In World City (20 page)

“What do you mean – the whole of World City?” Miranda asked.

He hadn't wanted to say that. He didn't want to know about how things really were. It made him uncomfortable. There was something in there he didn't want to know about anymore.

“Nothing,” he said. “I didn't mean anything.”

And Miranda looked at him, curiously, but didn't press the question.

The boy moves a step closer. In the face of this genetic replica of himself, Dion feels his skin begin to crawl. He wants to explain the boy away, devalue him. “You're something that was made to get through security,” he says flatly.

“No, you're wrong,” the boy replies, confidently, “I special. I your twin.”

Dion looks back, shaking his head slowly. He wants the boy to vanish. He wants to be left to the impersonal comforts of his usual life.

The boy appraises him carefully, then says, “Either you stupid, or you scared.”

Dion looks at him stupidly.

“Okay, let's suppose you stupid. Let's suppose you think I come with just another deal to get around the patents. You think I got some fancy junk to make you rich people richer at half the price. You think I got something that some bitter creep got to sell after they fire him from Mondosys or Racal. You think my people've thought up some new perversion. You think I here with more of the same kind of shit you people like to lock yourselves up with.”

The boy begins to pace up and down the floor, then he turns on Dion, “Well you wrong, Mister. You very wrong. Because what I got for you is me, your twin, and you don't know a damn thing about what that means. That's ‘cause you stupid. That's ‘cause you sit in World City, locked up with all your fancy gear like prison was turned inside out. You only deal in what you know already. And that's what keeps you stupid, Mister. What I got for you is me. I got something new in your world – something that's going to turn you people upside down.”

In framing and rehanging Dion's picture of the island, it had been the bedroom window of her childhood that Miranda had put back in place. She had found the picture in a fairy tale chamber at the top of a tower; in other words, in what she had made of her old room in her father's house. The picture of the jungle-clad island was the view of the wildwood she had looked out on from there.

But the window was open now and Miranda Whitlam was gazing through it freely. In her pursuit of forever and ever, she had found her way into the Waste and the Waste was the wildwood, the same wildwood that had cast the moonlight shadows that had once so terrified her. Stepping into those shadows now, she was beginning to place herself entirely outside the anaesthetising material of World City.

Consciously, though, she worried about the children, like any good World Citizen would. Once, Dion had said to her, ‘What's going to happen to them? They must find out sometime. We're not going to be able to just walk away from it all at the end of ten years.' At the time, she'd had other things on her mind. But afterwards, his words kept coming back.

Dion was right. If the experiment worked, she was going to have to parade those children in front of review committees, the press, other investigators. As Dion had said, she was making freaks out of them: they would be singled out as something special and, much worse, something enviable. How could she prepare them for all that?

She and Dion were walking together through the crumbling streets of the Waste when her tightening knot of concern began to untangle, along with much else.

The day was clear and bright after a hard spring shower, and they were keeping to the remains of the pavements, away from the rutted, waterlogged street. Occasional strands of people meandered past, talking interminably about ways of influencing Our Lady of Luck. Miranda was beginning to like the feel of those people. They had a mediaeval air; folk in an extreme of poverty with nothing left for their spirit to feed on but the most abstruse and probably heretical of doctrines. She could imagine them as refugees in an older Europe, where they might be swallowed up for decades in the great forests, developing their own societies with no one knowing.

The image struck her with unexpected force and she said, “Dion, what are we worrying about the children for? They never belonged to the normal world anyway. They've already taken responsibility for their lives. They grew up years ago. They've been their own masters from the moment they walked away from their parents. They've been in charge since the first night they found some doorway to curl up and sleep in. They've been deciding their fate ever since they took their first tin of food from a corner store. They were deciding it when they latched on to you. Same as you latched on to that Leo of yours.”

Dion thought about this some moments. He had been aware that Miranda was changing, but he hadn't expected anything as careless as this. He found himself shocked by her sudden self-absolution of any responsibility for the children.

“They trust us, Miranda,” he said, with some severity. “I never trusted Leo. I just worked with him. We've done something to these kids that others are going to take notice of. Leo gave me a few challenges but he never actually changed me.”

“Didn't he change you though? He knew he was making something out of you that would put you outside the law forever. He changed you into a better criminal.”

“But I knew that. Those kids of ours don't know a damn thing about what they're in for.”

