she was going off at a tangent.
‘Just what I say. Take the dinosaurs; it must have been a meteor hit you say? But there’s no evidence of it; it’s far more likely that they just died out naturally. The fossil record suggests it.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? And what would you know about fossils?’
‘I’m getting to it. It’s human nature to seek the most dramatic explanation everything’s got to be a big deal. So you envision a terrible apocalypse “The end of the world” and write a prophecy about it. The fact is, that when and if humanity comes to an end it’ll happen gradually, and you’ll probably bring it on yourselves.’
‘World War III you mean?’
‘No! Y ou see, there you go again – drama! Here we are in the middle of a fertility crisis brought on most likely by our pollution of the planet, we’re destroying the Eco-system, disrupting the food chain that we rely on; disease is rife. I could go on, and yet the first thing that comes to your mind is a bloody big explosion that’ll wipe us all out in one go.’
‘What was your point again?’
‘Just that the Apocalypse – Armageddon whatever you want to call it, isn’t going to happen. Things just don’t happen like that. Humans just think they do.’
‘I only said I wanted a garden.’
Tamar sighed. ‘You did, didn’t you? Okay then.’
There was a thin scream from somewhere up ahead.
‘Later,’ said Denny. ‘Come on Batman.’ They ran.
Up ahead three men were dragging a struggling girl along the street. Although they were doing this quite openly, nobody was doing a thing to intervene.
Denny and Tamar stopped short in some confusion. Was it an arrest? Were these actually plain clothes policemen … jeering and shouting obscenities while trying to herd her toward a ratty looking old van? Er – no then.
Now, Tamar had some fairly strong opinions about men who attacked women – that death was too good for them – but it would have to do.
(Her opinions on people who stood by gaping while men attacked women are unprintable.)
It was these very people who were causing her main problem. Her usual approach in these situations would be to – well, she had a variety of approaches, but they all involved using magic, and in front of all these witnesses, a display of that kind of power would be, to put it mildly, inadvisable.
She looked at Denny in a panic. ‘What do I do?’
Denny shrugged. ‘What does it matter? They’ll never believe it afterwards anyway. Isn’t that what you always say?’
‘There’s too many of them.’
A fundamental problem of the theory that people always just believe what they want to believe, and only ever see what they want to see, and then just generally rewrite events in their head afterwards, was that it tended not to work when a large group of people all saw the same thing. They still did it of course, and all in their own way. So that, what you ended up with was a large group of people all arguing about what they actually saw, but at least all agreeing that they saw something . And then selling their story to the papers, so that an even larger group of people could argue, sometimes on national television, about what a large group of people saw.
It’s much harder to convince yourself that it was just a weather balloon, when half a dozen other people saw the aliens playing the world’s largest synthesiser and are arguing about the tune.*
*[ The world has, in fact, been invaded by aliens seven times. Government conspiracies, ha! Governments are amateurs. It’s much bigger than that. ]
This was an exposure risk that was just too large to take. Humans en masse , are just not ready to know about “virtual reality”.
The men were almost to their van. One of them had split off and was opening the back. Tamar still hesitated.
Denny let out a snarl of impatience and ran forward to confront the men.
Tamar was wringing her hands in panic.