The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read online

  In still unspeaking accord, the two Emperors nosed the plastic beast round so that its bulk came between them and the shores of the bay: this for fear of directional microphones operating from land.

  Then the Emperors bumped and bobbed their way along to the dolphin’s tail, to which their two pairs of hands clung side by side, and at last gave one another Good Afternoon.

  ‘When Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander the First did this in the middle of the river Niemen’, said the Emperor of the East, still rather out of breath, ‘they had a pavilion constructed on a raft for them to meet in.’

  ‘At that date there was still such a thing as privacy,’ replied the Emperor of the West: ‘at least for the ruling classes. Nowadays building workers wouldn’t know how to build a pavilion without building in microphones.’

  On a sudden thought he pulled the stopper out of the inflation valve in the dolphin’s tail. Inside, there was a micro-tape-recorder, which the Emperor tossed out to sea before replacing the stopper.

  ‘We’d better get straight to business,’ the Emperor of the East urged. ‘It won’t be long before my security people become worried about my safety and insist on rescuing me. And I daresay yours are the same.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if mine sent a gunboat,’ said the Emperor of the West.

  ‘If they do, mine will send a faster gunboat,’ said the Emperor of the East gloomily.

  ‘I’ll waste no more time,’ said the Emperor of the West, ‘pleasant though it is to chat with you in the warm sea. I can explain the situation on my side very quickly. My Empire is approaching the last extremes of poverty. Almost all our revenue is absorbed by the quite unproductive business of building anti-weapons to answer your weapons, and building weapons to out-strip your anti-weapons. Sometimes I think we’d be better off if we let you invade and conquer us. At least, most of us would then be peacefully dead, and those that remained would constitute fewer mouths to feed. As things are, the civilised values which we believe we are spending all this money to preserve are vanishing from our lives. I realise’, the Emperor added solemnly, ‘that in telling you this I may have put my half of the world at your mercy. But since you are matching up weapon for weapon, I would guess that you are in exactly the same case and therefore in no position to take advantage of us.’

  ‘You can feel absolutely secure about having told me,’ the Emperor of the East replied, ‘because your guess is absolutely right. My Empire is based on a revolution in the name of the people, and the people are daily becoming more impoverished and more oppressed by our security forces: all because we have to be prepared to defend our revolutionary achievement against your Empire. Therefore, if you hadn’t spoken first, I would have said exactly the same thing to you.’

  Both Emperors gave a rather plopping sigh of relief. Side by side in the water, they turned heads and smiled at each other directly: two fattish, brick-pink, middle-aged men in bathing trunks experiencing the relief of lovers who, having bravely confessed to love, find it reciprocated.

  ‘Well what in hell’, said the Emperor of the West, ‘shall we do? Couldn’t we reach an agreement to disarm simultaneously?’

  ‘Don’t be insulted,’ said the Eastern Emperor, ‘but people on my side feel certain that if we reached such an agreement you’d cheat us.’

  ‘I can’t very well be insulted, because my side believes exactly the same of you.’

  ‘Couldn’t you’, the Emperor of the East suggested, ‘convince your people? Couldn’t you argue them into sense? After all, you have the advantage of being a democratic ruler.’

  ‘The people never mistrust a politician so much’, the Emperor of the West replied, ‘as when he tries to convince them. If they thought me a man of principle, I’d never be elected again. They want to believe us wily, unscrupulous and self-seeking, because they think that’s the only kind of person who can stand up to you. Now you, I should have thought, truly could do something, because as an absolute ruler you needn’t bother about carrying the people with you. Couldn’t you just give orders to destroy your weapons and disband your forces? The instant you’d done it, my side would be only too happy to follow suit.’

  ‘How can you be sure? You might no longer be Emperor.’

  ‘It’s true I can’t bind my successors. That’s another of the disadvantages of democratic government.’

  ‘Perhaps your people have elected a peaceful man like yourself only because they know my Empire is strong,’ said the Emperor of the East. ‘As soon as we became weak, they might throw you out and elect an Emperor who’d take advantage of our weakness. You can’t offer me any guarantee that they wouldn’t, so I couldn’t pass on any guarantee to my committee.’

  ‘Your committee?’

  ‘My dear Emperor of the West, you have to deal with an electorate of millions, at least some of whom would agree with you if you suggested destroying all your Empire’s weapons. I have to deal with a committee of six, not one of whom would agree with me. If I gave orders to destroy all our weapons, the six, who normally hate each other, would unite to countermand my orders and murder me. The man who replaced me would build up bigger armies and more powerful weapons than ever, because he would think he had proof that you were more dangerous than ever. Indeed, he’d suppose you had grown so aggressive and so powerful that you’d managed actually to suborn me. That’s the only way he could explain my having given such a lunatic order.’

  ‘I see your point, and I grant’, said the Emperor of the West, ‘that neither of us wields unconditional power. Yet between us we surely wield the largest single quantity of power in the world. Surely that’s powerful enough to do something?’

  ‘You’d think so,’ said the Emperor of the East. ‘But what?’