“For Christ's sake, Dion, they didn't know what they were in for when they decided to cut and run from their families. They've done family and they opted out of it – same as you. Maybe your leaving home was your only chance for a life of your own. Maybe it was their only chance. Anyway, they took the chance and now they've got a different life.

“And what guarantees does anybody have anyway?” she surged on. “We're always trying to make up ways of making the future better, making it more predictable, making it more like we imagine it ought to be. It's what the pension funds are doing for Christ's sake. It's what I'm depending on. It's why I thought we'd all come out of this okay. But it's all a lie. Like the lie that anyone could become a perfect person if only they had enough money to throw at the problem. Most of what you see on that neat little screen of yours, Dion, is about keeping everyone believing in the lie, showing them images of what they might become. They believe it all their lives and then they die.”

“So, what happens when you make people live forever?” Dion asked acidly. There was something peculiarly familiar about what she was saying and it was making him uncomfortable.

Miranda tasted the acid and looked at him with a mock-sour expression. “You're right, Dion. Maybe the promise of death is the only thing that can keep us from spending the whole of our lives in a dream. And the Ageing Initiative is putting out everything it's got and more to sustain that dream for ever and ever. They're getting the economics of it in place. Now all they have to do is fix people up so they can live up to what the economics can deliver. And I'm planning to be one of their greatest contributors.”

She stopped and turned to face Dion, standing in the middle of the shattered pavement where they had been walking, unmindful of the occasional knots of people passing slowly by, unmindful, Dion noticed, that she was standing in a particularly filthy puddle. She said, “But I'm not doing what I'm doing because I think it's all a lovely dream, Dion. I'm not doing it because I've swallowed the lie and think I'm going to get to live the perfect life without ever having to worry my pretty little head about dying. I never thought I was going to live forever. I thought I wasn't and it was that thought that drove me to do what I have, here, in the Waste, with those kids, who've never given death a thought, one way or the other.”

All the surface gloss her wealth sustained seemed to have left her. She looked bedraggled, destitute, utterly alone. “Dion,” she said, in a voice that was beginning to crack, “Death is obscene. It's horrible. It isn't some great challenge to be overcome, or anything grand like that. It's just nothing. It's completely nothing. And it makes nothing out of everything you might ever do in life. Because whatever you do it's always going to be there at the end. And that's it. Nothing. It's just filthy, horrible nothing. It needs to be stopped.”

She looked down into her reflection in the black water where she was still standing. “You once asked me why we're born perfect. I told you we weren't but you didn't believe me. Yes, I know I could have told you a load of stuff about how we're born as a new mix of genes with much of the damage eliminated so we don't look so bad to start off with. Or I could have said that the better integrated we start the longer it'll take for us to disintegrate. But that's not what you were talking about was it?”

Miranda had now had years to take in the faces of the children she had been offered and she had seen in them the same freshness and openness that was, even now, blowing through the Waste on the spring wind. She had also seen the hurt and the anger and the pain and the fear. But though that went deep, it was still an overlay. In the constrained cubicle of Dion's Place, she had watched their histories fall away. They relaxed and looked at her with wondering, insolent curiosity. She was touched by this and had used her status back in World City to get an entry into a hospital birth unit. ‘Why are we born perfect?' Dion had asked her and she had looked at the babies, thinking of his words. And afterwards, she had gone back to her penthouse in Basel to cry her heart out without knowing why.

“You're talking about the way we are, aren't you,” Miranda went on. Then, less certainly, as if struggling with a new language, “You're talking about the way we get experienced. I don't know how that can be perfect, but I know what you mean. Perhaps, it's the experience itself. Perhaps perfection is something we grant others.”

Dion found the clarity in the air – washed clean as it had been by the sharp, hard shower, and blown by the cold spring wind – suddenly dangerous. Standing in the derelict street, struggling with her words as if trying to remember a poem or lines in a play, Miranda appeared to him unbearably beautiful. He felt as if he was about to dissolve into the clear light that was now shining on the rain-glazed street. Somehow he needed to re-establish some distance.

“If you know we're born perfect, what is it you're trying to improve on?” he asked harshly.

