In World City (18 page)

“You said you tested the system out on animals. What happened to them? How sure can you be their death will come the same way as the death the children have waiting for them?”

“The animals I worked on lived, on average, 4.3 times longer than untreated animals. I don't know if it'll work the same way in humans. If I could be sure it would, I wouldn't be coming here each month.”

She thought she was being deliberately mild in her response. One of her few claims to ethical credibility in the work she was doing was that it focused exclusively on humans and the need for preliminary animal testing undermined that credibility. Had she but known, Dion was entirely unconcerned. Hadn't his grandmother employed animal sacrifice with considerably less passion?

“We and the other animals I work on share much the same longevity mechanisms,” Miranda added. “Evolution must have established them very early in the history of sexual reproduction. It's true the rats don't live as long as we do but that's solely down to body size. Body size represents a kind of built-in inertia; it keeps you going according to the amount of substance that's there.”

There it was again: substance – material and its evolution. Wasn't evolution about how the substance got rearranged? – How appearances changed?

“You talk as if evolution is in charge of all this, in charge of birth and death. Why does evolution allow death so much power?”

“We personify evolution because we like to talk that way. But we're wrong to. Evolution is no more than a convenient word that describes the workings of an inevitability. Death is part of that inevitability. If there was no death, there would be no evolution. Death lets the old bodies fall away and so makes way for the new bodies that random variation has come up with to be tested. The old bodies have done their job. Death is, therefore, a part of evolutionary inevitability because once the genes have been passed on there's nothing working to favour further survival.”

This talk of old bodies falling away struck Dion personally. He was feeling tired in a way he had not experienced before. With the sudden influx of funds from Miranda, his business was expanding fast and he had put his fatigue down to the increasing demands on him. But maybe he was feeling the effects of becoming an old body. He mentioned this to Miranda.

“Dion, you're far too young to feel what I'm talking about. Are you sure you're okay?”

He tried to shrug it off but Miranda thought of several kinds of life Dion might have led before the project started and none of them was particularly healthy. “I'll take some samples from you, too,” she insisted cheerfully, as much like a doctor as he had known her.

Dion felt uneasy but didn't resist. Had it been some years earlier, he might have protested more strongly, thinking of hair or nail clippings, substances upon which magic could be worked. But that kind of consciousness was beginning to fade and he felt no more than the mild distaste anyone might experience on having some blood and skin taken by their doctor. The lab tests Miranda ordered all came back normal; Dion was tired, that was all, and he felt a certain weight lift with the news. But out of the kind of ingrained habit that develops in anyone engaged in research, she kept back a portion of his samples for long-term storage. She kept them back in a low-temperature freezer she had in her own apartment, where a full back-up set of each of the monthly samplings from the children was accumulating. She put Dion's samples in a plastic container, which she located in one corner of the deep freeze, away from all the others.

*

“Why do we want to live forever if we can't?” Dion asked.

“We're programmed to survive at all costs. That's the one absolute given. Without that compulsion there'd be no life. I suppose it would suit us for the compulsion to atrophy once our children have been born and brought up and their children born, but there's not much selection pressure working for that to happen. Once the genes have been passed on, it doesn't matter much one way or another whether we want to live or not. The compulsion to live has to be so strong that I suppose it simply persists even when it's going to make no difference whatsoever to whether or not the genes get passed on.”

Dion was beginning to understand the strange, ritualistic inevitability of the scheme she was working within. Her manipulations in matter were part of an operation that ensured absolute certainty, absolute inevitability and absolute security. Nothing unexpected could happen in the world she was working with, not like in the world that depended on your relationship with the other party, the world of bluff and negotiation. Dion wondered at the elegance of it all. His penultimate question was a confirmation of the mastery he had, through repeated exposure, finally achieved in this unfamiliar language. “Why don't you take the genetic material from the oldest people and pass that on to the next generation. Then take genetic material from the oldest in that next generation and pass that on – and just keep doing that over and over. Wouldn't that lead to people living longer and longer? Why not do that?”

