Our Tragic Universe (35 page)

‘I didn’t go at first. Couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t really have anywhere to go home to in the holidays. In the end I worked on a lighthouse for a couple of years until it got decommissioned and then I started doing peace studies part-time, but I could immediately see there was no future in peace studies.’ He laughed.

‘Why?’ said Sacha.

‘Well … You know, the Gulf War had just started, and everything seemed so screwed up. Eventually I transferred to engineering. I was an engineer for a while after I graduated, and then, of course, I dropped out and …’

‘You didn’t really drop out,’ Libby said. ‘You started designing boats.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Just as I was wondering how Libby could explain knowing this, the doorbell rang and she went to open it. And suddenly there was Rowan, standing in the entrance to the sitting room wearing jeans and a pale blue shirt and not meeting my eyes. He was carrying a bottle of wine, which he gave to Libby.

‘Lise can’t make it, I’m afraid,’ he said, after kissing Sacha on both cheeks and shaking hands with Conrad. ‘She’s got a really terrible headache. She’s taken pills and gone to bed. I’m going to try to be both of us if that’s all right.’

‘Oh, the poor thing,’ said Sacha.

‘She always did have headaches,’ said Conrad.

Conrad was Lise’s brother. Of course. Had I known that and forgotten it? I didn’t think so. So Rowan was Bob’s uncle. I’d kissed Bob’s uncle and then had a million sexual fantasies about him. I was glad I hadn’t told Libby whom I was planning to have an affair with, even though, looking at him now, I realised how impossible that would be. But I had told him about her affair, I realised. I downed the rest of my wine and didn’t catch his eye.

Over dinner we all ended up talking about paradoxes. Libby had said something about my TV deal, and all the maths I used in my SF novels and the weird stuff I wrote about mobile-phone networks and cellular structures. She was worried about how they were going to translate this onto the screen. I said not to worry, because from what I knew TV options just sat on a shelf gathering dust until they expired, so it was unlikely the books would ever be adapted. Rowan asked whether or not I understood all of the maths and science in my novels, which was a good question, because I didn’t always. Or, at least, I did at the
time I was writing and then not a year or so later, usually when I had to give a few interviews about it. I tried to explain all this as honestly as I could.

‘But you review science books?’ Sacha said.

‘Yes. It’s a bit the same,’ I said. ‘I understand them at the time I read them, especially if they’re well written and have lots of good examples, but whenever someone asks me to explain relativity I can’t do it. Or at least I can, sort of. Which is the speed-of-light one?’ Everyone looked blank except Conrad.

‘Special relativity,’ he said.

‘General relativity is gravity?’

He laughed and sipped his wine. ‘I think so. You’re right; one does forget.’

‘In my mind I have a jumble of images: a man on a train that’s going along at the same speed as a car, and so it seems to him as if the train and the car are standing still, relative to one another, and when he starts walking down the carriage he feels as if he’s going at about one mile an hour, but really he’s going at the speed of the train plus that. And I can see space-time laid out like a blanket …’

‘Like the fabric of the universe!’ Libby said.

‘Exactly like that,’ I said, smiling at her.

‘You’ve confused everyone now,’ Bob said to Libby.

‘Oh. I knitted the fabric of the universe for Meg ages ago. That’s all.’

Mark rolled his eyes when Libby wasn’t looking.

‘“That’s all,”’ Rowan said, laughing. He caught my eye and then looked away again. ‘As if you’re a kind of God of knitting.’

‘Or God’s assistant,’ Libby said. ‘I had to ask Conrad what
the fabric of the universe would look like so that I could knit it.’

‘Do you think God made the universe, or just designed it and got someone else to make it?’ Sacha said.

‘Oh, Mum, don’t. You’re hurting my brain,’ Bob said.

‘This is why we didn’t bring him up to be religious,’ Conrad said to Mark. ‘We knew he wouldn’t be able to cope with the paradoxes. Robert has a very focused mind.’

‘I feel about three years old now,’ Bob said. ‘So thanks.’

‘I can’t understand paradoxes either,’ Rowan said. He looked at me. ‘Do you know Frank and Vi’s friend – that philosopher who solves paradoxes?’

I laughed. ‘No. My God. That sounds a bit crazy.’

‘I thought you couldn’t solve a paradox,’ Libby said. ‘Isn’t that the point?’

