Staring at the Sun (21 page)

“Spoken like TAT” became a proverbial phrase for a while; though curiously no one quite knew how TAT spoke. Everyone agreed that its answers must be differently phrased from the rest of GPC’s output; they were believed to be clear, yet poetically expressed. Some people said that writers had been recruited to create a special TAT tongue, both resonant and ambiguous. Some people said that TAT spoke in verse; others that it spoke in baby language.

“When I was a child,” Jean said to Gregory after she had finished her evening cigarette, “I used to ask myself questions in bed. I suppose it was instead of praying: I wasn’t encouraged to pray. I don’t know how long I did it for; it feels like my whole childhood, but I expect it was only a year or two.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I can’t remember them all. I remember wanting to know whether there was a sandwich museum, and if so where it was.
And why Jews didn’t like golf. And how Mussolini knew which way the paper folded. And whether heaven was up the chimney. And why the mink is excessively tenacious of life.”

“And did you get any answers?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t remember whether I actually got the answers or stopped being interested in the questions. I suppose that as I grew up I realized that the museum I’d imagined to contain Queen Victoria’s egg-and-cress sandwich was a fairly silly idea, and I found out that Jews did like golf, it was just that golfers didn’t like Jews, and as for heaven being up the chimney, I suppose I learned that certain questions have to be rephrased before you can get an answer to them.” She paused and looked across at Gregory. “And I never did find out why the mink is excessively tenacious of life. It used to worry me a lot. I used to think, perhaps that’s why mink coats are so highly prized—because the fur comes from an animal which has given up its life with extreme reluctance. Like minerals being valuable because they are difficult to extract. Do you remember mink farms?”

Gregory frowned. He couldn’t remember. So many things had gone on in the time before wildlife had been returned to the wild.

“I always wondered about mink farms. How they killed them, I mean. They wouldn’t want to damage the fur, after all. They’d hardly want to try strangling them. Perhaps they gassed them, like badgers.”

Gregory didn’t know. He couldn’t even remember about gassing badgers. How barbarous the past had been. No termination had been soft; not even for badgers.

The next day, at GPC, he called up the NATHIST bank.

“Mink,” he typed in.

READY
.

“Why is the mink excessively tenacious of life?”

There was a pause, a green flash of wait, and after a few seconds the reply:
NOT REAL QUESTION
.

Come off it, thought Gregory. That’s too easy. Sometimes this silo of knowledge could be very curmudgeonly with its grain.
Still, you could occasionally trick it by simply repeating the question.

“Why is the mink excessively tenacious of life?”

NOT REAL QUESTION
.

Ah well, back to basics instead.

“Is it difficult to kill a mink?”

FERAL SLAUGHTER PROHIBITED STATUTE …

Gregory keyed in an Interrupt. Start again.

“When were mink farms prohibited?”

1998.

“Request information running mink farms.” He waited ten seconds or so.

READY
.

“How did workers on mink farms kill the mink?”

VARIOUS. SPECIFICALLY POISONS, GASSING, SOMETIMES MECHANICAL, ALSO ELECTROCUTION
.

Gregory shivered. The brutal old days.

“Did the mink take a long time to die?”

ELECTROCUTION 2.3
SECONDS …

Interrupt.

“Does the mink struggle hard against death?”

YES. WANT EXAMPLES?

Gregory didn’t want examples. That was one of the troubles with GPC: it was so full of information it always tried to give you as much of it as possible; like some party bore, it wanted to drag you away from your own interests and boast of its knowledge instead.

“Why?”

WHY WHAT? EXPAND
.

“Why does the mink struggle hard against death?”

NOT REAL QUESTION
.

Bastard, thought Gregory. Bastard. But he continued, as tenacious as the mink itself.

“Why does the mink struggle harder against death than other animals?”

ARGUFY. SUGGEST
C37.

Gregory keyed in C37 without much expectation. A
RGUFY
indicated that the information sought by input was still in dispute among the world’s experts. C37 gave him an abbreviated rundown on the current state of evolutionary theory. All that it told him, though, was that the mink’s instinctive struggle against death was one reason why it had survived so long and so well as a species. Which really didn’t get him any further.

