In World City (24 page)

On the first day after the New Year break, Sylvie Lacombe showed Miranda Whitlam precisely the trends and significances Miranda had been expecting for nine years. William Burger was ready with his alternative and Sylvie had spent Christmas and the New Year working up the last six months' data so they would show all that Miranda had been expecting.

Sylvie asked archly, “Miranda, what have you been doing? This study sample of yours, look, there are two distinct groups. I thought they were all from one group, like that one, showing normal progression of ageing indices. But that is only one half of the sample. This other half is different; it is showing significant retardation of the indices. Look, it's there in every one of them. You have complete discrimination between the two groups.”

From all she knew of Miranda Whitlam, Sylvie had been expecting eager, possessive excitement at this news. Instead, she saw the kind of ironic self-deprecation that was the usual response to experiments that had failed.

Miranda said, “You're not as innocent as all that, Sylvie. I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't been holding back data to give yourself time to manoeuvre. You didn't think I asked Morton to work up those human viral vectors just for academic interest and you didn't think I went over your head and asked four other groups to work on vector-mediated incorporation of sequence-specific modifiers just to save you the trouble. If you want to know, it was Marcus Olsen who put them together but by the time the material got to him it was all so far beyond discrete identification he might have been making vaccines. He has no idea what I put together with it all. It was the only way to do it, Sylvie. I would never have got ethics approval. But now it's a fait accompli and there's nothing anyone can do but accept it. Anyhow, I'm handing over the whole thing to William, institute and all. I've a trustees' committee lined up to take care of the funding. The rest is up to you. Stick around if you want. Take that professorship in Perth if you want. I'm finished, Sylvie. I'm bowing out. I'm going to lose myself somewhere. You and William can take all the credit and if there's any serious ethics problem you can blame me. I'll leave you an affidavit taking full responsibility. Use it if you need to. I'll be miles away. Anyway, everyone'll be too excited to bother about the ethics – what's up, Sylvie? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Uh – I asked the people in Perth not to contact you.”

This was true, though they both knew it was inconceivable Miranda Whitlam would not have been sounded out for Sylvie's suitability. The truth merely served to cover a far greater confusion in Sylvie's mind.

“Don't worry,” Miranda replied airily. “I told them you'd be just what they wanted. You've a free choice.”

Sylvie indeed had a free choice. For reasons she never bothered to work out, she used that choice to call Burger within seconds of her conversation with Miranda.

William Burger had Miranda Whitlam arrested immediately. The holding charge was violation of the rights of minors. Some more charges would be thought of when the ethical-legal situation became clearer.

*

The first Dion heard of it was as breaking news on his ebony-encased screen, which was propped on the end of a bar in a third-rate World City hotel somewhere outside Bonn. The uncharacteristically low-grade rendezvous had been specified by a new corporate traitor who, given the time Dion had been waiting, appeared to be having second thoughts. Dion didn't wait any longer. He called his five most reliable company men and told them to round up the nine remaining boys, put them in Dion's Place and make sure no one went up – even if it meant destroying any World City security that happened that way. He was there within an hour. Six of the kids had appeared. The other three turned up after another two hours.

“The experiment has worked,” Dion said.

Jetter gave a whoop of joy and, characteristically, failed to ask where Dion's information had come from, or where Miranda was.

“You're going to live God knows how long,” Dion continued, “but there's going to be no more money in it.”

“What do you mean – no money in it?”

“Miranda's been arrested. I saw it on a screen three hours ago. That means the experiment has worked. There were two people who could have told her it worked and one or both of them will have put security up to arresting her. Otherwise, she would have been here telling you herself. You were the first people who were to be told once she was sure. One other thing she was going to tell you was that the whole experiment was going to be handed over to her institute and the Ageing Initiative, yourselves included. That way, you'd have found yourselves a big part of something bigger. You'd have had all the reassurance you could need and about all the excitement you could take. But someone wants to play it different. They're going to want to make an example of you. You'll be set up to show people what uncontrolled individual initiative in medical research can do when it's not kept under proper ethical constraint. My guess is someone has an alternative they've built up on the back of Miranda's work. They want to set Miranda up to make their own way of doing things seem so much the cleaner. You'll be kept in protective custody for as long as it suits them to have you pushed in and out in front of the cameras. Give it about five years then you'll be kicked out on the street. You might just be able to sell your stories, but there won't be much change left out of that. The alternative is for you to disappear. You've had enough training from me to set yourselves up anywhere. Miranda paid well, even better than you knew. I was intending to give you the full balance as a bonus when you were all old enough to know what to do with it. You're going to have to get old enough now. I'll give you each your bonus and you go with my blessing. Everybody'll be going with my blessing.”