  ‘We’d better decide quickly or our respective security forces will be upon us,’ said the Emperor of the West. ‘It’s a bit slipshod of them not to be here already. No doubt the events of this afternoon, when they discover we’ve been absent and unobserved so long, will put them more on the alert, and that will make it harder than ever for us to meet confidentially. Both our Empires will be beggared before we can contrive such another chance as this.’

  ‘The security forces themselves’, the Emperor of the East grumbled, ‘are one of the most expensive and least productive drains on the revenue. Is that your experience too? In my Empire, about one in four of the citizens is drawing a high salary from the state merely for watching the other three.’

  ‘In mine, about half the security force is occupied solely in watching the other half of the security force. We have to pay even more for that, because it’s more highly-skilled work. Indeed’, the Western Emperor went on, ‘for all I know, the entire security force may be self-parasitic. I ought to know what goes on, because I’m the only person with total access to top secrets. But to be the only person with total access is in fact totally futile, because only another person with total access could explain the total system to you.’

  ‘Could there be’, the Emperor of the East enquired, ‘hope in that?’

  ‘If you can see it, please expound it.’

  ‘Well: the financial appropriations for new weapons, for example. They go through your parliamentary process? The parliamentarians vote the money for the weapons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the parliamentarians don’t oversee in detail how the money is spent?’

  ‘I daresay I’m infringing security in telling you, but no, of course they don’t,’ the Emperor of the West replied. ‘Parliamentarians have a very low-grade security clearance. The money for weapons is spent secretly, by experts.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Emperor of the East.

  ‘What about your committee?’ the Emperor of the West asked in a slow voice that indicated he was thinking as he spoke. ‘Do the experts keep your committee in the dark, too?’

  ‘The committee votes the money’, the Eastern Emperor replied, ‘and each member of the committee would dearly like to know the secrets o
f how it’s spent. But for each member there are five other members who mistrust him. So rather than let any one member acquire the power that would accompany total knowledge, they all insist on the traditional security procedure of the cell, whereby each person knows only the minimum he needs to know.’

  ‘So it would be possible’, the Western Emperor speculated, ‘for the money to be voted for defence but in fact to be spent on—’

  ‘—better things,’ said the Eastern Emperor trenchantly. ‘And no one would know how it was being spent, because the whole subject is top secret.’

  ‘A man could join the army and be seconded to work in a hospital or a school. That man would suppose secondment to be just his individual lot. He would believe that millions of other men truly were serving in the army, and no one would know that in fact there was no army, because the numbers and dispositions of the armed services are naturally matters of top secrecy.’

  ‘What about the weapons that already exist?’ asked the Emperor of the East.

  ‘We’ll order those to be destroyed, on the grounds that they’re obsolete. We’ll say we’re going to replace them by weapons more up-to-date and more effective – weapons which are, of course, ultra-hyper-top-top secret.’

  ‘And for those supposedly more effective weapons we can get really huge amounts of money voted,’ said the Eastern Emperor, ‘which can be spent on much better things. Do you know that in my Empire, the very home of the art, we are contemplating closing the state ballet because we have no funds for anything except defence?’

  ‘I was going to ask you if your ballet could come to us on tour.’

  ‘It can come every year if you’ll put our plan to work.’

  ‘Agreed,’ cried the Emperor of the West. ‘My first step, like, I don’t doubt, your own, will be to tighten up the security system. Obviously we need very strict security if it’s not to leak out that we have no security.’

  The Emperors clapped each other on the sunburnt shoulders, kicked off from the plastic dolphin, sending it spinning out to sea, and swam separately back to their own shores.

  To the populations of both Empires it seemed that the Emperor-level conference had been a failure, since the first announcement each Emperor made, on returning to his own capital, was that security was to be tightened.

  (The Western Emperor told his agents that his reason for absenting himself for a whole afternoon was as a test of them, and they had not even noticed. That, he argued, demonstrated the need to re-design the whole system.)

  Further financial stringencies were expected and, indeed, announced. But though everyone in both Empires knew that more money than ever was being spent on weaponry, no individual seemed to be personally feeling the financial pinch. In neither Empire did anyone seem to meet anyone who had actually known anyone whose job was in a weapons factory – though of course that was only to be expected, given the secret nature of such jobs. What people did notice was that the slums were being pulled down and handsome flats were going up. However, every individual realised that it must be just his individual good luck to live in a neighbourhood where, quite against the general trend, it was easy to find a decent home and where, should you fall ill, there was a modern and comfortably equipped hospital to care for you.

  No announcement was made in either Empire about an increase in subsidies to theatres, opera-houses, museums and symphony orchestras. But people who went to museums noticed that the buildings had been recently renovated; and people who applied for tickets to performances noticed that tickets had become cheaper and performances better. If you chanced to be acquainted with a musician or an actor, you probably noticed that your friend was suddenly more affluently off and less worried, which probably accounted for the improvement in performances.