He decided not to tell Jean about the various ways in which mink were killed. It wasn’t that it would upset her; he just didn’t want to go through it again himself.

“I asked GPC why the mink is excessively tenacious of life.”

“Did you, dear? That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“Well, I thought you wanted to know.”

“And what did it say, this clever-clogs machine of yours?” Jean awaited the answer with some scepticism; she didn’t believe in computer knowledge. She was, she admitted, hopelessly old-fashioned.

“It said that it wasn’t a real question.”

Jean laughed. In a way, she was quite pleased.

“About ninety years ago,” she said, “though it might have been a bit longer, come to think of it, I asked my father the time. He told me three o’clock. I asked him why it was three o’clock, and he said exactly the same thing. He took his pipe out of his mouth, pointed the stem at me, and said, ‘Jean, that’s not a real question.’ ”

But what were real questions, she wondered. Real questions were limited to those questions to which the people you asked already knew the answers. If her father or GPC could answer, that made the enquiry a real question; if not, it was dismissed as being falsely based. How very unfair. Because it was these questions, the ones that weren’t real, to which you wanted to know the answers most pressingly. For ninety years she’d wanted to know about the mink. Her father had failed, so had Michael; and now GPC was ducking it. That was the way it was. Knowledge didn’t really advance,
it only seemed to. The serious questions always remained unanswered.

“While you’re at it, dear, could you find out what happens to the skin after death?”

“Really, Mother.”

“No, I mean it.” Jean increasingly found herself remembering times she thought she had forgotten: distant years now proved easier to recall than more recent ones. This was, of course, normal; but it had its sudden pleasures. Gregory bent over his aeroplanes: she could see him now. He would cover the balsa skeleton with tissue paper. The tissue paper would be sprinkled with water and it would pull tight as it dried. Then he would paint it with dope, and again it would sag and pucker. Then, gradually, as it dried once more, it became tougher and tauter still.

Perhaps this happened to the skin as well. It seemed fairly tight at first, then as you got older it sagged and puckered as if you’d been sprinkled with water and painted with dope. Perhaps, after death, it dried out and stretched tightly over your bones. Perhaps you looked your best, all smart and finished, only after your death.

“Go on, Gregory.”

“No, I won’t. It’s morbid.”

“Of course it is.” She bet she was right. When they exhumed those people who’d been buried in bogs, wasn’t their skin all dry and tight, the wrinkles eased out, as if death really had smoothed the cares away? “Well, perhaps you can find out what happened to Lindbergh’s sandwiches instead.”

“Sandwiches?”

“Yes. Lindbergh. He was probably before your time. He flew the Atlantic all by himself. He took five sandwiches with him and only ate one and a half. All my life I’ve wanted to know what happened to the rest.”

“I’ll see if GPC can help.” Really, there were times …

“I shouldn’t think it can. I haven’t much of an opinion of that mincing machine of yours.”

“You haven’t even been near it, Mother.”

“No, but I can imagine. There used to be something like it when I was a girl. He was called the Memory Man. He used to go round fairs and things. You could ask him any old rubbish—football scores or something—and he could tell you without any trouble. Ask him anything useful and he was no help at all.”

“Did you ever ask him anything?”

“No, but I can imagine.”

How do people die? Gregory called up the last words of the famous. Kings seemed to die in one of two ways: either crying “Villain, villain” as the murderer’s knife struck, or else adjusting their knee breeches in the confident expectation of soon entering another court which would be much like their own, if slightly—ever so slightly—grander. Clerics died with a squint: one eye cast down in obedience, the other one raised in hope. Writers died with writerly things on their lips, still wanting to be remembered, still unsure to the very last whether all those words they had written would do the trick. There had been an American poet, a woman, whose final words had been, “I must go in, the fog is rising.” All very well, thought Gregory, but you had to be sure of your timing. You couldn’t very well produce your carefully scripted farewell and then go on living, else your last recorded words might turn out to be “Get me another hot-water bottle.”

