Evensong

“Scholars who know more and more about less and less. And religious scholars,” she hissed, “were put on Earth by God for me to offend them. Real scholars are scholars of a body of knowledge. You’re scholars of a body of unproven and unprovable belief. You belong in the Dark Ages. What conversations you must have in your own heads!” (More uproar.)

“You’re not an Archbishop, you’re an Archbusiness woman!”

“And,” someone else shouted, “an atheist!”

“I’m not an atheist. But I won’t buy what you’re selling. I want something better.”

“Something better? You want God in your own image?”

“I want us in God’s image. Does God want us ignorant and superstitious?”

“How dare you presume to say what God should want us to be!”

“It’s what your priests have been doing for generations, and claiming it’s God speaking through you. Our God’s outgrown that. Evolved, perhaps. And if your God hasn’t, then I and my Church have the right not to believe in him. Or her. Or it.”

“Do you even believe in the New Anglicans’ God?”

“Not just believe. Approve.”

There was more of this; a lot more. After it had finished, the New Anglicans’ ratings soared. The rest was history. In the following three years she implemented most of the Room For God projects, and the New Anglicans became the world’s fastest-growing major Church.

Anwar sat in his living room for some time after the recording finished, repeating it to himself while the shadows lengthened around him. He knew it word for word. And he knew that inside it was something he needed. Something which would help him understand her, and this mission. He couldn’t see it yet, but he would if he reflected on it carefully. That was how he liked to work: carefully, and reflectively.

He was born an American citizen. His pre-Consultancy name was Rashad Khan. His family were third-generation Pakistani immigrants, living in Bay Ridge, New York. His parents were both successful lawyers. He spent a comfortable childhood in a large nineteenth-century brownstone house on Ridge Boulevard. He had brothers and sisters with whom he exchanged normal affection. His family were not particularly religious, and neither was he.

His parents feared he might be mildly autistic. He wasn’t, but he had some of the outward signs: a certain social awkwardness, and a liking for routine, for having everything in its fixed place, tidy and orderly. And he liked to see inside things—how they worked, what they were really like under the surface.

He probably saw more of the UN Headquarters Building in New York then, when he lived not far from it, than he did when he became a Consultant. He’d often look at it from across the East River, or at closer quarters from East 42nd or East 48th Street. It was an archetypal mid-twentieth-century building: clean and bright and optimistic when built, but now tastes had changed and made it ugly. Levin, when they met several years later, would never tire of telling Anwar about

UNHQ’s ugliness, and what it signified. “Architecture,” he >would say, “was once described as frozen music. It is. But it’s also frozen hope.”

Frozen hope. Anwar considered himself, and considered her. He knew which one the phrase fitted. And that’s what this mission’s about.

He always preferred UNEX to the old UN. UNEX had a closeness of form and function: its outside accurately reflected its inside. It was an engineer’s construction, designed for results rather than idealism. The old UN was the opposite, a philosopher’s construction. Its membership was a microcosm of the entire world’s grudges and prejudices and conflicts. Its

Charters and Declarations were impossible even before the ink had dried on them. UNEX’s aims were less ambitious but more achievable. Something like Make Things Better, Or At Least Less Bad. It didn’t compress easily into a slogan like Marek’s Justify Nothing, but it meant as much to Anwar as, presumably, Marek’s meant to Marek.

So, despite the fact that the old UN was practically in his backyard, he joined UNEX. By that time Rafiq was Controller-General, and the difference between the two parts of the UN was becoming clear. He felt he’d chosen correctly. He had a hope, then, that UNEX really could make things better—a hope which had now become frozen in him. He’d carried on doing the specialised work for which he was frighteningly well qualified, but these days he did it automatically. Without pride. Without passion or mission or meaning.

As the shadows continued to lengthen around him, he knew he’d at last found what he’d been looking for. It concerned her. She’s always out there. Always at the sharp end, putting herself up to be judged, fighting her case. Often viciously, but always openly.

And it concerned him, too. He was her opposite: standing apart, coming out of his comfort zone to make simple in/out strikes (for which he was guaranteed success, against out-matched opponents), and then going back.