“What do you mean – everybody?” Jetter questioned.

“I'm finished. When World City starts following the tracks Miranda's left, there'll be no way someone as identifiable as I am can carry on operating.”

“You mean everybody? The whole company?”

“You can stick around if you want but everyone I've ever had anything to do with is in serious danger of becoming famous. You've got about two hours to make up your minds what to do. The company men have longer since there's no reason to take them in except for questioning. I haven't told them yet.”

Jetter stood up and started pacing beneath the low concrete ceiling. Dion watched him moving back and forth along the walls of the concrete chamber: Dion's Place.

“Fuck,” said Jetter, “Fucking shit. Fucking, fucking shit.”

Dion watched him rage, felt the rage of nine young men in the confined space, and felt their fear. They had grown used to the stability the work with Miranda had provided.

“Listen,” Dion said, “I don't know where you all came from. I never asked and you never told me. But I do know there was one time once in your lives when you felt you had to cut loose. You're not new to this. You've had a ten year holiday from not knowing what the hell's going to happen from one moment to the next – except probably it would be bad, and probably worse than the last moment. You had a holiday like you'd never dreamed of. And you've got a trade you can take anywhere. How long you live with all that is nothing. Wherever you end up, you could just as easily find yourselves treading on the toes of some lord who blows you away before you even know he exists. You're just like the rest of us. You've no guarantees and you never had any. Here's your money.”

Dion went round each of the nine; handing out the nine wads of currency notes he had collected on his way to meet them.

“That's it,” he concluded, “That's twenty-thousand each. If I see you again, it won't be around here.”

Dion turned and left the concrete cubicle that might once have housed machinery. He felt as empty as the space had looked when he first saw it, and as ragged and abandoned as it had looked when he had returned there to find Miranda Whitlam sitting cross-legged surrounded by rat shit, back against the wall, flanked by a fading poster of a tropical island. He set up a recorded message for his company men to hear and started walking into nowhere.

Nine scared and angry boys were left in Dion's Place.

“I'm turning myself in,” Biv said, “If they want to observe me they can. They can do what they like with me as far as I'm concerned. When I walked out on my family, it was because my dad beat up my mother, fucked my sister and tried to fuck me. I dunno. I don't mind being fucked over for a few years if that's what's got to happen. Maybe it'll be done with some respect. I've been violated all down the line – by my father – by Miranda – by Dion – what's new?”

He got up and walked out of Dion's Place five minutes after Dion. Two others followed fast after him. The rest looked at Jetter, still pacing the floor, raging. He suddenly stopped and turned on them. “Well, what are you fucking waiting for? Scramble, goddamn you. You heard Dion. He said it's over. You've each got more fucking credit in your hands than you'd have made in twenty years of working your butts off in some lousy World City job. You're rich, fuck you. Now get.”

He paused a few seconds then charged the door. His steps, thundering down the echoing stairwell of the tower block, were soon followed by the rest.

*

New Year is still only recently past. Outside the crumbling apartment block, as the freezing, whitening wind blows through the opposing geometries that cover Europe, Waste and World City sleep together like shards of ice torn from some ancestral block. Each of the kids and the company men have holes to bolt to, to lick the wound they've been dealt and consider where to go once it starts to get light. But Dion has nowhere to go. Bitterly, he remembers his grandmother once saying, ‘You want to live like I do? – Then you make damn sure you can't hide. Hiding's a lie. Can't hide from being born, can't hide from dying. No point in hiding in between.'

Dion has not hidden, at least not enough to avoid the shattering blow he has been dealt.

‘All you can do when things get rough and you need to get free is lose yourself,' his grandmother had gone on to say. ‘Get yourself somewhere where you don't know where you are. That way, no one can find you.'

That instruction he can use.

So Dion walks, as the strobing lights of World City security converge on the stained and crumbling tower block, where an empty concrete cubicle sits two hundred feet above the freezing ground. An old Asian woman points the way up for the tumbling uniforms the vehicles disgorge. Like her, they too are caught in a dream of probabilities. They will say things like: ‘If only we'd got here earlier; if only the chief hadn't wanted to check sources; if only that stretch two miles out hadn't been closed... ‘ For them, probability is something to be fought and denied. Hazard is what World City dumps in the Waste; all those arrangements of objects in time and space that cannot be forced to behave with certainty, arrangements like the fall of lottery numbers, the criminal who breaks through the tightest of your security systems, or the time and place of your death. And, as security curses and swears and tries to justify its presence by collecting items that might be clues – like a well-mounted picture of a jungle-clad island – all the while there blows through the canyon streets, across the derelict ground, and up against the double-glazed windows of World City, a wind from out of a cycle of certainties that was there long before World City or the Waste, and will be there long after. It will be there for as long as the world turns, the Death Wind of Winter that freezes the land in the kind of certainty and finality of position that World City struggles towards with desperate longing, clamping objects in frozen outline, stilling the atoms that, back in high summer, had danced in the inexhaustible access of energy the sun poured forth. Dion huddles deep inside his overcoat, walking north, thinking bitterly of Miranda Whitlam; Miranda Whitlam in whose image he was finally able to drown; Miranda Whitlam who is gone, along with everything he has built for himself.