‘Your wife is cleverer than you,’ Conrad said to Bob. ‘I’ve always said so.’

‘Dad, please shut up.’

‘One of the artists I know collects paradoxes,’ Sacha said. ‘He pins them in a glass case like butterflies whenever he finds one.’

‘Finds one?’ I said. ‘What, just lying around?’

‘It may have been a metaphor. Perhaps there were no glass cases really either. We were drunk when we were talking about it, I think.’

Conrad frowned, and finished his glass of wine. He poured another glass, and then topped up everyone else’s.

Rowan laughed. ‘I’ve never found a paradox,’ he said.

‘You will,’ said Libby with a dark smile.

Damn it. She knew.

‘This is good,’ Sacha said. ‘It’s good that we’re discussing this because I’ve always been too embarrassed to ask him what they actually are. Now one of you can tell me exactly: what is a paradox?’

‘It’s a self-negating statement,’ Mark said.

‘Like what?’

‘All Cretans are liars,’ I said. ‘If a Cretan says that to you.’

‘A cretin?’

‘No. A Cretan, Mum,’ Bob said. ‘Someone from Crete.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s an Ancient Greek thing, I assume.’

Conrad looked up and laughed. ‘She’s clever,’ he said, pointing to Libby, ‘but my son isn’t stupid either. They are well matched. In any case, there’s something more to it than a self-negating statement.’

‘It’s where you end up using something to prove that it, itself, is ridiculous,’ I said, struggling to explain. ‘Like the Heap Paradox, where you have a heap of stones, take one away and ask someone if it is still a heap. They’ll say yes, of course. You take another one away and ask again. Still a heap. At what point does it stop being a heap? At some point it will be just one stone, and since there is no definition of “heap” you could end up concluding that the single stone is a heap of stones.’

‘But that’s just a case of proving that a word doesn’t have a precise definition, surely?’ Rowan said. ‘It just shows the difference between an abstract noun and a concrete noun.’

‘OK, yes, that’s not a great one. But the whole of twentieth-century science is based on paradoxes. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle … There’s also the Fiction Paradox, or the paradox of fiction. Why is it that
we get scared reading a ghost story, for example, when we know it’s just a story? Why does fiction have any emotional effect on us at all, considering that we know it’s not real? Why, when re-reading a book, or watching a film for the second time, do we still have the same emotional reactions as we did the first time around?’

‘That’s not a paradox,’ Rowan said. ‘That’s just life.’

‘My favourite paradox is the Horse and the Bales of Hay,’ Conrad said. ‘This is where a horse, given the choice between two identical bales of hay, each the same distance from it, cannot make a rational choice between them and so starves. This demonstrates the paradox of rationality.’

I thought about the woman who couldn’t leave her house because she’d seen the Beast in her garden. Would she starve? If so would it be because she was too rational, or too irrational?

‘Oh, that reminds me of an even better one,’ I said, struggling to remember where I’d read it. ‘It’s from Thomas Aquinas originally. Aquinas wondered what would happen if God wanted to achieve universal resurrection. In other words, bringing everybody who had ever lived back to life at the same time. What would happen to cannibals, and the people they ate? You couldn’t bring them all back at the same time, because the cannibals are made of the people they have eaten. You could have one but not the other. Ha.’ I looked at Rowan. ‘That’s a good example of a paradox.’

‘Rowan’s got stories about real-life cannibals,’ Bob said, but Conrad was pointedly stroking his beard in response to what I’d said about Aquinas, and so Rowan, like everyone else around the table, waited for him to speak.

‘This is an interesting conundrum,’ Conrad said eventually.
‘Aquinas focuses this problem on the cannibal, but in reality everything is made of everything else. Every boat I build used to be a tree, several trees in fact, and perhaps meteorites, iron ore, plants and so on. You can’t eat your cake and have it too. I think this is where the paradox comes from.’

Libby laughed. ‘Meg’s always talking about cannibalism,’ she said. ‘Ignore her. Who wants some lemon tart before we all sit around like hippies playing guitar, singing and clapping our hands?’