Miranda looked at Dion with sudden regard. He was beginning to make himself known to her, and he was doing so by understanding her thoughts as well as her language. “It's been done in insects and it worked,” she replied enthusiastically. “But to do it in humans would require a commitment lasting a millennium. It's possible, but the world I'm working in only allows you to keep on exploring if you can produce results. So we must come up with something quick. If it works, then maybe we can move on to an age-based selection experiment. But it would need a complete change in people's attitudes. The whole idea of us actively selecting genetic material for transfer to future generations is still barely acceptable. We need the data that our project is going to generate.”

Dion had one final question. “How come we're born perfect?”

Miranda was slightly shocked. This sounded like a relapse into his earlier thinking. “We're not,” she replied briskly. “We've all kinds of time bombs at work in us that we've inherited from our parents. These things just don't show through until they've been passed on to the next generation. If we were born perfect, we'd live forever.”

Dion shook his head; he remembered now the babies his grandmother had blessed. “No, we're born perfect, Miranda. Go and look at a baby sometime.”

Miranda looked at Dion, puzzled. That wasn't what she was talking about. She was talking about how living things really were; she was talking about the structure that underlay mere appearances. Living things were structures of matter and lived by the energy exchanges those structures mediated. All she could hear in what Dion was talking about was mere subjective experience: appearances. He seemed peculiarly sure of himself, though.

The children were three years older, the youngest still not much use for anything, but the older ones increasingly wanted to get serious about becoming company men. Dion could feel the pressure building in the boys. They hung around his professionals more and more, pestering them for odd jobs, anything that might get them involved in the real work.

The three eldest were Nial, Biv, and Jetter. Nial had a way of making it clear to Dion he was going to become a company man come what may. He talked as if it was already understood he was just about ready. He'd say things like, ‘Dion, there's a line of shops just closed on RieterStrasse. Looks like they're going to redevelop. There'll be some cut-price outlets opening up there before work starts; high turnover, low security. Might be worth looking into.'

Biv went about it a different way. ‘Dion, I'm old enough to go out on a job, aren't I? I'd only need to stand by and watch. I wouldn't need to do anything.' And Dion would say no, and Biv would come back a week later with exactly the same line. Biv had a worried look, like he was getting uneasy without a role to play. He had a rash around his mouth that Miranda hadn't been able to shift and Dion noticed it was getting worse.

Jetter was the most demanding of the three. He simply marched up to Dion whenever he felt himself beginning to boil over and said in a voice that was barely short of a shout, “Dion, I must do some work, man. I'm going crazy kicking around with the kids. I've got to get going. I can't stand it anymore. I'm just hanging around waiting. I went off with Face and Georgio and did a sweet-counter yesterday. Yeah, just like you said we shouldn't. We ended up with all these fuckin' cough sweets. Tasted like shit. But we got to do something.”

Dion told Jetter to go and learn to read properly – it was a basic qualification for getting anywhere in the business. But Dion knew he was only temporising. As they got bigger, the kids would just go off and do their own thing. He had to start channelling their energies, somehow. And there lay his dilemma: the two-year commitment with Miranda Whitlam was a ten-year commitment now and the boys had to stay in one piece all that time. But starting out in the business was dangerous. There was a high drop-out rate and Dion, thinking of what the boys meant to Miranda, couldn't risk losing a single one.

There had to come a point, though, when the dangers of not getting them started began to outweigh the dangers of getting them started. Dion knew it had been reached when Juan, one of the younger ones, and still years off any reasonable expectation of becoming a company man, came to him and said, “Dion, are we kids really going to get to be company men or are we just going to carry on hanging out and having Miranda come and take stuff from us each month?”

Dion set Nial, Biv and Jetter to work with his three most experienced company men. The plan was that the kids should just watch and be the rough-looking youngsters they were. This would provide good distraction for security while the professionals got on with the job. Nial would be fine, Dion thought. Biv would be okay as well. He might look anxious but he knew how to listen to instructions and act on them without screwing up. But, the danger lay with Jetter. Jetter lived up to his name. He was speedy, distractible, impulsive. He went off on flights of his own when he should have been keeping his feet on the ground.

*

The scheme worked well for two weeks and Dion eased up on drumming into the three boys that they must not, on any account, take the slightest of risks. With the pressure off, Jetter immediately decided to do some freelance work. He was supposed to be distracting security's attention from the conventional suit who only seemed interested in prices, but Jetter thought he could outsmart the video eyes and tried to pocket something. Three uniformed security cornered him immediately.