“I'm not trying to improve on anything,” Miranda came back, the struggle in her voice giving way to desperation. “I'm trying to prevent, preserve, hold back. What I let loose in those children – it's like a restraint on the clock hands. That's all. I'm not putting in something that should have been there already. I'm trying to change the fact that they're born into a world that works to destroy them. Yes, they are born perfect and from then on they're under constant attack. Everything works to damage and destroy them: bacteria, viruses, toxins, cosmic rays, radiation, oxidants, other people. All I'm trying to do is give our children some extra protection; protection against what's trying to kill them right from the start.”

She hesitated, the muscles of her face working. Then she cried out, “Listen Dion, the only time ever I didn't believe that it all ended in death was when you showed me the pool on your island and I floated in the water looking up into the trees and the sky. It all dropped away then. I didn't believe that death was all there was. I felt like I could live forever and ever and ever.”

She began weeping bitterly and Dion felt a terrible wave of loss sweep over him. His head swam and the broken pavement tipped, but he tensed himself and stepped forward to catch Miranda before, as it seemed to him, she crumpled in a heap. She howled into his shoulder and he held onto her, a distraught child crying in his arms.

After a while, her sobs stilled and she pulled away from him, sniffing. She said, “Oh, I don't know. I don't really know what's going to happen to the children. I've no idea.” She gave herself a shake, adjusted her coat, and stepped out of the puddle they had been standing in together.

*

The kids hit adolescence. The diffuse, romantic eroticism of childhood was becoming more focused, more aggressive, more about what was happening between their legs. The older ones compared pubic hair lengths. The younger ones overheard a lot of stuff which they put together rather haphazardly, like anyone basing their ideas on other people's experience. They all masturbated furiously, even the younger ones who'd picked up on the sign language of adolescent sex and hoped that something might happen if they made the right moves.

They would never have dreamed of trying anything on with Miranda, but she and Dion couldn't help but pick up the energy that was around. Miranda would find herself getting charged looks and Dion would note the hint of squaring-up in the older ones when they faced him.

“You know, Mayer really fancies you,” Dion said.

“Of course he does,” Miranda replied carelessly, but found herself colouring. She giggled and added, “He's the strong, silent type, full of hidden passion. Dion, they all fancy me. What am I going to do with them? They're coming on like a bunch of young Oedipuses. They probably want to kill you, you know.”

“They're just kids.”

“Exactly.”

They laughed at the roles that had been thrust on them, and relaxed into their parts without any particular tension. Miranda asked Dion if he'd like to go and have dinner with her, out in World City, and he agreed, curious to see where she liked going.

Where Dion liked going was the kind of businessman's restaurant that combined simplicity with quality, functionality with comfort, and which preferably had a certain amount of soundproofing between the tables. In the course of expanding his interests, he was spending increasing time in such places. He liked the invisibility they cultivated, the feel of everyone minding their own business. He never bothered to spend much money; the food was simply a prop, part of the stage set. What mattered were the negotiations.

Miranda took him to a tower in Dusseldorf, on top of which was an expanse of glass-walled, palm-filled space. Scattered around its perimeter were some tables, as far apart as planets. The master introduced himself personally and there was a waiter for each table. Their own personal minion pulled out for Miranda a high, deeply-padded chair from beneath the dark-grained, carefully-polished, hardwood table. He pushed the chair in behind her, as she and Dion sat down together. From somewhere deep in the foliage came the sounds of running water and a lone guitar, just audible in the vast space.

Miranda eyed Dion in their individual pool of light. She felt some apprehension. Had she overstepped the mark? Had she taken him so far out of his usual haunts he would be offended by the contrast? But he seemed relaxed.

“You'd better order,” Dion said, eyeing the menu. “I don't know what half this means.”

“Do you like this place?” Miranda asked, reassured by his easy admission of ignorance. “It's not over the top is it?”

Dion shook his head, smiling. Liking or disliking the place was not an issue. What mattered was that he find out how it worked. After he'd mastered the use of it, then he'd decide whether he liked the place and the experience it had to offer.

“Reminds me of Dion's Place,” he said, “only the view's better.”

“That's the difference between World City and the Waste,” Miranda replied more hastily than she had intended. “In World City you can see.” She stared out over the vast filigree of lights stretching away into the darkness. The sight made her feel wistful.

Dion glanced out on the light-filled space and said lightly, “You can look, but you can't touch.”

Miranda looked across at him. Had that been addressed to her? But his attention seemed elsewhere – back in the spaces of the restaurant – taking it all in.