Artists seemed better at it than writers, more matter-of-fact. He admired the French painter’s modest wish: “I hope with all my heart there will be painting in heaven.” Or perhaps it was that foreigners were better at dying than Anglo-Saxons. An Italian painter, urged to receive a priest, had replied, “No, I am curious to see what happens in the next world to those who die unshriven.” A Swiss physician died feeling his own pulse and announcing to a colleague in attendance, “My friend, the artery ceases to beat.” Professional deaths like these pleased Gregory. He warmed to the French grammarian who declared, “Je vas, ou je vais, mourir: l’un ou l’autre se dit.”

Were these good deaths? Was a good death one where the
character of the life about to be extinguished was maintained until the end? The composer Rameau on his deathbed complained of a curé hitting the wrong note; the painter Watteau rejected a crucifix offered him because the artist’s representation of Christ was unworthy. And should a good death somehow imply that life was a little overrated, and hence that fears about death were exaggerated? Is a good death one that leaves the mourners undistressed? Is a good death one that leaves those present something to think about? Gregory chuckled at the American writer who asked,
in extremis
, “What is the answer?” and, receiving no reply, continued, “In that case, what is the question?”

Or perhaps how they died was affected by why they died. Go straight to the top, thought Gregory, and typed in “Fetch American presidents.” A list appeared on the screen, with a flashing circle to indicate further material was available if required. The names only went up to Grover Cleveland, but Gregory thought that was probably enough. He typed “Cause of death” into the enquiry field, and contemplated the twenty-two presidents in front of him. Some were vaguely familiar; others sounded more like corn dealers, dry-goods merchants and pharmacists. Corner-shop names redolent of small-town honesty. Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes … even Americans didn’t seem to be called things like that anymore. Gregory suddenly felt nostalgia—not the everyday and sentimental kind that you feel for your own childhood, but the fiercer, purer form set off by an era you could not possibly have known.

Of course, he realized, some of these Iowa seed-drill merchants were probably just as crooked and incompetent as the known criminals who had inhabited the White House. But that seemed no reason for cancelling his request. He moved the blinking green cursor down the list until it rested on the F of Franklin Pierce, then tapped “Proceed.”

8 OCT 1869
ABDOMINAL DROPSY
.

Hmm. He moved the cursor up to Thomas Jefferson.

4 JULY 1826
CHRONIC DIARRHOEA
.

Rutherford B. Hayes.

17 JAN 1893 PARALYSIS OF THE HEART
.

The diagnoses sounded charmingly distant: frontier euphemisms for causes not properly understood. This part of GPC’s bank probably hadn’t been updated for years. Gregory approved: it was right that the cause of your death should be given in the language of your own time. It was somehow proper.

Zachary Taylor,
CHOLERA MORBUS AFTER PARTAKING IMMODERATELY OF ICED WATER AND ICED MILK THEN LATER A LARGE QUANTITY OF CHERRIES
. Ulysses S. Grant,
CANCER OF THE TONGUE
. That seemed a little closer to home. Gregory clacked his way quietly through the list. Bright’s disease. Debility. Shot. Shot. Dropsy. Asthma. Cholera. Rheumatic Gout. Enfeebled health. Old age.

The list gave Gregory a sense of rising envy. How varied and romantic were the ways of death then. Nowadays you died only of soft termination, old age or from one of a diminishing band of trite diseases. Dropsy … asthma … cholera morbus … it seemed like an extension of freedom to have so many possibilities ahead. Gregory lingered over Rutherford B. Hayes. Paralysis of the heart. You probably experienced just as much pain and fear as with any other ailment; but what a thing to have said about you. He died of paralysis of the heart, Gregory whispered to himself. Perhaps Casanova should have died of that too. It made him want to invent at least one new cause of death, something to surprise his own age with. In the 1980s they had discovered a fresh category of illness, he suddenly remembered; it was called allergy to the twentieth century. The victims—few, but well publicized—experienced chronic reaction to every aspect of modern life. They might have responded in just the same way to the nineteenth century, but their disease would then have been given a firm yet fragrant name like brain fever. The more self-doubting twentieth century preferred to call the illness an allergy to its own times. Gregory wished he could produce some malady as original as that. A final tremor of invention with which to say farewell. He forgot why he had asked for presidents’ deaths. He checked on Casanova: no, not paralysis of the heart, just old age.