Daylight on Iron Mountain (14 page)

He chose the sofa. A minute later the screen lit up and Mary’s smiling face beamed down at him.

‘Hi, sweetheart. How’re things going? They treating you well?’

He gestured to the suite that was all about him. ‘It’s the lap of luxury. You’d love it. And the job…’

‘What do they want you to do?’

‘To train people up…’

Mary looked perplexed. ‘Train them up? But you don’t know anything about biotech, or training, come to that.’

‘They’ve got a datscape.’

‘Ah…’

He saw how her face clouded momentarily. It wasn’t something they had talked about very often – his past life – and neither was comfortable with it. But she recovered quickly. The smile returned. ‘Do you think you’re up to it? From what you said… it all sounded very demanding. Physically, that is.’

And mentally
, he thought. Just melding the two, intellect and body, that was the trick. Not to let either side of the brain dominate the other.

Only what if he had lost that ability? What if he could no longer do it?

Then no one else could. Tsao Ch’un had ensured they were all killed during the Crash.

Jake smiled. It felt suddenly like he was the last of a species that was just about to become extinct. And GenSyn wanted to save him, in effect to
clone
him.

‘They want me to stay here a day or two,’ he went on. ‘Get a feel of things. Meet a few more people.’

‘They seem very keen.’

‘Oh, they are.’

And probably monitoring this
.

‘They’re talking ten times my current salary, Mary. If I want it.’

‘And do you?’

Jake didn’t answer, just gave the slightest shrug. ‘Look… I’ll speak to you when I’m back. When I’ve had a chance to mull things over.’

Mary looked a little disappointed, but all she said was. ‘Okay. Love you.’

‘Love you too. And give my love to the gang. Tom ’specially.’

‘I will…’

The screen blanked.

Jake lay back, closing his eyes. He could still hear the rain falling, smell the clear, refreshing scents of an English garden.

Maybe they thought his hesitancy a bargaining tool – just a means of jacking up his salary. Only it wasn’t. He was actually afraid. Afraid lest he’d lost it totally. Because it was the one thing in his life he had done well. Better, in fact, than anyone else in the world.

To web-dance again… He felt a shiver run through him at the thought. To be inside there once again, his senses razor sharp…

How could he
not
try? How could he possibly hesitate? And yet he did. Because to fail at this was to be condemned to a life lived at the lower level. Quite literally.

Jake stood, then paced the room, trying to see some clear way out of this. Only there was no clear answer.

Maybe one would come to him. Maybe he’d find the courage from somewhere to make the attempt. Only he doubted it. He knew himself too well.

They threw a dinner for him that evening, with thirty guests, most of them senior executives, but one or two of them potential colleagues, people he would probably be working with…
if
he took the job.

He liked them a lot. Liked the company, that feeling of being part of the future again, because there was no doubting it – GenSyn was still cutting-edge. By comparison, the job he’d been doing was sedentary, dull.

Backwater
.

Only the thing was he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t voice his doubts. All he could do was go along with things, let them believe he was thoroughly seduced by it all.

Which, in a sense, he was.

Neither of the Ebert brothers had shown their faces yet. Gustav was on Mars, so there was no likelihood that
he’d
be making an appearance, but Wolfgang was in Bremen, so Jake was a little surprised – bearing everything else in mind – that he’d not yet met him.

And then there was Alison.

Alison still worked for GenSyn. He’d actually checked up on that. She was Head of Evaluation, and had been for the past twenty-five years, since they met before the Collapse. Unmarried still. Childless.

Again he was surprised that he hadn’t seen her, for she surely must have known he was coming. From all accounts, everything to do with GenSyn’s operation went through her office.

Or was her absence deliberate?

As the last dinner guests departed, sometime shortly after two, she finally arrived.

‘Hi, Jake…’

‘Hi…’

Alison was a lot older than he’d imagined her. She had put on weight, and her blonde hair, which had previously been long and straight, was much shorter now, curlier, and very obviously dyed. She wore a dark blue one-piece with a jacket, on which was appended a nametag. It looked like she had just come from a conference of some kind.

‘I meant to be here earlier,’ she said, coming across and offering her hand, ‘but I got delayed.’

