whom the monster eats as tribute.'

‘Your father's fascist propaganda would be more credible', Theseus said, ‘if he weren't so ignorant. Bulls, like me, are vegetarians.'

‘The only reason I smuggled you in here', Ariadne said sulkily, ‘was that I hoped to witness the bullfight of all time. I did it at great risk to myself. Indeed, I can't go back to the palace now. My fascist father would tan the hide off me.'

‘All right,' Theseus said. ‘I'll get you out and take you home to Athens with me. But we're taking the Minotaur too, in case your fascist father should turn spiteful on him. Give me the end of that thread.'

So saying, he gently wound one end of the thread into a collar about the Minotaur's bull neck; and by following the
rest of the thread back to where they came in, he made good his own and Ariadne's escape, while the Minotaur followed them quietly.

Almost as soon as they had put out from Crete for the voyage back to Athens, the Minotaur became sea-sick.

Theseus patiently held his bull head. Ariadne said it was disgusting, but Theseus replied that she was in no position to object, as her mother had been a good deal more intimate with a bull than that.

Meanwhile, in the royal palace in Crete, a junta of colonels armed with pistols arrived one dawn outside the royal
bedchamber
and arrested Queen Pasiphaë.

She was arraigned on charges of unnatural sexuality and contempt of the régime. She was found guilty. King Minos abdicated, and his regally fascist rule was replaced by the military fascism of the junta. Cretan culture passed into a phase of apathy, which lasted until Sir Arthur Evans touched it up.

The Athenian ship was not more than half-way home when its supply of clean sheets was exhausted, the Minotaur having soaked through them all in his fits of shivering and sweating.

Theseus told the sailors to take down the sails, tear them up and put them on the Minotaur's bunk. The ship approached Athens under sails improvised from the grubby sheets, which from a distance looked black – and at sight of which Theseus's father jumped into the sea, leaving Theseus ruler.

Long, however, before that, Ariadne had declared herself finally out of patience with Theseus's mollycoddling of the monster. She insisted on leaving the ship at its half-way port of call, on the island of Naxos, where she eventually took to drink.

As soon as he set hoof on dry land, the Minotaur recovered his health and cheer. Theseus made him at home, in the palace which was now Theseus's property and, as soon as the
Minotaur
was sufficiently settled in to be left for a little, Theseus went off and had a fight (a naïve form of flirtation) with Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.

Hippolyta let him beat her because she had fallen in love with him, and she accompanied him home to Athens, where they reigned together.

At Athens it was soon an open secret that the fabled
Minotaur
was living at the palace with Theseus and Hippolyta.

Theseus's reputation as a hero was enhanced by the public belief that he had tamed both the Minotaur and Hippolyta, though in fact the Minotaur had been of a tame disposition all along and, if anything, Hippolyta had tamed Theseus.

As a result of too much horse-taming and other athletics in her girlhood, Hippolyta was unable to have a baby. The
Minotaur
became a sort of adopted son to the pair. He dined with them at table every night and would often rise early in the morning and accompany them in their favourite sport of
drag-hunting
, which they did in a wood near Athens.

Athenian citizens who were in the know and could get up early enough often went out there in the hope of glimpsing the extraordinary sight of a huge man with the head, feet and tail of a bull running happily if clumsily behind Theseus's hounds, which were bred out of the Spartan kind, so flew'd so sanded, and their heads were hung with ears that swept away the morning dew.

The Minotaur enjoyed his small celebrity. ‘I've become', he said one night at dinner, lowering his head shyly, ‘a
minotaurist
attraction.'

One noon, however, the Minotaur came galloping back from the drag-hunt and thundered into the palace blowing and whinnying with fear.

It took Theseus and Hippolyta an hour to quieten him. Finally, as Theseus gently scrunched the curls on his forehead, which was resting on Hippolyta's lap, he managed to blurt out:

‘In the wood – I saw a monster: a man with the head of an ass.'

