In World City (21 page)

Dion was relaxing. He found his mind unusually clear, free of its usual concerns about his business, about the kids, about Miranda and what direction she might be taking. He found himself suddenly curious about her. He'd never directly asked her what actually went on in her life

He asked, “What are they like? – The people you work with.”

“The people I work with,” Miranda mused, surprised and rather pleased he was taking this interest in her. “It's not like your set-up, Dion. I get the feeling you're all in it together, you and your company men. You just happen to be the one who's the best at it. So they give you their allegiance. My place doesn't work like that. I might be the most capable but I'm not the most experienced. That makes for a lot of politics and petty jealousies. You know, people trying to get position by filling in for my gaps. And science isn't like business. In business you're valued by the deals you make – or the product – or the profit. People argue that it's the same in research, but only the crudest work gets done like that – research that's little different from product testing. In real science there are no limits. You handle a problem and that generates ten new problems. People have to get selective about what they work on, and the more a line of investigation develops the more selective they have to get. What happens then is that there's a lot of ego and talking-up. So a lot of the time I find myself having to take care of people's need to feel important rather than what they're actually doing.”

Dion was looking around again, feeling mildly irritated. The restaurant they were in felt too high; there was too much space in it; the lights below stretched too far away into the distance. He turned back to Miranda, determined to recover himself. “But what are the people you work with like?” he persisted. “What would I make of them? Are they black, white, tall, thin, happy, sad? Who are they? What are their names? How do you get on with them? Come on, you know the people I work with but I don't know anything about your place. How many are there?”

Miranda was mildly shocked. She wasn't used to Dion pressing his questions. Neither was she used to talking so personally. She decided to give it a try though. “There were fifty-four at the beginning of the month. I don't know how many there are today. I know even less about that than I usually do, with all the time I'm spending with you. We have a high turnover: students doing vacation work experience; and strolling transients – you know, knowledge nomads who like to travel around on the strength of a particular skill – people like that. Those ones I don't usually get to know personally. They come and go and it's not worth the time or effort.

“I can tell you about the other end, though – the ones I sometimes feel I know too well. At the top, there's William Burger – my deputy. He's just over fifty, married, wants my job. I had a thing with him once when I was a bit younger. He was a contender for the directorship when the last director died. The place lost its funding then and I had more money to put up than William, so I got the job. I suppose you could say I bought my way in. Things have always been a bit complicated with William. The trouble is, he's good and he's got fifteen more years' experience than I have. I had to appoint him deputy director. I pay him twice what he'd be getting in industry and four times what he would get in the universities. He makes out this suits him but I still think he wants my job. Then I've got Morton Schulman as technical director. Morton's fine. He's a big, beardy, bear of a man. He looks like he'd tear you apart if he felt like it, but of course he's gentle as a lamb. He's absolutely reliable and I pay him a fortune, too. Then I've got my research director, Sylvie Lacombe. Sylvie's into her career so I know exactly where I stand with her – you know, degree at Toulouse, doctoral thesis at one of the INSERM centres, post-doc fellowships in the States, Wellcome fellowships in the UK. No, sorry, you probably don't know, but her track's pretty well mapped out. She'll probably spend another three years with me, then she'll go for a professorship somewhere prestigious or she might just jump into industry. She's not sure yet. We talk about it over lunch or dinner – it's all out in the open what she wants. Beyond those three there are just managers and team leaders who I know to say hi to and use first names at meetings with, but mostly they deal with Burger, Schulman and Lacombe, same as I do. I don't know. I'm leaving more and more of it up to them. And why not? I know them well enough to be pretty sure what they're going to think and do. Maybe all I'm interested in now is what's going to happen to the kids. The rest of it is predictable.”

“This guy, Burger,” Dion broke in. “You said you had a thing with him. How did it end?”

There was concern rather than curiosity in Dion's question so rather than tell him to mind his own business, Miranda said, “He got too serious – wanted to leave his wife for me. I didn't want that and that's what I told him. I wasn't too sure how much I wanted him, anyway. I suppose I was never too sure how much he wanted me. I thought maybe he was just thinking of the possibilities I might offer him – rich man's daughter, that kind of thing.”

“This guy's interested in possibilities, yet he's stayed on as deputy director for ten years, working for someone who's fifteen years younger?” Dion urged. “What's going on?”

“I told you, I pay him a fortune. I daresay he's stashing it all away somewhere. He doesn't exactly live extravagantly. My guess is he's intending to open a place of his own. By the time he does that, I'll be ready to do without him.”