  In a corner of the Empire of the West, three poets, who had been on the verge of starving in a cramped garret and who had been using up their failing strength in debating which of them was the least gifted poet (for they all agreed that, once he had been justly picked out, it would be only just for the other two to eat him), were rescued at the latest possible moment by state pensions for life, granted them personally (and, he insisted, privately) by the Emperor.

  In brief, the plan worked.

  Everyone in both Empires was soon receiving a sound but interesting education and then going on to a secure and pleasant job which exacted from him only short hours of work.

  Everyone continued, however, to believe that most of his fellow citizens were slaving away, in factories too secret for their whereabouts to be divulged, at the distasteful but necessary chore of making weapons.

  Each Empire was quickly growing into a paradise – but a paradise much less boring than its mythical prototype. For, besides being offered entertainment of a high standard to divert them in their new quantities of leisure, both populations turned their serious attention to the unendable quest for excellence in art. And there was constant public discussion of adventurous and subversive ideas.

  Ideas which a few years before would have been called dangerous were now thought exciting. People no longer wanted to stop others saying things they disagreed with. They positively wanted the ideas they disliked to be expressed, because otherwise it was impossible to put the arguments against them.

  Now that people were enjoying their own lives, they felt very little impulse to prevent other people from enjoying theirs.

  No more did they want to prevent animals of other species from continuing and enjoying their lives. Humans stopped torturing and killing other animals for purposes of sport, science or food production. They explored the luxuries of vegetarian food (which, since it was cheaper than carnivorous food, further increased the affluence of both Empires), and two new and sophisticated vegetarian cuisines were developed, one Eastern and spicy, the other Western and saucy.

  On each side there were moves to extend the new tolerance to the other Empire. Each Empire was inclined to believe that its own way of life was now so obviously paradisal that citizens of the other Empire would need only to see it to be won over.

  Having lost their dread of subversion (their secret conviction, that is, that the other side was more attractive than one’s own), both sides permitted their own citizens to travel freely and welcomed visitors in return.

  The tourists were much freer than before to roam while they were abroad. Although they knew there existed large military areas which it was forbidden to enter, they never seemed to chance on one, no matter how widely they wandered.

  In their new freedom, the tourists became much less purblind about what they allowed themselves to admit to themselves they saw. Both sets of tourists were, in fact, astonished to realise, from observation, that the other Empire was also a paradise.

  On each side, the consensus worked spontaneously round to the conclusion that, regrettable though it was in principle and expensive in practice, armed vigilance must still be kept up, since the rival Empire obviously had dangerously huge material resources.

  Suddenly, the Emperor of the West died.

  (His doctors diagnosed, unfortunately after the event, that his heart had been weakened by his taking up long-distance swimming and when he was past the age for it.)

  The new Emperor of the West, like most people in both Empires, was a believer in reluctant armed might. As soon as he was installed and had access to top secrets, he considered it his duty to satisfy himself about the state of the armed forces, the stock of weapons and the security precautions of his Empire.

  He found it difficult to penetrate the codes and the reciprocally watertight systems of the many security organisations. Having, however, been trained in Formal Logic, he set about deciphering the secret files systematically and coolly. Yet for all his coolness he could scarcely believe the conclusion to which all his investigations seemed to point.

  Flustered despite himself, the new Emperor realised that he must instantly summon the whole political and military hierarchy and disclose what he thought he had discovered. If anyo
ne could shew that the Emperor had misunderstood the files, so much the better: he would merely have made a fool of himself.

  He planned to disclose the truth in total secrecy, of course. He realised that any leak would entail enormous risk: should word reach the East of the West’s complete lack of defence, immediate invasion might result.

  Although he had made up his mind what he must do, the new Emperor found the state of affairs he was about to disclose so incredible that, before summoning the assembly, he retired to his private study and passed an hour of agonised solitude trying to get used to the reality of what he had to tell.

  He was on the point of pressing the intercom button and sending out his summons, when he noticed his window being besieged by a singularly persistent pigeon.

  A birdlover in any case, impressed by this bird’s purposeful behaviour, and feeling the need for a moment’s respite from his huge and urgent responsibility, the Emperor raised the window, despite the disruption that invariably made in the air conditioning, and found that a note, purporting to be from the Emperor of the East, was attached to the pigeon’s left leg.

  ‘If you’ve discovered what I think you must by now have discovered,’ the message read, ‘do nothing rash. I had an arrangement with your predecessor. I’ll explain when I can see you alone. Accept my forthcoming invitation to an official conference, and leave the table for the lavatory at 11.39 G.M.T. on the second morning. Message ends.’

  The Emperor pushed the intercom button but only to ask for the air conditioning to be rectified and to request a handful of corn from the kitchen so that he might thank the pigeon.

  The next day, diplomats from the East began negotiations for an Emperor-level conference.

  That seemed to offer the Emperor of the West some assurance that the message was not a hoax.

  All the same, he was worried by the danger of doing nothing about his Empire’s vulnerability. He might be committing the grossest dereliction of duty in history. He told his own diplomatists to hurry the conference arrangements.