‘It's all right. Quiet now,' Theseus said, stroking away. ‘It's just that you have a poetic imagination. As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.'

‘I wouldn't be so sure, Theseus,' Hippolyta objected,
whispering
above the Minotaur's head. ‘I wouldn't be surprised if it more witnesseth than fancy's images.' She looked down thoughtfully at the huge head and then, adding her gentle caresses to Theseus's, said sweetly: ‘He grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable.'

‘I must say,’ said one of the disciples, ‘I’m glad I live in a democracy.’

‘Why?’ the sage asked.

‘Surely it’s obvious. In a democracy, I have a right to a say in shaping the system I live under. Am I not justified in being glad?’

‘Certainly,’ the sage replied, ‘—if you’re correct in thinking you have such a say.’

‘I have a vote. I have freedom of speech. I am free to join a political party – or even to start one. Can you deny that I have a say?’

‘I neither deny nor affirm it,’ the sage said. ‘I don’t know whether you have a say. To find out, I should have to ask many questions.’

‘Ask away.’

‘It is not you I should have to ask. However, without
knowing
whether you in fact have a say, I know that whether you have a say or not is a matter of pure chance.’

‘I foresee the point you’re going to make,’ the disciple said. ‘Let me save you trouble by admitting at once that the amount of say a person has may be affected by chance. A person who chances to be born into the ruling class or to be rich may well have extra opportunities to influence public opinion. In a sense I should have more freedom of speech if I could afford to
become
a newspaper proprietor than if I merely have to address myself to passers-by from the street corner. However, it is already possible to rise to power without chance giving you a good start. And increasingly democracies are ironing out the chance factors.’

‘I am not sure that democracies
are
,’
the sage said, ‘but I readily grant that they
could
iron out those chance factors if they set their mind to it. However, those were not the
operations
of chance that I meant. Let us suppose that a democracy
had ironed out all the uneven starting-points you mentioned. You would still say you were glad to live in a democracy?’

‘More fervently than ever.’

‘And would you say that, in such a democracy, you and I had equal opportunities to make our will prevail?’

‘Yes. That’s what’s good about a democracy.’

‘Let us say that you want X and I want anti-X to be made part of the system we live under. Which of us will get his way?’

‘Obviously, we can’t tell until we know which of us is
supported
by the majority of our fellow-citizens.’

‘Then you and I’, the sage said, ‘do
not
have equal
opportunities
to make our wills prevail. If it turns out that 51% of the population support me, I will get my way, and you will be frustrated. We do not know which of us will have more supporters. It is a matter of pure chance. All we can say is that one of us has the right to have his will put into operation, and the other has no right. The distribution of right and no-right between us depends on chance.’

‘Not on chance,’ the disciple said, ‘but on the will of the majority. The great advantage of democracy is that it is not the will of one man that prevails, but the will of the majority.’

‘Is there a being that can think to itself “I am the majority, and this is my will”?’

‘No of course not. The majority is merely a large number of individuals.’

‘Then the will of the majority
is
the will of one man?’

‘No.’

‘Surely, it is the will of one man, which chances to accord with the will of another man and another man and another man … and so on, up to the number required to make a majority?’

‘You could put it thus.’

‘When you shape your political will, on a matter that has not yet been tested at the polls, you do not know how many other wills coincide with yours?’

‘No.’

‘From your point of view, whether you will in fact have a say in shaping any given part of the law or of the political
constitution
is a toss-up?’

‘From my point of view, perhaps. But the majority—’

‘Yet you said the majority is only a large number of
individuals
. For each individual citizen, whether he will have a say in shaping things is a toss-up? His say depends entirely on the chance of how other people see the matter?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Then in fact no citizen has a
right
to a say in shaping the system. All that a citizen has is a
chance
that he will turn out to belong to the majority, in which case he will acquire the right.’

‘Do you imagine you’ve shewn me that I ought
not
to be glad I live in a democracy?’

‘Of course not. What I’ve shewn you is that, if you are glad, what you are glad of is that you live in a lottery.’