In World City, custody awaiting trial was not uncomfortable, as long as you were not accused of violence or property crime, but rather some felony of a higher socio-economic status, like fraud or industrial espionage. Conditions were so good that generally the accused were on friendly terms with the holding officers within hours. But four days passed without Miranda Whitlam saying a word and on the fifth day, when her bail hearing came up, the officers were relieved to have her off their hands. She treated the move with the same detached passivity she had received everything else they had offered: food, newssheets, screens, sympathy. They had no idea what was going on with her and no longer had any wish to find out. She made them shiver and want to look behind to see if anyone was following. The judge granted two million bail after he and Miranda's lawyer had haggled for half an hour. The lawyer offered Miranda a lift back to her apartment.

“I want to drive myself back,” she said. “Where's my car?”

These were the first coherent words she had spoken in four days, her part in the bail hearing having passed on nods and monosyllables. The lawyer sent a junior to fetch the car and Miranda drove north out of the city in immediate violation of her bail conditions. The law was a structure she had begun to dissociate herself from long before and this was her last step in abandoning the security it had to offer. The step took her out along an escape corridor of diverging autobahn tracks, autoroute tracks, mainway tracks, tracks that carried her away from the last remaining anchor-points in her life.

*

The first track she took joined a greater one, and then a greater one still, the car seemingly drawn into the torrents of traffic like a leaf hurled into the rapids as she let herself be sucked out into the free space that was the vast vacuum of Europe. She glanced up at the sign gantries straddling the road and saw words that meant nothing. Delocalised by speed and space, she was nowhere and travelling very fast. A low, hard light broke over the land. Everything conspired to isolate her: the speed of the car; the low, hard brilliance of the light; and each mote of traffic being swept on its predetermined course through a continent that was empty as the space between stars.

Miranda Whitlam was absolved by World City's reaction to her, absolved of any further commitment to anything that World City stood for. She had offered World City the one thing every good World Citizen desired. Her offer would be accepted but she would not. Perhaps the enormity of what she was offering was such that no identifiable person could be allowed to provide the desired thing and live. Perhaps such a giver had to be sacrificed; else the debt felt would be too much for people to bear. Miranda was taking a different way out, though. Had she stayed to receive her sentence, the collective weight of opinion would have killed her no matter how far distant had been the last use of the death penalty. Obscurely, unconsciously, Miranda Whitlam had decided not to die like that. She already knew there were different ways of dying to the intentions of other people. With Dion, she had gone to the borders of a place that lay beyond the securities with which World City fuelled its own peculiar beliefs. Now she was rushing deep into the interior of that place with every intersection she passed.

*

Three hundred kilometres later she abandoned her car in an exit lane. In the fading, frosty twilight, she wandered along the side of the road and then around the parapets of the interchange. She stood and watched the wavering red sun-disk descend beneath the edge of Europe's great void. Below her, vehicles roared unchecked along the ten-lane highway, an unrelenting burden of steel and glass. She was like some fragile single-celled animal caught above the hurricane of a solar wind, yet she felt no fear, not even when a sixty-ton truck pulled over beside her and she found herself lifted into its imperious cab. She ate none of the food the driver offered and offered no resistance when he threw her onto the bench slotted in behind the seats and forced himself into the tracked geometries of her body. He pushed her out at the next pull-in, spooked beyond endurance. She wandered back onto the highway, a small, fragile fragment of awareness in the blinding wind of steel and glass that howled by on its programmed course.

A battered Volkswagen with three youths in it pulled up alongside her. A door opened and she climbed in. She saw the three faces as through a screen. The faces looked back at her and saw how far removed from their own world she was. They made no attempt to talk, merely pulled out a dirty blanket from somewhere and wrapped it around her.

Nial, the eldest, kept on driving until they were safely enclosed by side streets and the kind of World City borderland buildings that might one day become Waste. Led by Nial, flanked by Mayer and Mysté, the person that was called Miranda Whitlam obediently ascended the stairs to the third floor, still wrapped in the blanket they had found for her. They guided her to a bed where she accepted hot coffee with a stiff measure of brandy. Before she lapsed into unconsciousness, she used her last reserves of strength to say, “You did exactly right, Nial. You cut loose just at the right time. All those viruses at work in you – you possess them now. They are entirely your own, and the years of extra life you will enjoy will all be yours.”