Her hand was small and slim and just a little cold. Just as he remembered it.

He looked up, meeting her pale blue eyes. ‘It’s nice to see you again.’

‘It’s nice to see you…’

Jake let her hand go. She was smiling now.

‘What is it?’

‘Just that… well… it’s
you
… I’d never have mistaken you. You’ve put on weight, and the hair…’ She smiled again. ‘I’m glad you survived, though. An awful lot didn’t.’

‘I know.’

She took a breath, then, very businesslike, said, ‘I’ll be your guide tomorrow. Take you round and show you things.’

‘There’s more to see?’

‘You’ve not seen a tenth of it. And besides, I want to talk to you. I know you have your doubts…’

‘You do?’ He was surprised. Had they been analysing tapes or something?

‘I know you, Jake. You always had doubts. At first. When you took the job at Hinton…’ She shrugged. ‘We’ll talk it through tomorrow. Right now I reckon you need some sleep.’

‘I do.’

‘I like your wife, by the way.’

It was unexpected. ‘Oh? Which one?’

‘Mary. You were married to her sister, weren’t you?’

He nodded. Then, quietly, ‘Kate died, you know. They killed her.’

Alison nodded sadly. ‘I know.’

Jake blew out a breath. ‘Well then…’

The words seemed to galvanize her. ‘Right. I’ll leave you now. The steward will see you back to your rooms. And I’ll see you in the morning. Ten, shall we say?’

‘Ten sounds good. Sounds
civilized
.’

She smiled again. ‘Then ten it is.’

Jake slept like the proverbial log and woke to find the steward in the room with him, bearing a full cooked English breakfast on a silver tray, complete with coffee and a chilled glass of freshly squeezed orange.

Alison’s doing
, he thought, remembering how she’d used to treat him, at College, back when they were students.
She remembered
.

It was a nice touch – the first of many that day.

She was there at ten precisely, and he was waiting for her, showered and changed and ready for the off.

‘First off I’ll take you to see “the Farm”,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a circus, but then it is our showcase. This is where we bring all the big clients. We give them the tour. Show them what’s possible.’

The Farm was even more impressive than he imagined. It was situated in a separate stack, into which they entered via a ‘seal’, a massive portal, half airlock, half safe door. There were only six such entrances to the whole of the stack, all of which were operated under the strictest guidelines. Guidelines
drawn up by Tsao Ch’un himself. If anything escaped, the whole damn thing would be shut down, the special edict granted to GenSyn for this purpose revoked and their creatures destroyed.

It was like entering a high-security prison. There were masked guards everywhere, and, high up on the walls – which Alison pointed out to him – the jets through which the sterilizing gases would be pumped into the facility, should it ever prove necessary.

‘It was a lot smaller when I first came here,’ she said, almost wistfully. ‘Just a single deck, that’s all we had. And less than a hundred different creatures. Now this is one of four such facilities, all of which take up a whole stack. And we number the creatures we produce in the tens of thousands.’

The first section they looked at was named simply ‘Extinct’, the word striking Jake as being as ironic as you could possibly be, considering that Tsao Ch’un, if he had his way, would make the whole of nature extinct.

‘This is our most popular range,’ Alison explained, as they stood there, staring through a one-way mirror at the most famous extinct bird of them all, the Dodo. ‘It’s mainly creatures who’ve become extinct before the last hundred years. Totemic creatures that they can impress their friends with.’

‘The rich, you mean?’

She nodded. ‘And you have to be very rich indeed to afford one of these, because it’s not only the cost of purchasing the animal, you have to sign on for the aftercare service. And then there’s the construction and maintenance of the creature’s environment.’

She looked to Jake and smiled. ‘Well, we can’t have them running around loose, can we? So whoever buys them has to guarantee to keep them isolated. We have a “look but don’t touch policy”. If they break the agreement then we take the creature back. And no refunds.’

Jake nodded. The Dodo looked real. It didn’t look like a manufactured creature. But then, why should it? It was, to all intents and purposes, the real thing. Only it couldn’t breed. None of these creatures could. That was part of the deal. Once it died it was dead and you had to buy another one. If you had that kind of money.

