Tomorrow’s World (15 page)

If there was such a connection in this instance, I wouldn't find it without getting my mitts on a copy of
Lichens and Mosses of the World.

I started with the Ecosystem, searching by author because his name, Jay Bright, was shorter than the book's title. Sure enough,
Lichens and Mosses
was in the ISBN index, but nobody had bothered digitizing it. I wasn't too surprised. You can earn pleasure points by adding to The Sum Total of Human Knowledge, but the number of points you get is related to the profundity of the original content and the value you've added by your own powers of analysis.
Lichens and Mosses of the World
didn't have any
obvious
potential for providing rich pickings on either count. Still, Doug MacDougall had apparently found something startling in it and, just as I couldn't rest until I discovered what had happened to Doug, so I couldn't settle until I found out exactly what had shaken his world.

Since Doug's apartment had already been cleared out I couldn't simply help myself to his copy of
Lichens and Mosses of the World.
I had to find another copy.

I had to go to the old city.

“You've never been to the old city?” I asked incredulously.

Perfect Paula shook her head.

I'd told her my theory about the book and what I intended doing about it and, before I knew it, I was trying to persuade her to come with me to the old city. Suddenly it seemed very important that she came; at least as important as getting a copy of the book. I wanted to find out if Perfect Paula had a sense of wonder to awaken. I wanted to find out if there was a truly human being deep inside her. The strength of my desire to see if she'd loosen up when outside the community, if the change in surroundings would change her, took me by surprise.

“I'm as baffled that you make trips to the old city as you are that I don't,” Paula told me. “Why damage your health when there's no need? We have everything we need right here in the community.”

“Aren't you the slightest bit curious to see what it's like?” I asked.

“I can do that with a timesphere.”

“It's not the same. It's not the same at all.”

“What's different?”

I didn't know where to begin. It was like trying to describe color to a person who can't see, or music to someone who can't hear. Paula looked at me curiously. I waited for her to sneer as I struggled to articulate. When she didn't, I realized she hadn't just asked the question because she thought I'd have difficulty answering it, which is what Numbers often do. She genuinely wanted an answer. I tried my best to give her one: “It's a different world, and you can be part of it in a way you can't in a timesphere. You can reach out and touch things; think about what they were used for, and by whom.

“You can open doors and step into other people's lives, learn something about how they lived from the things they gathered around them. Some houses leave you cold and unmoved, or just plain depressed, but others captivate you. The past comes alive around you, and having the chance to explore it is amazing in a way that nothing in the community is, not even the timespheres. You want to open every door and drawer or just walk slowly from room to room. And, as you do, you start to feel a presence not your own.”

“Don't tell me you believe in ghosts, Travis,” she said, and now there was a hint of a sneer on her face and in her voice.

“No, but some places definitely have an atmosphere, and when you go there it doesn't take much imagination to hear the echo of old footsteps and voices,” I said. “There's a story in every house. There's a mystery with clues in every room, in every cupboard and drawer and box.”

As clearly as I saw signs of old lives in those derelict houses, I saw confusion in Paula's eyes. I guessed she was torn between mocking contempt, envy, and curiosity; perhaps she was wondering if she'd feel any of the things I'd talked about on visiting such a place.

“Why not come with me and find out,” I said.

“What?” she asked.

“Why not come with me and find out if you can feel any of those things, too.”

The assurance I was used to seeing in her eyes had disappeared altogether, and I knew she was taken aback that I'd read her mind so completely.

Then it was her turn to surprise me. I'd expected her to come up with a whole host of perfectly logical reasons for not venturing to the old city with me, but she didn't say a single word, just nodded.

We did a search on the Olden Days Database—largely drawn from the Internet which was at the heart of life sixty years ago—and found two libraries within walking distance that had listed
Lichens and Mosses of the World
in their catalogues. One was in the old city of Dundee. I guessed that was where Doug MacDougall got his copy. The other library was on the far side of the river, in what had been the middle-class suburb of Newport. I thought that was our best bet.

Okay, I also wanted to go there because it was a bit further away, giving me more time with Paula. Then there was the fact it was made up of gorgeous old stone villas; if anywhere could enchant Paula, it was there.

After stocking up with four filtermasks apiece—the most you're allowed in any one day—we breathed into the first of them and set off on our little adventure.

I noticed a change in Paula as we made our way down to the old city. Her stride shortened and she began looking around, not straight ahead like Numbers usually do. I'd forgotten how startling the change from community to old city is the first time you make it, because I've walked from one to the other so many times. There's no boundary wall or fence, no moat or ditch, but the demarcation is just as abrupt. The narrow, well-maintained streets give way to wide, potholed roads strewn with masonry, broken furniture, and burnt-out cars. The regular, tiny-windowed, ten-story havens and the low gray factories are replaced by a bewildering assortment of buildings of all shapes and sizes scattered about here, there and everywhere. There are towering thirty-story apartment blocks with their windows blown out by hurricanes, and the tattered remains of flapping curtains forlornly adding flashes of color…

The remains of factory chimneys shorn off halfway up by superstorms, looking like the lightning-struck stumps of petrified trees…

And the spires of churches where people once gathered to worship a God who would eventually abandon them. Or maybe they abandoned Him to worship the new god, the Ecosystem.

