Unlike Renner, back at the mansion, unlike most people, Ms. Aster seems to show no sign of intimidation or nervousness in the presence of the Speculative Service. To the contrary, she’s fascinated, inching up the stairwell with one old hand clutching the banister, licking her lips. “The Speculative Service on my humble stairwell in a fearsome little pack.” Her small features narrow to a fascinated point, savoring the mysterious syllables of the occupation. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We’re here about your tenant, Mose Crane.”
“What did he do?” she says. “He murder someone?”
“No,” I say, thinking, Interesting assumption. “No, ma’am. He’s dead.”
“Murdered?”
I’m about to say no, and I find that I can’t do it. My throat refuses to form the word, my instinct refuses to certify it as part of what’s So. So I merely smile, dance sideways around the question. “We are hoping to take a look at his apartment. Hoping you can help us out with that.”
I’m digging her, this old lady—she has a tough sinewy look about her, like an old snake, not dangerous but built to navigate danger. She hands me her Day Book and I hand her mine, and I stamp hers and she stamps mine, and then she does the same with Paige.
“So. What’s it like,” she asks Paige, “enforcing a world of absolute truth?”
“I don’t know,” says Paige, deadpan. “It’s my first day.”
Ms. Aster likes that a lot. She laughs, loud and cackling, hands on her hips, and gives me a wink. “You better watch out for this one, young man. Watch out!”
I raise my eyebrows, give her a tight smile, indulging the joke, but Aster’s joke has got it wrong—dead wrong, 180 degrees in the wrong—which she’s old enough to know. I do not believe and have never believed that our mission is to enforce a world of absolute truth. If such a world could be built we would have long ago built it already.
People are going to lie: they want to—they need to. Lying is born into the species. You know this is true as well as I do. There is something perfect in a lie, something seductive, addictive; telling a lie is like licking sugar off a spoon. I mean, think of children, think of how children lie all the time. We have imaginary friends, we blame our misbehavior on our playmates or our siblings, we claim not yet to have had dessert so we can cadge a second cookie. Me and Charlie used to have contests, as a matter of fact, two brothers each trying to slip a fake fact under the other one’s radar: “I beat up a kid at school”; “I saw that dog, the neighbor’s dog, jump over a fence”; “I’m the fastest runner in my class—”
You go back far enough in history, ancient history, and you find a time when people were never taught to grow out of it, when every adult lied all the time, when people lied for no reason or for the most selfish possible reasons, for political effect or personal gain. They lied and they didn’t just lie; they built around themselves whole carapaces of alternate truth in which to live like beetles. They built realities and sheltered inside them. This is how it was, this is how it is known to have been, and all the details of that old dead world are known to us in our bones but hidden from view, true and permanent but not accessible, not part of our vernacular.
It was the world. It was this world but it was another world and it’s gone. We are what’s left. The calamity of the past is not true because it is unknown: we do not know what happened or how it happened or why it happened—and therefore it is by definition not true. There could only be hypotheses, and hypotheses are not the truth. So we leave it blank. Nothing happened. Something happened. It is gone.
What we know of the past is enough to be afraid, enough to build our world, this world, our good and golden world, around preventing a repeat of the mistakes that destroyed the world before.
The contrary situation is untenable. If we did not exist, “we” meaning the Service, meaning the State and its many mechanisms. If we eased off, as some argue we should, if people were allowed to experiment, to push at the boundaries. If we unplugged the captures and burned down the Record, closed the doors of the Service and ushered its officers gently into retirement. We know what would happen. We know. What happened out there would happen here; what happened back then would happen now. And just saying that, just imagining it, just speculating, you get a shiver of what that would mean, what it would feel like. You can see the shimmer of that terrible prospect on the horizon.
And so the preservation of reality’s integrity is the paramount duty of the good citizenry and of this government alike. Imagine what kind of mad society would be organized otherwise.
I shake my head a little, out here on Crane’s landing, and blink myself back into the moment. Into reality unfolding. “So listen, Ms. Aster. Do you have a way of getting into the apartment?”
“How about a key? Will a key do?”
There is something grimly tragic about a Golden State apartment with no outdoor space: no balcony, no patio, nowhere to go and feel the blessing of sunshine on your cheeks. Crane’s U City apartment is grim and dark, a second-story bat’s nest, three narrow rooms connected by a carpeted hallway. Out the two small windows there’s a sorry view of Ellendale Place, stray sheets of Authority and hamburger wrappers tumbling down the street, the roots of aspen trees warping the sidewalk stones into strange shapes, like children hiding under a rug.
I wander through Crane’s apartment slowly, following no particular rhythm or route, developing a picture of the man’s life from the dull shapes and muted colors of his habitat: from the pair of beat-up shoes at the door, apparently the only pair he owned besides the pair he died in; from the three faded family photographs, tacked up unframed, brother and sister and mom faintly smiling, squinting into the sun on the pier; from the tiny kitchen table with the one chair, the coffee maker with two-day-old grounds still thick and gritty in the filter. The fridge is mostly beer, the garbage mostly takeout containers.
No speculation required. This was the home of a bachelor who worked long days at hard, sunburnt labor, who came home to piss and sleep and shower and get ready to go back to work.
Paige is pursuing her own slow perusal of the apartment, and she has her Day Book out to take down in carbon all these lonely details I’m absorbing: she’s taking inventory, creating a list of flat facts to refer to later. One armchair, one floor lamp, one cup at the kitchen table. One bookshelf, squat and brown.
I take a closer look at the books and find all the usual stuff: a volume of Maps and Legends, a copy of Recent Reference and one of What Things Are Made Of, this year’s edition of Flat Facts for Everyday Use. All of the various State-issued volumes produced by the Publishing Arm, the constant effort to ensure that we all know the same things, that we all know everything; Common knowledge is a bulwark. All of the books look basically brand new, as pristine as when the State published them; Crane, I figure, was lacking in either the time or the inclination to do a lot of reading. Probably both.
Not surprisingly, the man has hardly got any novels at all—although there is, prominently displayed on the top shelf, a copy of Past Is Prologue. I lay two fingers reverently on the wide scarlet spine. I’ve read it—you’ve read it—everybody’s read the big book, most of us many more times than once. But I slip Crane’s copy off the shelf nevertheless and flip through it slowly, feeling its words under my fingertips, giving myself the gift of its serenity. I fight an urge to just sink down to the floor and read the thing, pick a spot at random in the long and beautiful history of the first days and years of the Golden State, of our seven heroic founders and the obstacles they overcame and the gifts they left in their passing. Before I put it back I find one of its many black pages and place my hand down on it flat, feeling that power. Black pages; invisible truths; redacted facts about the time before, unknown and unknowable.