“Is there enough room for two of you in the work you're doing?”

“Absolutely, especially now the Ageing Initiative's getting so geared up. And he's entirely focused on animal work. That was part of the deal when he agreed to stay on as deputy director – that I let him keep that. So William could take off anytime, especially given the level he prefers to work at.”

“What level's that? Do you mean the animal work?”

“There's more to it than that. William's rather conventional. He doesn't believe in interventions at the DNA level. He'll go along with what I want at the institute, but what he's really looking for are the secondary effects we set in motion when we work on DNA in our experimental animals. He believes that if those can be identified we can work out longevity strategies every bit as effective as anything that derives from changes in DNA itself but which get around the ethical problems. I don't agree with him. If you want to make a change then you go ahead and make it, and you make it at as deep a level as you can. Everything else is cosmetic. William goes quiet when I talk in those terms. I think he might be getting religious in his old age. He certainly doesn't give me the eye anymore.”

“What will he say when you tell him what you've been doing with me and the kids?”

“I suspect that'll be the time when he says thank you and goodnight. He'll make some speech about our ethical principles being irrevocably at odds and march off in righteousness with all the money I've paid him.”

“What does he make of this Ageing Initiative?”

“He thinks it's great. He thinks pension fund managers are his kind of people. He's the one who deals with them, mostly.”

“Miranda, when you come out with what you've done, aren't there going to be a lot of other people who feel the same way as this William Burger? How are you going to handle them?”

“I don't see any problem. I'll be presenting a fait accompli. I've told you before, the world and the Ageing Initiative are going to be so hungry for what I've got the ethics'll go out the window.”

“But won't William Burger do what you say he does – take what you've made happen in our kids and make it work without the DNA interventions?”

“He'd need two to three years from the time I announce the findings. Nobody's going to wait that long when I can offer something that works immediately. Come on, Dion, what's up? What's worrying you?”

“But William Burger's going to be tracking the project isn't he?”

“No, it's between me and Sylvie and even Sylvie doesn't know the half of it. William doesn't get a look at this one at all, beyond the knowledge that I've got groundwork going on with some local children – just looking at basic ageing processes. That's about all Sylvie knows too, except that she's monitoring the analyses and data collection. They both think there's this control group of kids who are simply being observed – nothing actually done to them – all ethical and above board – just looking at the way they get older. What I do is mix in the samples from our kids with those from the control group. I'm the only one who knows there are really two groups in there.”

“You're too confident, Miranda,” Dion said.

She shrugged and smiled.

Too confident, Dion thought.

Later, after he'd told her he'd prefer to stick around Dusseldorf for a few days, Dion watched Miranda's white Mercedes disappear down the canyons of steel and glass. He thought she looked vulnerable.

William Burger fucked Sylvie Lacombe with deliberate ferocity. This gave him some satisfaction. For a start – as he saw it – Sylvie, vain to the last, mistook his fury for passion. Further, she sustained her self-deception by never looking him in the face when they had sex. Instead, she liked to look at herself in the mirror – her face – the positions she adopted. William felt nothing for her, apart from mild distaste. He did, however, feel something for the images that crowded his mind while he was on the job. Mostly hate: his wife, cold paragon of propriety, not much good for anything except keeping things clean; but mainly it was Miranda Whitlam he thought of.

“What are you thinking of, William?” Sylvie asked the ceiling. “You are so withdrawn after we have made love.”

He wished they both smoked. Then they wouldn't have to talk to cover the space between them. Usually she told him how wonderful he had been, so he was disturbed by this personal note. Presumably she wanted him to say it was her he was thinking of, so he replied with an honesty he hoped would be brutal, “Whitlam.”

Sylvie's self-regard was entirely unshaken. She laughed and said easily, “She intrudes in everything.”

That much was true, William reflected. She was even trying to intrude in the very stuff of life. He was still mystified by how unconscious it was with her; not so much a part of any deliberate programme as a reflex or appetite – a need for air or water. She seemed possessed by an unrecognised assumption that the world was there for her to do with what she wanted. Her continual interference did no more than confirm that. But so strong was her hunger she had pushed back the boundaries of her interventions so far that she had finally hit on DNA, the stuff of life.

