But no. In all probability, Lucia was still oblivious to what John Paul was doing.
“That’s … very touching. Very touching of you to say so. Good night, Mugabe.”
“Good night, madam.”
I watched Lucia retire into her room. The central room.
I waited for the soldier to continue his patrol and checked that he had left the building before dashing up the stairs. The soles of my boots automatically adapted to the flooring, helping me make a silent ascent. I felt like a ghost. These noise-canceling boots made you forget the fact that you had two feet planted firmly on the ground.
The door was open. I readied my gun and charged inside.
But Lucia was nowhere to be seen.
There was only moonlight, scattered and diffuse, shining in through the windows.
I quickly scouted the empty room. There was a desk, and it looked like someone had been working at it until a moment ago. There was a paper notebook and what looked like some sort of manuscript, and a fountain pen. The manuscript was titled The Federation, and on closer inspection it looked like a handwritten draft of a presidential speech. John Paul evidently did his writing longhand.
The notebook next to the manuscript was filled with code and strange words, far removed from ordinary English. It was evidently some sort of shorthand key that described the characteristics of certain words—their gender and connotations, looked like—logic symbols that described word and sentence orders and patterns of incidence. The linguistic jargon and code were all crammed densely together, and I couldn’t imagine ever being able to truly understand what was written there.
Then I heard the sound of a safety lock unclicking behind my back.
“Hello again, assassin.”
I spun around.
It was John Paul, smiling sadly and holding a pistol to my face.
4
“I thought that my rescue force might have killed you,” John Paul said.
We were standing in a reverse snapshot of our first face-to-face encounter in Prague. This time I had my back to the bright moonlight and John Paul’s face was bleached white by it. His expression was the same though—very sane, very sad. He was holding an antique, a Browning semiautomatic. A gun without an ID. A throwback to a time when anybody could use any gun to kill anybody else.
“They almost did.”
“Ho-hum. Shame.” John Paul pulled up a nearby chair and sat down, keeping the gun trained on me all the while. “Anyway. You showed up in time for once, eh? I’ve only just begun planting the seeds of discord throughout the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation.”
I looked into the eyes of this man who was now sitting before me in a rattan chair. His eyes were so calm and so still. Even though this unassuming middle-aged man was confronting a skilled assassin such as myself, he managed to exude an aura of quiet dignity that put me in my place.
It occurred to me that a religious fanatic who imagined himself to be the Messiah would probably also have this kind of assured charisma. The difference was that John Paul exhibited none of the trappings that came with a Messiah complex. No wild flash in his eyes. No trace of pride or hubris. None of the affected kindness.
“Why are you still doing this?” I asked. “Is this some kind of experiment to see how many people you can kill?’
John Paul paused for a moment and then looked down at the muzzle of his gun. It was as though he couldn’t quite work out how it came to pass that he was holding this weapon of murder in his hand.
“I finished experimenting years ago. Do you perhaps think that I’m some sort of madman who is just itching to see how strong my powers are?”
John Paul’s eyes stayed fixed on the cold, shiny Browning. Was he digesting the reality that he held in his hands a real weapon of murder, an actual object that could directly cause the death of another human being?
“I’m guessing you’ve never held a gun before,” I said.
John Paul looked up. “You’re right. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually held one myself. No matter how deep I was in a war zone, I never touched one, and I always stayed away from them.”
“Yeah, why would you bother when you already have the power to massacre thousands without ever having to get your hands dirty?”
John Paul shook his head and chuckled. “It’s not my power.” He stood up. His voice sounded tired. “The language of genocide was always there in the human mind. It’s a presetting, a default. I just discovered it, that’s all. If you could even call it a discovery. I’m not that different from the first anatomists who ‘discovered’ and classified human organs.”
“I doubt Einstein felt that way when he discovered the atomic bomb,” I said.
“Cruelty is an inherent characteristic of the human brain. How is that so hard to understand? You don’t need my grammar of genocide to see that people are intrinsically capable of great brutality. Murder. Robbery. Rape.” John Paul used his free hand to gesture toward the hand that held the gun. “See? I’m getting ready to kill you even as we speak.”
“What about primitive societies, or isolated societies that haven’t even come into contact with the modern world? They’re peaceful, aren’t they?”
“No. That’s a lie spread last century by scientists—or social activists, really—who had a political agenda. The truth is that these so-called noble savages can be just as vicious as us. More so, in some cases. They covet and steal and rape and kill just like we do. Margaret Mead’s tropical Samoan paradise was debunked with the most cursory of follow-up research. She was, as they say, not even wrong. But one thing is for sure—plenty of rape and murder have gone down in Samoa over the years.”
“And wars?”
“Of course! Why not? Why should the civilized world have a monopoly on war? There are tribes in obscure corners of the Amazon rainforest that have never seen a white man and yet are happy to fight, plunder, kill, and rape. It seems to be a basic evolutionary need, passed down from generation to generation.”
“But people can make a choice,” I declared calmly. “I carry my sin around with me. You can choose to accept the responsibility for your choices. Saying that murder or rape or theft is just human nature is not the same as saying that any of these things are ever justified.”
“Absolutely. I agree with you.” John Paul smiled.
Well, that was anticlimactic. “What?”
“If the impulse to pillage and rape and murder derives from basic survival instinct, then so too do sympathy, love, and self-sacrifice. Our brains have evolved to contain a multitude of conflicting emotional modules, each one derived from a basic survival instinct. Some of these are redundant, and others have become positively counterproductive. A sweet tooth, to give you a trivial example. Great for when you have to compete for food, as it helps you absorb nutrients quickly. Not so great when you live in a world of superabundance and you’re trying to stave off obesity and diabetes.”
“So you’re saying that there’s nothing wrong with the modules that turn us into murderers and rapists—they’re basically just outdated?” I asked, incredulous.
“Hm. I’m not sure if that’s a fair way of putting it. ‘Outdated.’ That’s a subjective concept. Orthogonal to the current social mores of the so-called advanced nations, perhaps. Anyhow, like it or not, the grammar of genocide is also one of these modules.”
“What do you mean?”
John Paul looked past me, out through the window, at the night vista of the shores of Lake Victoria, where countless families were suffering in poverty, starving, selling their bodies, doing whatever they needed to do to get by.
“Okay. Imagine there’s a drought. We’re talking pre-agricultural times. Well, people have already learned by this time that by forming a group and cooperating with other people, you stand a better chance of survival in the long run than by betraying the others and just taking what you wanted. Maybe this was due to evolution and genetics, maybe due to memes, but either way, altruism or love, or whatever you want to call it, emerged as adaptive behavior designed to help preserve the self. So what happens when you have an unexpected outside shock such as a drought, and there is no longer enough food and water to go around? Does the entire community perish along with its evolution and altruism?”