The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

The people around the fire all looked at her sadly and nodded sagely. She stared at their human faces, painted by the firelight, and thought how those they loved and served would eventually sell them into perpetual misery. She wanted to tell them to run away. What were they going to say of themselves when their souls were marched through Hell’s Gate and their bodies were buried no doubt with flowers and music and fine ceremony? Were they going to say, ‘So, I’ve failed. Such and such a lady or gentleman no longer loves me, and has laid me by’? Taryn understood that her existence was only of use or not of use to her society. She was a consumer contributing to economic growth, which was an unquestioned good. To exist, she must spend her life spending. But these people were going to be sold to buy more time for time-rich, heartless people. They were going to be literally damned by association, never mind the original state of their souls. Heaven would not intervene as it did in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, because, for a start, none of these people was a countess. They were the numberless others of history, counted only by the Tithe. They were marks in a ledger. Taryn wanted to say, ‘I’m a consumer and a client, and you’re property. We have value, but it has nothing to do with who we are.’ But she didn’t say that. Because what good would it do when a true understanding of what was in store for them couldn’t save them from any of it?