The Network - Jason Elliot [52]
I’m wondering who, if I had the choice, I could ask for advice on all this. I think suddenly of the story told in the Bhagavad Gita of the princely warrior Arjuna, doubting whether he should go to battle because he knows there are friends and members of his own family who he’s likely to meet. He turns to Krishna for advice, who reminds him that life and death are unimportant things and that righteous action is the key to life. No one, says Krishna, can get to grips with your fate except yourself, which is why it’s no good imitating the life of another. There’s a harsh solace to this counsel, it occurs to me now, for anyone troubled by questions of fate, choice and action.
I turn in, but my mind is see-sawing between past and future. H is right to suspect that I have doubts, and they’re coming at me like demons now. I’m not so much worried about the dangers ahead. Planning and training and common sense go a long way towards dealing with the obvious dangers. I’m actually looking forward to going back to Afghanistan. My doubt is whether I can carry my secret with me, which I can’t tell Seethrough or even H, and this already feels like a betrayal. No one but the Baroness knows about Orpheus or the fact that he needs to come in, or whether, in the jargon of the Network, he’s still a good householder or has become a lost sheep and will have to be eliminated.
I can’t sleep, not properly, anyway. It’s 3 a.m. I crawl out of the sleeping bag and pace around. There’s a half-moon above me and the clouds are sweeping in luminous silence across the sky, and through the tears in their fabric I catch glimpses of the stars.
Fear is a catalyst of strange thoughts, I realise.
In daily life you are swept along by events which prevent you from going too deeply into things. But now that the ordinary momentum of the world has been stripped away, my doubt is laid bare. I want to know if I am making the right choice, but I can’t be sure whether I have made a choice at all, or whether it has chosen me. When a man reaches a crossroads, it’s fair to suppose that the decision he takes is a free one. It’s what we’d all like to believe. But you can argue that his choice, so-called, is no more than the outcome of everything that has gone before, like a mathematical equation which, however complex, really only has one answer. All of a man’s experience of life is part of that equation, embracing all his hopes, dreams and prejudices, his wishes and convictions, his most tender longings, bitterest grievances, and all the dark machinery of his fears. All invisibly influence his choice, like a secret committee voting behind its leader’s back. Perhaps even the future itself exerts an influence, reaching back beneath the scheme of things. Then, when this formula of near-infinite complexity is at last resolved, and his decision, in which he has really had no say, rises like a balloon into the world of his conscious thoughts, the man will declare: I have made my choice freely and am responsible for it.
But that’s not the point. Any propagandist, magician or behavioural scientist can tell you a man has much less choice than he’d like to believe. The interesting question is whether a man who knows he isn’t free lives a different kind of life from the one who imagines he is. And if it is different, how is it different?
I can’t hold the thought long enough to calculate the answer. I’m cold and tired and shivering now, and it’s time to get some rest.
PART THREE
7
Even today I am reluctant to go into the details, and the knowledge that the players and the protocols have all changed since then does nothing to ease the task. It’s true I want things to be told, but to abandon the habit of secrecy on which your life and that of others has at times depended is like pulling shrapnel from a wound. It may seem like the necessary thing to do, but the act sometimes risks killing the victim. It does