William identified with the stuff of life. He felt his own vitality beating against every constraint that had ever been imposed on him: his unremittingly middleclass upbringing, his competitive education, his conventional marriage, his employment in somebody else's institute. When he had first seen Miranda Whitlam on that primitive island where her father had holed up, he had recognised immediately someone who was and would be entirely free of such constraints and he had clutched at her like a straw. Sometime after, she had allowed herself to be grasped but had then slipped his grip, moving instinctively away from the dead weight of limitation he knew he carried, then turning on him and laying another weight of constraint with the outrageous salary she offered. Thus he became another piece of the world to be worked by her. He resented this like hell. So, when Sylvie Lacombe came and told him she had found out Miranda Whitlam was arranging for the construction of human-specific viral vectors, his resentment found a cause to focus on. Miranda Whitlam was aiming to step beyond the bounds of the acceptable and she knew it. He knew she knew it because she entirely omitted to say anything about it to William Burger, her deputy director.

Sylvie shifted closer to him. “She is not here, William. She is not here. She has no idea that we are here. Her thoughts are not on us.”

William felt her hand move up the inside of his thigh. He clenched his teeth as she started to massage his limp, spent penis. “She's not here, William,” Sylvie whispered teasingly. She kept on rubbing him and he lay there waiting for her to lose interest.

“William,” – still grinding her palm into his genitals, “something happened on Friday. I got significant discrimination on three of her five radical damage markers.”

“What?” Burger bellowed, reflexively trying to roll over and get above her. He flopped back, however, as giggling Sylvie tightened her grip, threatening to dismember him if he tried any dramatics. “Three out of five?” he questioned, more controlled. “What's the breakdown?”

Sylvie relaxed her grip and in a single movement was straddling him, still keeping up the massage, but with abrasive downthrusts of her crotch. Burger winced.

“Twelve and twelve,” Sylvie murmured, each number being accompanied by a more forceful thrust. “Twelve and twelve,” she repeated. “Twelve and twelve.”

Easing up on the force, she made her movements more sensual, her voice softening into a sing-song moan. “Twelve and twelve. Our Miranda has two groups there, William: good boys and bad boys. Good boys going through puberty just like she said on the ethics application. Bad boys going through puberty too, but they've had something done to them, William. They've been interfered with, William. They've had something injected into them. That wasn't in what the ethics would allow. That wasn't in the guardians' checklist. Bad boys out there, William, with no one to say ‘no' when the needle goes in. Bad boys with no one to look after them. Where does she go, William? Where does she go when she says she's visiting her little group of twenty-four children? She's gone for days, William. Where does she go? Twelve and twelve. Who are the twelve bad boys, William?”

William Burger began to catch fire. Miranda Whitlam was delivered unto him. Here was the proof he had been waiting for ever since Sylvie Lacombe had come to offload her conscience onto him. She had wanted no responsibility for her knowledge of those human-specific vectors – she was too much into her career to want to risk being associated with a scandal. She had come to William and made it his responsibility and he had been only too willing to shoulder the load. He rose bodily, tipping Sylvie off him and onto her back. She pretended to struggle the better to fire him up still more. Then, when he had her properly pinned down, she started fighting in earnest. This was the way it went when they became most excited. If William had thought, he might have concluded that since she came back for more she liked it that way. But he was too taken up with fury to give a damn what she felt. He thrust into her with all the force he could concentrate into his normally sedentary pelvis. Sylvie screamed and he felt the constraints loosen. Thoughts dimmed. Control went. When he came and whether she came he had no idea but, somehow, it was suddenly all over and they were lying apart, drenched in sweat, breathing hard.

After a while, Sylvie said, “What do want me to do, William?”

“How much does she know?” Burger grunted.

“I've held back the last six months' data. There was a trend just beginning. I told her we needed to do the assays in six month batches to optimise quality control.”

“Make the trend disappear. Don't let her see even a hint of significance until I say.”

“What will you do?”

“What I want, Sylvie dear, is for us to find out exactly how it works and work out how to mimic that in a way that does not involve screwing around at the DNA level. When we have that ready to run, you start giving her figures that make the trend come back. That gets her excited and we let that excitement build till she believes she's about to take over the whole Ageing Initiative.”

Sylvie laughed. “You hate her so much, William. Do you still want the directorship?”

Burger didn't answer. It would serve no purpose to tell Sylvie that the directorship was a secondary concern now. What William Burger wanted was to break into that unquestioning operator attitude that pervaded every cell of Miranda Whitlam's wretchedly beautiful body. He wanted her to feel that attitude of hers for the first time just as it was about to disintegrate. Simply, he wanted to see her suffer.