All Dion's operators, all the way down to the youngest, knew they were on their own while they were doing a job. But Jetter had been too well protected for that knowledge to really sink in. He shrieked out to the company man, “Help, man, they're going to get me.”

The company man had been told by Dion how unpredictable Jetter might be. When the guards reflexively turned their heads in his direction, the company man managed, in the instant he held their attention, to project a look of blank astonishment, followed by a puzzled glance over his shoulder.

The guards saw immediately the kid was only trying to create a distraction and hauled him off. The company man went back to the Waste. As far as he was concerned Jetter was finished. There were never second chances.

Dion affected unconcern. Jetter had proved himself a liability and carrying liabilities wasn't worth it. But, to himself, Dion cursed Jetter. Jetter had made a mess of Miranda's work.

*

“Where's Jetter?” Miranda asked, three days later when the monthly sampling session came round.

“He got caught,” Juan called out. “He was supposed to be covering for one of Dion's men but he got clever and tried it himself. He'll be lucky to get away with two years in juvenile detention then he'll get put in a camp till he's eighteen and after that he'll be on probation. World City comes down real hard on people like us.”

Juan prattled on, proud to be the one who was telling Miranda the exciting news, oblivious to the appalling atmosphere that was developing in the room.

Dion had felt it the minute Miranda noticed Jetter's absence. He felt it as a physical shock, hitting him so hard that for a minute he had to struggle to identify from where the blow had come. He couldn't make out why her reaction was so strong. He couldn't make out why she wasn't saying anything. Dion had been ready for some kind of protest, anger even. In which case he would have told Miranda there had simply been no way of avoiding the risks of setting the boys to work without incurring the greater risks of every one of them taking off elsewhere. He could have talked her through it. He had been sure of that. But this looming, desperate darkness around her was something he had simply never experienced before.

Juan trailed into silence as even he became aware of the awful lump of feeling that had congealed in the room.

“Come on, we'd better get this finished,” Miranda said unsteadily.

She did the rest of the sampling in complete silence. When she was through, the children scuttled out promptly without having to be encouraged. In the empty space left by their departure, Dion could feel the threat coming off Miranda like sweat from an explosive.

“What the hell were you thinking of, letting them go off like that?” she managed to say.

“I had to. They'd all have left otherwise,” Dion began, steadily.

But he could feel his words failing to connect even before he had finished saying them. All Miranda had needed was something she could get a grip on. He might as well have said it was cold for the time of year.

“You fucking bastard,” she screamed, “You fucking pimp, you bastard. How dare you? They were mine, I tell you. Mine. And you just treat them like they're something to be bought and sold. You fucking pimp. Where is he? Where is he now? You tell me. He's probably been bundled into some fucking car and being used for filth. You bastard. You fucking black shit. How dare you. You don't give a damn about them. Anything could happen to them for all you care.”

Dion was dimly aware that what he knew and what she was screaming at him were two different things, but he was too busy warding off the kicks and blows to work out how different. He found he was getting angry himself. This wasn't due to him. He managed to grasp Miranda by the wrists and turn his body partly side-on to her so the kicks were mainly on his shins.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Miranda?” he shouted into her face. “I told you – they'd have all left if I hadn't let the oldest ones work. They'd have all gone, every one of them. They'd have gone long before your ten years was up.”

“Oh sure,” Miranda hissed into his face, her own expression twisted with exaggerated sarcasm. “You did it for their own good. You did it to help me. Bullshit. You did it because you didn't give a fuck. Why should you? You've got their money. There're still eleven of them left. They're disposable. Oh yes, and you did it for me, the most beautiful girl you'd ever seen,” said with particular venom. “Like hell you did it for me. You haven't done anything for me except damn near destroy everything I've worked for. You once said this was something I needed more than I've ever needed anything before. Fucking right it is. I need this. I need it to work. It's the last thing I've got left, and you just piss on it. I need this, Dion. You told me I needed it. You knew. So, why do you treat it like shit? Is that what you're about? Is that why you're stuck out in this shit-hole? – Because you treat people like shit?”