There are old tenement blocks with water-stained and crumbling walls; with plants sprouting from chimney pots, and rusty drain pipes dangling from the roofs and hanging off the gables. The windows are boarded up or gape darkly, with discolored net curtains like smoke-darkened flags of surrender hung out by defeated inhabitants who'd long since given up the ghost. The doors hang off their hinges, or have been beaten down by the desperate hands and feet of the hungry and thirsty; their faded and tarnished plaques spelling out the names of people who don't live there any more, above letterboxes that no longer swing open with anything except the wind.

There are brick walls covered in graffiti that was meaningless when it was written, let alone now.

Signs advertise products that haven't been made for decades, or name streets hardly anyone has walked for sixty years; traffic lights and lamp-posts no longer light up.

I hardly noticed any of these striking sights, because I was watching Paula as she took them in. She didn't say anything. I had the feeling that, for once, she was at a loss for words. She spoke plenty but in a different language, one made up of barely audible gasps of shock and surprise, uncharacteristic hesitations and disbelieving shakes of the head.

I spoke before she did, saying, “It's like the old city has learned everything there is to know about how to look the worse for wear, and doesn't try to hide its knowledge: every way stone can crumble and wrought-iron can rust; plaster can peel, paint can fade, and wood can warp and splinter; every way a road can be cratered and potholed, a pavement pitted and broken.”

Paula nodded, unable to take her eyes off the dereliction around her, and said, “Yes, that's exactly what it's like, but I couldn't have put it like that.”

“You don't get a true impression from watching movies or hearing teachers talk about it, do you?”

She shook her head. “You get a picture, but it's incomplete in some way I can't describe.”

“It's the stuff you can't describe that gives it atmosphere.”

A gust of wind blew back a curtain as we walked by, and Paula's eyes opened wide in fright. I should have laughed at her, because
they
regard displays of emotion as a sign of weakness, and
we
love nothing better than witnessing such a nervous reaction in them. But for some reason I didn't laugh or even smile at her alarm. Instead, I said, “It's okay, it's only the wind.”

Paula looked as if there was something she wanted to say. It was a few moments before she said it: “What about Outsiders?”

There was a widespread belief that gangs of deformed, desperate crazies or lone lunatics roamed the old cities, searching for food and ready to ruin your day in a variety of unimaginably unpleasant ways if you were unlucky enough to run into them. They were supposed to be discredited renegades from the community, and the misshapen offspring of people who hadn't made the move to the havens in the first place. Some people had preferred to stay in the old cities—elderly folk who didn't want to leave their homes, animal lovers who couldn't bear to leave their pets, and opportunists who saw the chance to move into the biggest and best of the abandoned houses, to enjoy material wealth they'd only dreamed about before. Most of them found their way to the community in the end, though—when water stopped flowing from the taps and there was no more power at the flick of a switch; when there was hardly any more food and drink left to loot, and competition for what remained became so fierce the last semblance of law and order broke down; when the toxic haze became truly choking and the heat stifling, relieved only by storms that blew down buildings and rain that flooded any streets which hadn't already been inundated by rising rivers and encroaching oceans and seas. Those who remained Outside led short and miserable lives, if the diaries I'd found from the last of the Old Days are anything to go by. If there had been a second generation of Outsiders I hadn't seen any sign of it. As for discredited renegades from the community, they nearly always came back and gave themselves up, driven by thirst and hunger and the realization they were sentencing themselves to death if they stayed Outside.

“The Outsiders are what used to be called an urban myth,” I said, as we made our way down toward the river.

“A what?”

I was surprised she didn't know. I'm used to Numbers knowing everything. But then they don't deal in myth and legend, only facts and figures. “An urban myth,” I said. “They're stories that used to circulate in the Old Days, usually telling of terrible things happening to people. They were related second-hand because the victim was always a friend of a friend. A classic is the one about a woman licking an envelope—it's from the days when people sent paper letters by post rather than e-mail—”

“I gathered that, Travis.”

They can't help themselves from picking you up if you state the obvious, so I didn't take it personally, and carried on my merry way with the shocking little tale. “She cuts her tongue as she licks the gummed flap of the envelope, and doesn't think any more of it. But over the next few days her tongue swells up to three times its normal size.”

Actually, the version I'd heard had her tongue swelling to twice its normal size, but you have to embellish these things before passing them on. That's the whole point.

I carried on: “She goes to the doctor, and he thinks it's just an infection and gives her some broad-spectrum antibiotics. They don't help. Her tongue keeps swelling, and that night she wakes up and can hardly get a breath. She goes through to her bathroom and looks in a mirror and…” I paused for effect.

“And what, Travis?”

“And she looks on in horror as…” Just as they can't help themselves from putting us down if we state the obvious, we can't help provoking displays of emotion from them.

“Travis!” Paula said impatiently.

“Her tongue splits open and a bug crawls out,” I said, concluding the cheery little anecdote.

“That is gross.”

“The idea is, there were tiny roach eggs in the envelope gum, and one of them got in her tongue through the cut and—”

“I gathered that, too, Travis. And of course a roach egg sac is too big not to be noticed by someone licking an envelope, and holds a lot more than one egg, so it can't be true.”

I might have guessed she'd know that. She obviously wasn't sure of the truth about Outsiders, though. It wasn't something you could be sure about unless you'd actually spent time Outside. So I gave her the benefit of my experience: “The only people I ever see in the old city are citizens like myself, wanting to spend an hour two in search of the past, or just to get out of the confines of the community.”