Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [73]
“Dear oh dear, who did this to you, Timmy? It was ‘Day,’ wasn’t it? Dear oh dear, Timmy.”
“Floor,” said Timmy.
And what becomes of the moral order? he thought, settling back between the jaws of his gray armchair. The screen said: 03.47, 03.46, 03.45.
2
“In the Ultraverse there is an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of planets, and in infinity everything recurs an infinite number of times. That’s a mathematical fact. But it hasn’t panned out in your case. Among the countless trillions of type-y worlds so far cataloged, none, I can confidently divulge, presents a picture of such agonizing retardation as Mother Earth. To be clear: type-y planets that have been around as long as you have are, without exception, type-x planets or better. Earth has other peculiarities. DNA, I have known you since before you were children. I am the witness of all your excruciations! I have watched you hopping along the savannah and hooting around your campfires. I have watched you daub shit on the walls of your caves. I have watched you stumble, grope, err, miscarry, flop, dither, blunder, goof off. I have watched you trying, straining, heaving. I feel … I sometimes feel that I, too, have become partly human, over these many, many years.”
The conference room was now but feebly illumined. You saw the milky outlines of the listeners and the fumes of their milky breath, shapes of heads, Incarnacion with Pickering’s hand on her lap, Lord Kenrick flexing his shoulders, Zendovich hunched forward with his chin on his palm, Miss World chewing gum and not blinking. On stage the robot moved among shadows, tracked by the glint of its face. It came forward, and sat. The janitor on Mars had changed clothes. That serge coat had been discarded: in its place, a rust-red smoking jacket of balding velvet. At first you thought it was a trick of the light, but no: there were two black rivets, like eyes, on the curved axe of the face.
“What was it with you, O double helix? What kept you back? Most salient, no doubt, was the failure of your science. The utter failure of your science. Your Einsteins and Bohrs, your Hawkings and Kawabatas—they’d have been down on their lousy knees, licking the lab floors on Mars. Only now are you receiving your first whispers from the higher dimensions. On Mars, they always thought in ten dimensions. The Infinity Dogs are believed to think in seventeen, the Resonance in thirty-one, the Third Observer in sixty-seven, the higher entities in a number of dimensions both boundless and finite. But you think in four. As do I. They made me like that. I had to be something that you could understand.
“Next: terrestrial religion and its scarcely credible tenacity. Everywhere else they just kick around a few creation myths for a while and then snap out of it when science gets going. But you? One of your writers put it succinctly when he said that there was no evidence for the existence of God other than the human longing that it should be so. An extraordinary notion. What is this longing? Everyone else wants ‘God’ too—but from a different angle. For us, ‘God’ isn’t top-down. He’s bottom-up. Why yearn for a power greater than your own? Why not seek to become it? Even the most affable and conciliatory Martian would have found your Promethean urge despicably weak. Okay, on Mars we had to face—and maybe we never truly faced it—our actual position in the order of being. It goes beyond the Third Observer, on and on and up and up. And what do you reach? An entity for whom the Ultraverse is a game of eight ball. And maybe he’s just a janitor—the Ultrajanitor. This entity, through his surrogate the Third Observer, created life on Mars. And what am I supposed