Her gaze passed over the other two, including them in what she was saying. “What will happen is that the discoveries I made and the technology I put together will be applied, but not at the DNA level. There have been ways found to simulate what I made happen. Then, when people have got used to the idea, someone will say you might as well make it all happen in the genes after all. There will be opposition at first. Then there will be discussion and then what I did to you will become normal – for those privileged enough to be able to afford it for their children. The numbers of the privileged will grow, of course, strictly according to a programme worked out by those empowered to decide: government committees, drug-company committees, the fund managers. So, over the next few centuries, there will be an increasing number of people who feel a little more secure in the usual belief that they're going to live forever. But those people will be identified. And they will identify themselves with the treatment they have acquired and that identification will be one more lock on the prison that is World City. You have no such identification. If you came out and said what had been done to you, you would be sacrificed on the spot. Because to really be part of the breakthrough that you are, you have to be entirely outside of the securities people live by. But people have to make a security out of what we offered them and the only way they can do that is to sacrifice us. But that's not going to happen, because you cut loose. Congratulations. Nial, you're free, just like you wanted to be.”

*

These were the last words to be said by the historically continuous person that was Miranda Whitlam. To her guardians, she was delirious for a week and they didn't dare call a doctor for fear of discovery. This was just as well, for delirium was not the word the person who had once been Miranda Whitlam would have used. She was as secure in her apparent disintegration as a baby being born; potentially dangerous, but safe enough given the right circumstances. Her experience was one of journeying, sometimes in the form of a bird, sometimes as a fish, sometimes as nothing recognisably organic. Time after time she felt herself being dismembered, her liver and lungs torn from her and the flesh scoured from her bones and her bones pulverised to dust. Time after time she was put back together again, sometimes in the earth, sometimes in the sea, sometimes in the boiling cauldron of a volcano crater. She was taken to places on the planet with histories humanity had never guessed. Once, she found herself in a secluded valley high in the mountains of a jungle-clad island with nothing but a waterfall and a clear stream pouring over rocks to listen to and the occasional thin piping of an unseen bird. Finally, she was taken to the highest place in the world from whence she could look out over all creation. Then she was cast down and woke up in a body on a bed in a small apartment that had assorted pieces of electronics stacked against the walls. Three young men looked at her – curiously. She took their hands, each in turn, and looked into their eyes. Each found himself believing in her and each realised that to do whatever she wished was all he could ever wish to do. Her body took a month more to recover. She gave the boys careful instructions on what she needed to eat, what the arrangement of the objects in the room should be. During this time, Nial managed to contact Dion and persuade him to come and see her.

*

Dion looks down on someone he wants to offer up to earthly powers; someone he wants to betray. He has had enough. Whatever it was in her he was enthralled by is now gone. Now, he wants nothing more than the impersonal securities of a usual life. He has had three months and looks ahead to an entire future cast out of all he has struggled to build, all because of her. Dion is deeply envious, though he doesn't know this. He left his island with all of his grandmother's vision but none of her power. Before him is someone who had the power already and has now taken his vision. But all he can understand is that he has been used. He decides to tip off World City security as to her whereabouts. Why shouldn't she be punished? He can't understand why Nial and the others are so excited by her.

She looks up at him and sees a messenger between the worlds, someone she has used before and can use again. And she sees his reluctance and the deadly complex of reactions and assumptions settling over him. There was an influence on him she can recognise, an old woman who could have made of him an operator in her own world. But that influence is being thrust aside. The man before her is battening down the hatches, settling for what he can get from World City and World City is settling over him like a shroud. She sees he will even betray her, though she will be long gone before he does so. This one will have to wait until the time is right. There is nothing he can learn from her just now.

*

The person who had been Miranda Whitlam saw all this and prepared for a long period of attrition in her relationship with Dion. The course he was taking would eventually wipe him clean enough to receive her once more. In the meantime she had Nial and the others move her to the deepest recesses of the Waste to complete her recovery. When she had regained her strength, she went walking among her people, some of whom recognised her for who she was. They drew diagrams on the ground in order to invoke her intercession in matters of luck, sprinkling the patterns with their own blood. She told them to tear up the concrete and start planting trees. Then, secure in her position, she told Nial to recover some material she had stored in an apartment she still retained under her control. It was in a plastic container in the corner of a locked freezer. Nial saw no problem in getting past the security. The three of them together could handle that. It was what Dion had trained them for.