There were mammoths here, too, and sabre-toothed tigers – these last the most expensive item in the section. Jake asked what expensive was in round figures, but Alison wasn’t going to say.

‘Not unless you join us,’ she said, smiling. ‘Then you get to know everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Well, almost everything. You’d be senior management, Jake. A decision-maker. We’d put you on the board, if you wanted.’

He wasn’t sure he did, but it was nice of them to offer.

‘What’s next?’ he asked, as they stepped through into the connecting corridor – a small airlock in itself – and waited for the door behind them to be sealed.

‘My personal least-favourite. Creepy crawlies.’

‘Insects?’

‘And other things. Quite inventive, some of them, as you’ll see.’

The door ahead hissed open and they stepped through. Into a massive hall, filled with glass cases.

‘Each one is a tiny environment,’ Alison explained as they walked up to the nearest of them. ‘Most contain only a single species, but others… they’re complex little ecosystems. Some contain over a hundred different types of insect.’

Jake crouched down, resting his fingertips against the glass of the case. It was like an exhibit in a zoo; a cross section through the earth, showing the insects’ tunnels and nests. As he watched, something scuttled away into the dark of the interior – something winged and clawed and black as night itself.

‘Are these all taken from nature?’

‘Some are. But we like to customize, for our richer patrons. We can have their company logos imprinted on the tiny creatures. Built into them, if you like. On their wings, for instance. And we can play about with the colour of them or the shape. Truth is, there’s little we
can’t
do.’

‘But that “little” worries the Eberts, right? They want to be able to do it all, yeah? That’s why I’m here, right?’

She stared at him, surprised that he’d worked it out so quickly.

‘Partly.’

‘One question,’ he said, straightening up, then turning to look at her. ‘What exactly are you going to use the datscape for?’

She looked down, the gesture ancient in his memory. People didn’t change. Not in their essentials, anyway.

Alison looked up, meeting his eyes again. ‘Much of our work here – the
research work, that is – is done at a microbiological level, using electron microscopes and the very finest gauge waldoes.’ She smiled. ‘To put it crudely, Jake, we play about with proteins. Only… what we want to do – and we’re not even sure yet that it’ll work – is to duplicate what happens at the nanotechnological level on a much larger scale within the datscape, so that we can, quite literally, walk around it and through it and view it from every possible angle.’

Jake smiled. ‘I like that. It’s a good idea. Who thought of that?’

‘Gustav, of course. He bought the datscape at auction. There are only four of them left. The rest were all destroyed.’

‘Ah…’

‘Oh… it’ll be a lot more complex than the original datscape, if Gustav has his way. He wants to replicate nature in there.’

‘And his brother?’

She smiled. ‘Wolfgang only worries about the cost, the likely profit.’

‘Will I get to meet them?’

‘If you join us, yes.’

‘I see… And my role will be what? To train people up? I know that… But what else?’

‘To be an enabler. And a consultant and… well, whatever else takes your fancy.’

‘Carte blanche…?’

‘Not entirely. But pretty free. Providing you’re on call all of the time.’

‘They’re very demanding, then, your bosses?’

‘Very. But then that’s the challenge.’

He hesitated, then asked what had been nagging him, at the back of his mind. ‘Did you approach Lahm?’

‘No. Lahm came to us.’

‘And before that?’

‘I didn’t even know you still existed. It was a very pleasant surprise, Jake.’

Jake looked at her briefly. She seemed to mean that. There was certainly a warmth there in her eyes.

‘And your bosses… what do they want?’

‘They want things up and running. So the sooner I sign you the better.’

‘Ah…’ He changed tack. ‘Can I ask you something. Something personal, I mean…’

She shrugged. ‘If you must.’

‘Why did you never marry?’

‘I did.’

‘But I thought…’

She smiled. Faintly amused by his query, it seemed. ‘You’ve been looking me up, haven’t you?’

He nodded. ‘So what happened?’

‘He died.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I…’

Alison looked down, fragile suddenly, more like the Alison he’d known, long ago. ‘He was on a craft that got shot down. Terrorists. Not surprising, really, the places he went.’