Sylvie stretched with cat-like complacency. She eased herself up and looked down on William Burger. What did she care? She would be into another job within two or three years with her passion for what the man had to offer burned out. At present, he suited her perfectly; absolutely no threat of involvement and excitingly brutal in his sex. She adored the inarticulate, impersonal fury that could come over him when they were in bed together. Quite what he got out of it she wasn't sure: a different kind of release presumably. As for the information she brought him, his intentions were entirely clear. More than that, he paid her a substantial bonus out of his own pocket. William suited her. She went to take a shower.

With Sylvie out of the room, William Burger managed to smile for the first time in the twelve hours they had been together. And he was still thinking of Miranda Whitlam. She had once asked him, ‘Why are you so interested in longevity research, William?' He had said something conventional, like, ‘Because it's an area with the greatest potential,' or, ‘Because it's the last great frontier of investigation.' But if he had been honest with himself, he would have said, ‘Because I need more time.'

He understood well enough now his need for more time. The need grew with every passing year and its reinforcement of the limits of his existence. He needed those limits pushing back and one way of doing that was to acquire a controlling position in longevity research. He thought he'd got it when Prof Joe died but Whitlam had stepped in with her absurd wealth. Still, he had guessed even then that if he gave her enough rope she would eventually hang herself on some point of ethical practice that her pride – or whatever the hell it was about her – would lead her to overlook. She had never fully taken on board what a sensitive area they were working in. When Prof Joe died, Miranda Whitlam had been left with no constraints. William had seen this at the time and had decided constraint would be one gap he would not fill for her.

As for the rest, he would continue his animal work and use the knowledge thus gained to develop strategies for use in humans that did not impinge on their precious genetic material. It was still a dangerous approach; he would have to tone down how much had been gleaned from the animal studies. But that was a minor consideration compared with what might be gained. William had made no secret of the fact that this was his chosen strategy. He had, in fact, used it as a platform from which to launch his bid for the directorship. But Whitlam's wealth had shouted loudest. And she had no time for such niceties as the rest of humanity's ethical scruples. ‘William, when they see life stretching before them, perhaps forever, they won't give a damn about their precious genetic identities.'

But William Burger had been with the Ageing Initiative managers and he knew for a fact that, despite their soaring enthusiasms, they did give a damn. And, when the time came, as it surely would, and they started to waver, he would be there with an effective alternative and he would be thundering out into every media ear fire and brimstone for anyone who so much as touched the sacred genome.

“I have to go now,” Sylvie said, coming out of the shower. She didn't really, but she'd had what she wanted from William Burger. Next day – a Monday – they would resume the relationship that others saw, acting as if nothing had passed between them beyond the mutual daily concerns that their work brought. She dressed, said, “See you tomorrow,” and left. They always arrived separately, took separate rooms, and always left separately. It sustained the illusion of a business arrangement – which maybe it was.

William propped himself up on his elbows preparatory to climbing off the bed. He paused in mid-movement, eyes suddenly fixated on the dull square of curtained window. If grey could radiate, that was what was coming from the single source of outside light. He felt completely spent, used up by Sylvie's hungers. She had saved up the information on Miranda's project just for the moment when he had nothing left. Then, with her news, she had charged up the excitement in him, only to take it all back into herself. She had left him doubly discharged. All this William saw as he stared momentarily at the grey rectangle. He dragged his legs over the edge of the bed, walked to the window and drew back the curtains. He looked out of the rear of the small country hotel they had chosen. It was thirty kilometres outside Basel, in thick woodland that stretched up to the Jura. There was a fine drizzle and a mist down on the approaches to the low mountains.

William struggled against the smothering greyness. If what Sylvie had said was true, his future was assured. So was Miranda Whitlam's. She was finally about to overreach herself. Timing would be critical though. She could not be allowed to think she had succeeded until he was ready with the alternative. And, by the time he was ready with the alternative, those fund managers he was dealing with would have been imbued with a mortal horror of DNA-based manipulations. They were wary enough already, but that was more out of concern for their public standing than any deep conviction they felt. William would be supplying them with all the conviction they could take, and more.

He stepped back from the window and began dressing. Sylvie would have to be kept happy for a while longer, long enough to see her lined up with some comfortably tenured professorship on the other side of the world. For a moment, he wondered what she saw in him. When he thought of her at all, he thought of his own sense of rage and exhaustion and, it had to be said, some sense of release.

William finished dressing, packed his overnight bag and checked out. He would stop off for a drink and arrive back for an early Sunday meal with his family having been, he would say, to just another dull conference, a duty in his line of work.