From habits acquired years back, Dion didn't waste time questioning how it could be that the controlled, over-educated woman he had got to know since they had started working together could be so suddenly transformed. He didn't stop and never would stop to fill in with any narrative about the motivations causing her to embark on ten years of crime, or how destabilising to her identity had been the pressures involved. Dion simply heard her saying that he treated people like shit. He thought of the time he put a bullet through the back of Maskel's head. He thought of how he'd made Miranda dismiss her guard in front of him. That was about as shit as he got. He'd never treated anyone like shit that hadn't had it coming to them, and more.

He grasped Miranda's wrists harder and started to shake her. He bellowed in her face, “Like shit, you say? Like shit? You tell me about how I treat people like shit? You fucking look at yourself. How did you treat me when you first turned up here? I saw you. I saw you look at me like I was the kind of filth you just knew hung out in places like this. I saw that, Miranda Whitlam, daughter of the same fucking Whitlam who made me leave my island. I saw you look at me like that and you been looking like that ever since. That's all you been doing. You just been waiting to show me I was the filth you always knew I was. But what you don't know is that every fucking move you make treats people like shit. Everything you do treats people like shit. You just treat people like they're something to look down on, something to be used, something for you to be fucking better than. We're all just servants to you, every fucking one of us, even my kids. My kids, do you hear? My kids. Not yours. I'm the one they came to. I'm the one who took them on. They had nothing to offer me, but I took them on. I just took them on, do you hear? I took them on without knowing what the hell I was going to do with them. You didn't do that. You took them on because you could use them. You took them on because you had the money to buy them. I didn't have money to buy them. They chose me because I could offer them a future, a real future, not a future as some fucking scientific experiment, a future as some fucking freak show that's had its body altered and been made to live forever. I had a real future for them and that's what I'm giving them. Because if I don't give it them they'll just up and go and then where will this thing be that's the most important thing in your life? It'll be fucking nowhere, Miranda. Nowhere, you hear? So what did I do? What did I fucking well do? I put it off as long as I could. And I did that because I didn't want to risk your fucking experiment. And when the kids couldn't stand it anymore, I sent them out with the best people I've got and took every fucking precaution I could so that your experiment wouldn't get messed. And in spite of all this, Jetter still manages to fuck up. There's nothing I can do about that, Miranda. There's nothing you can do about that. Nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing. You can't fucking well control them, Miranda. They're alive.”

As Dion's rage peaked, he was vaguely aware there was something odd about the concrete cubicle they were fighting in. It seemed larger, dirtier, infinitely more dangerous. The fleeting image made him feel sick and he thrust it aside – easily enough, in the whirl of rage they were both caught up in. But for a moment he had felt something more real and more violent than even the present he was embattled in.

His grip relaxed and Miranda broke free from him. She had a confused, angry look, like someone who had just been hit from behind. She shook the hair out of her eyes. Her body moved towards him as if about to strike out again, then she stumbled backwards, sitting heavily on the couch where the children usually lay as she took their blood.

Dion was breathing heavily. They didn't say anything to each other for some moments.

Eventually Miranda ventured, “How much more cash do you want? You know – to make sure they don't get into anything dangerous in between the times I see them.”

Dion paced the room some moments, trying to rearrange his thoughts. This was a sensible question and deserved a sensible reply. He stopped and shook his head, “Miranda, I can't stop them doing what they want to do. They're not so much interested in the money. They just want to work for me. That's why they've stuck around here so long. The experiment is just something extra for them.”

“But isn't there something you could do that would at least keep them a bit safer? Oh God, I don't know. Maybe not.”

Miranda had calmed sufficiently to know she was sounding foolish. Crime was not safe and couldn't be made safe; crime bosses didn't have hard hats or safety policies.

But Dion knew he had to come up with something if she was going to be able to keep coming back. He said thickly, still breathing hard, “Look, I could give my operators a bonus for bringing them back safe. In my kind of work, you're on your own when you go out on a job. That means the kids get left to make their own mistakes. If my company men got a pay-off for driving a bit more fucking sense into the kids' heads, that might help.”

“How much would you need?”

“Don't know. I guess the higher the bonus, the more care they'll take. You could offer so much it would be more worth their while to sit them in McDonald's for the day. But the kids wouldn't have that – they want to work. And I don't want them getting singled out as something that special. That way even more questions get asked than I've been asked already and the questions keep on coming until people start getting answers. Make it thirty percent of the average take.”