“Were you, now?” says Hemingway. His eyes narrow like a sleepy cat’s. “Yes, come to think of it, you do look familiar.”
“Agra,” Vulpius says. “Lhasa. Athens.”
“He gets around,” says Einstein.
“A world traveler,” says Hemingway, nodding.
Picasso now has joined the group, with Cleversmith just behind him. Vulpius says, “You’ll be departing soon for Paris, won’t you?”
“What’s that?” Cleversmith asks, looking startled.
Hemingway leans over and whispers something in his ear. Cleversmith’s expression darkens.
“Let there be no pretense,” says Vulpius stonily. “I know what you have in mind, but the Louvre must not be touched.”
Picasso says, “There’s nothing in it but a lot of dusty junk, you know.”
Vulpius shakes his head. “Junk to you, perhaps. To the rest of us the things you’ve been destroying are precious. I say, enough is enough. You’ve had your fun. Now it has to stop.”
Cleversmith indicates the colossal mass of the Matterhorn above the town. “You’ve been eavesdropping on us, have you?”
“For the past five or six days.”
“That isn’t polite, you know.”
“And blowing up museums is?”
“Everyone’s entitled to some sort of pastime,” says Cleversmith. “Why do you want to interfere with ours?”
“You actually expect me to answer that?”
“It seems like a reasonable question to me.”
Vulpius does not quite know, for the moment, how to reply to that. Into his silence Picasso says, “Do we really need to stand here discussing all this in the public street? We’ve got some excellent brandy in our lodge.”
It does not occur to Vulpius except in the most theoretical way that he might be in danger. Touching off an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, causing the foundation of the Washington Monument to give way, dropping a turbulence bomb amid the ruins of Byzantium, all these are activities of one certain sort: actually taking human life is a different kind of thing entirely. It is not done. There has not been an instance of it in centuries.
The possibility exists, of course, that these four might well be capable of it. No one has destroyed any museums in a long time either, perhaps not since the savage and brutal 20th century in which the originals of three of these four men lived their lives. But these are not actual men of the 20th century, and, in any case, from what Vulpius knows of their originals he doubts that they themselves would have been capable of murder. He will take his chances up above.
The brandy is, in fact, superb. Picasso pours with a free hand, filling and refilling the sparkling bowl-shaped glasses. Only Hemingway refuses to partake. He is not, he explains, fond of drinking.
Vulpius is astonished by the mountaintop villa’s elegance and comfort. He had visited it surreptitiously the week before, entering in the absence of the conspirators to plant his spy-eye, but stayed only long enough then to do the job. Now he has the opportunity to view it in detail. It is a magnificent aerie, a chain of seven spherical rooms clinging to a craggy out-thrust fang of the Matterhorn. Great gleaming windows everywhere provide views of the surrounding peaks and spires and the huge breathtaking chasm that separates the mountain from the town below. The air outside is moist and mild. Tropical vines and blossoming shrubs grow all about. It is hard even to imagine that this once was a place of glittering glaciers and killing cold.
“Tell us,” Cleversmith says after a while, “why it is you believe that the artifacts of the former world are worthy of continued preservation. Eh, Vulpius? What do you say?”
“You have it upside down,” Vulpius says. “I don’t need to do any defending. You do.”
“Do I? We do as we please. For us it is pleasant sport. No lives are lost. Mere useless objects are swept into nonexistence, which they deserve. What possible objection can you have to that?”
“They are the world’s heritage. They are all we have to show for 10,000 years of civilization.”
“Listen to him,” says Einstein, laughing. “Civilization!”
“Civilization,” says Hemingway, “gave us the great warming. There was ice up here once, you know. There were huge ice packs at both poles. They melted and flooded half the planet. The ancients caused that to happen. Is that something to be proud of, what they did?”
“I think it is,” Vulpius says with a defiant glare. “It brought us our wonderful gentle climate. We have parks and gardens everywhere, even in these mountains. Would you prefer ice and snow?”
“Then there’s war,” Cleversmith says. “Battle, bloodshed, bombs. People dying by tens of millions. We barely have tens of millions of people anymore, and they would kill off that many in no time at all in their wars. That’s what the civilization you love so much accomplished. That’s what all these fancy temples and museums commemorate, you know. Terror and destruction.”
“The Taj Mahal, Sistine Chapel—”
“Pretty in themselves,” says Einstein. “But get behind the prettiness and you find that they’re just symbols of oppression, conquest, tyranny. Wherever you look in the ancient world, that’s what you find: oppression, conquest, tyranny. Better that all of that is swept away, wouldn’t you think?”
Vulpius is speechless.
“Have another brandy,” Picasso says, and fills everyone’s glass unasked.
Vulpius sips. He’s already had a little too much, and perhaps there’s some risk in having more just now, because he feels it already affecting his ability to respond to what they are saying. But it is awfully good.
He shakes his head to clear it and says, “Even if I were to accept what you claim, that everything beautiful left to us from the ancient world is linked in some way to the terrible crimes of the ancients, the fact is that those crimes are no longer being committed. No matter what their origin, the beautiful objects that the people of the past left behind ought to be protected and admired for their great beauty, which perhaps we’re incapable of duplicating today. Whereas if you’re allowed to have your way, we’ll soon be left without anything that represents——”
“What did you say?” Cleversmith interrupts. “ ‘Which perhaps we’re incapable of duplicating today,’ wasn’t it? Yes. That’s what you said. And I quite agree. It’s an issue we need to consider, my friend, because it has bearing on our dispute. Where’s today’s great art? Or great science, for that matter? Picasso, Einstein, Hemingway—the original ones— who today can match their work?”
Vulpius says, “And don’t forget your own ancestor, Cleversmith, who built the Great Singapore Tower, which you yourself turned to so much rubble.”
“My point exactly. He lived 200 years ago. We still had a little creativity left, then. Now we function on the accumulated intellectual capital of the past.”
“What are you talking about?” Vulpius says, bewildered.
“Come. Here. Look out this window. What do you see?”
“The mountainside. Your villa’s garden, and the forest beyond.”
“A garden, yes. A glorious one. And on and on right to the horizon, garden after garden. It’s Eden out there, Vulpius. That’s an ancient name for paradise. Eden. We live in paradise.”
“Is there anything wrong with that?”
“Nothing much gets accomplished in paradise,” Hemingway says. “Look at the four of us: Picasso, Hemingway, Einstein, Cleversmith. What have we created in our lives, we four, that compares with the work of the earlier men who had those names?”
“But you aren’t those men. You’re nothing but clones.” They seem stung by that for an instant. Then Cleversmith, recovering quickly, says, “Precisely so. We carry the genes of great ancient overachievers, but we do nothing to fulfill our own potential. We’re superfluous men, mere genetic reservoirs. Where are our great works? It’s as though our famous forebears have done it all and nothing’s left for us to attempt.”