She was right. I used to talk about cannibalism all the time when I was a vegan. When I was a vegan people would ask me if I thought animals felt pain and plants didn’t, and what I’d do if I swallowed a fly, or was in a plane crash and had to survive in the jungle by eating corpses and insects. I’d respond by asking people why it was OK to eat pigs, say, which have the intelligence of three-year-old children, but not OK to eat three-year-old children. I’d been a vegetarian ever since B had been a puppy and I’d been idly stroking one of her legs. Suddenly, horribly, I realised that it felt like uncooked meat. It was just like a chicken thigh you’d buy in a supermarket. B already knew her own name, as well as about twenty other words, and had a favourite ball. She rolled on the floor when I played Tom Waits, but left the room if Bob Dylan was on. She was not food; she was my companion. I realised then that I wouldn’t be able to eat a mammal’s flesh again, although I carried on eating fish for a while and then gave that up too. Not long after that I reviewed a book that argued that vegetarianism, in the way I was practising it, made no sense. Why eat the by-products from the meat industry, like milk and cheese, but not the products themselves, the actual flesh of the animals? How can
anyone drink milk knowing that it’s really made for those cute calves you see lying in the sun in fields in the spring, who are taken away to be turned into veal, or gassed, or incinerated, so that you can have their milk? I was convinced enough to start existing on a diet of plants: mainly hummus, plain chocolate and salt-and-vinegar crisps. I kept it up for two years before the cracks started to show. It turned out that the fiction of consensus reality, where farm animals are happy drawings on packets and nothing else, was easier to believe than the truth. I never ate mammals, and I still avoided dairy products most of the time, but I no longer thought much about the reasons why.

Libby put the lemon tart on the table and cut it into slices.

‘I remember where I read about Aquinas,’ I said. ‘It was in this crazy book about how you survive the end of time.’

Conrad laughed. ‘How do you survive the end of time?’

‘You wait for the universe to collapse, and then you get a computer simulation going just at the moment when all the matter in the universe is infinitely dense. You use the infinite power to simulate a new infinite universe: a never-ending afterlife. It’s quite neat, but very creepy.’

‘I had a horrible dream after you told me about that the other week,’ Libby said.

‘It is a horrible dream,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it a good thing?’ Sacha said. ‘I’d like to live for ever.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Rowan.

‘It’s weird when you start thinking about the possibilities of “for ever”,’ I said. ‘The book I read, or books – there are two of them so far – try to imagine this post-universe, and how it might be controlled by the Omega Point, which is the “moment” of infinite energy that becomes a sort-of God. How would
“heaven” be arranged? The writer ends up arguing that we all get to live as heroes for a thousand years before we can even go to heaven. It’s kind of complicated and disturbing all at once.’

‘I think you can’t imagine heaven,’ Libby said. ‘Or what would be the point of it?’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Conrad.

‘But if you know that you’re going to exist, with one consciousness, through all infinity,’ I said, ‘then there is stuff to imagine, and it quickly gets unpleasant. I think that’s why this writer suggests a limit of one thousand years before you sort of merge with the God figure, the Omega Point. If you were conscious in an infinity, you’d become a god yourself in the end, because you’d experience everything, and everyone …’

‘You’d become omniscient,’ Rowan said. ‘You’d be able to know everything. Nothing would be impossible.’

‘You could go back and live through anyone you wanted,’ I said, holding Rowan’s gaze for a second. ‘You could find out what people around you had really been thinking while you were alive, even if they’d never said anything. You’d know the truth about everything. You’d …’

‘It would be hell,’ Mark said, pushing his plate away. ‘Well, for some people. Because you’d realise that you had spent your entire life lying and cheating and betraying people you loved, and that at some point in eternity – which may as well be at the beginning, whenever it happens, since eternity is for ever – everyone you’ve lied to, and everyone you’ve cheated, and everyone you’ve hurt and double-crossed will find out about it. You’ll have no secrets. Everything you’ve ever thought and everything you’ve ever done will be there for everyone to see.
You’ll spend the rest of eternity alone, shunned by everyone you’ve ever messed around.’

Libby got up and left the room.

‘That doesn’t make any sense, though,’ I said, wondering if I should follow her.

‘No,’ said Rowan. ‘Surely in order to know someone else’s thoughts, you’d have to become them. You’d have to live through their life from the beginning: you couldn’t just “drop into” someone’s consciousness. Even if you did drop into someone’s consciousness, you’d have all their memories and desires and hang-ups right there in front of you. And as you say, in an eternity you’d get the chance to know everything once enough time had passed. You’d become unable to judge anyone.’