In World City (23 page)

“It's cold,” Dion said uneasily. “Let's go inside.”

“Don't worry. It'll pass,” Miranda said dreamily. “The wind will pass. It'll all pass. It's okay.”

Dion, too, was feeling himself cast adrift, only he viewed the receding shoreline with less equanimity. He had a life he valued, with a future and plans. He looked at Miranda, searching for some way of pulling her back. But she was moving too fast and she was already out too far and she was taking him with her. He thought of the car he had come in, the roads he had taken, the wine glass he now held in his hand. The images made him anxious and instinctively he thrust them away. Only the image of the person in front of him offered any kind of certainty. For the first time, Miranda Whitlam seemed to be truly opening herself up to him. He held onto the image before him, beautiful beyond belief, and let the rest go where it would.

And the darkness passed, just as Miranda had prophesied. The shadow that had come with the wind lifted and they were once more bathed in warm autumn sunlight. To Dion Miranda appeared as beautiful as when he had first come upon her, deep in the midst of his island, back when he had been looking for the place where he could live forever. But there was a difference now. She knew he was there and she was inviting him to join her.

As for Miranda, the familiar net of structures and connections that all believe to be their defining appearance was finally beginning to break apart. Its strands were separating, opening up a view onto somewhere unknown, and unknowable in any familiar terms. The image that came to her was of the wildwood, covering Europe forever. She was in the depths of that great forest now and the twilight was a receding boundary, the deep indigo over the river dissolving the forms of the visible, making them transparent and insubstantial.

With her increasing distance from the objective world, the trees became presences, like memories of someone she herself had been, once upon a time, deep in the past. The river was a sky she looked down into, or an ocean current, a track into limitlessness; and the stonework of the terrace was a craft adrift in the midst of it all, something conceivably solid but cut loose in a boundless sea of awareness. The experience she was dissolving into was familiar as a ghost, something so deeply known it was awful. She felt she knew the world she was falling into better than she knew herself.

Memories moved in Dion, reluctantly, stiffly, like an old door opening after centuries of disuse. But the door opened enough for him to say, “I had a grandmother. I haven't thought about her in years. She was a sorceress.”

Adrift as Miranda was, Dion's sudden memory seemed the most sensible thing he could have said to her. “Tell me about her,” she asked. “What did she teach you?”

A breeze, tenuous as thought, passed between them. Dion took in the twilight, the yellowing leaves, the river, the old stones of the terrace, still warm from the afternoon sun. He would not have been surprised to see his grandmother walk up the path that led through the trees from the river. He held the image in his mind and, letting it intensify, said, “My grandmother lived in this world every minute. I'm remembering something she once said to me. She said – do you know what she said?” Dion laughed, suddenly embarrassed by his memory but determined to keep going. “She said, ‘This world, young Dion, this world made of dream stuff'.”

Dion laughed again, trying to ease the immediacy of the challenging old voice, but trying all the same for his grandmother's tone: grating, harsh and warm, like the coals being stirred in the metal drums the Waste inhabitants stood by in winter. “She said, ‘I know you think this world made of all those bits and pieces they teach you the names of in school – all that solid stuff. You think that, eh? Most peoples think that. No reason why not – no one drowns in the ground – ‘less it's been raining hard. But not so, Dion. Not bits and pieces. Not solid stuff, this world. This world made of dream stuff'.” Dion gestured with the same peremptory impatience his grandmother would have used then, settling more into the role, “‘But this dream stuff different from what you get in your bed at night. This is the dream stuff you tell what to do, stuff you manage, like you was the plantation manager telling the casuals up from Soufrière what to do next. It useful enough, same as them. And everyone agree pretty much what need doing. But all this dream stuff is only what you can pick and choose, like in the plantation. Now, young Dion, you try pickin' and choosin' the hate that Matthew Lasalle feel for that plantation man who bought him out for piss. There's no ruler you'll ever put beside that hate, but hate is killing the crop sure as any damn beetle. That how well Matthew Lasalle can hate',” and Dion stopped dead, shocked by the immediacy of his memory, emptying his glass of wine in a single swallow, trying to close the door.

But Miranda was sinking still faster. Fleeting images of her life came to her like fragments seen from a departing train, eyeblinks as the speed gathered. They had all the rigidity of a snapshot – which was indeed their essence – and both fragments and snapshot were constructed specifically to be proof against this immaterialisation she and Dion were now drowning each other in. Miranda was aware of a fleeting coldness as each image passed, a fixity that she shook off as each picture came to her. Then, just before she let go completely, she caught sight of herself injecting the boys with her cocktail of molecular machines that would ensure they would outlive even the oldest. Her eyes opened wide and she forced Dion to hold her gaze. She wanted to scream and laugh, both at once. Really, it was the only kind of release that would do, the only outlet for the insane mix of horror and humour that was sweeping through her.

Then, recovering herself, she said levelly, “Dion, it's true what you once said. World City is where you can keep it all forever. But it's a system of dying. World City is the death where you can keep it all. It's like midwinter when the wind starts to blow down on the North Europe plain. Everything becomes still. Everything finds its place. That's a system of dying that makes way for new life. World City is another system, only it doesn't work to make way for new life. The way World City works is to set up structures that look like life but aren't. Within those structures life starves to death. After a bit, everything finds its place. Only there's no new life.”

“Why are you saying this, Miranda?” Dion asked faintly. He was hanging on to her image with all he had. In the great incoming tide of what she was saying, it was the only surety he could find.

“Perfection – that's what World City is working towards,” Miranda came back. “World City is working towards a perfect appearance, a perfect simulation of all that we are. Everything we value will have its equivalent, its counterpart, its simulation. And it will be a simulation that can live forever. So anything you or I might actually be will be valued at nothing. Each one of us will be no more than a fleeting moment in the great fixity of perfection that will be World City. We will construct World City out of the appearances we most value, and those appearances will last forever, and we will be left as nothing.”

Dion's twin stares at him in the dimness of the perfectly appointed hotel room.

“What's your name,” Dion asks, hoping for more time.

“What do you think?” comes the withering reply.

The chill in Dion deepens. He takes a breath and asks, “Why did she send you?”

His twin regards him quizzically. “So let's suppose you scared, man. Let's suppose you believe in me, because if you do then you gotta be scared.” The boy sits lightly on the bed opposite and says, “You know her, don't you Mister. She says she owe you a favour.”

“She owes me no favours,” Dion says. It is the surest thing he knows.

The boy nods his head from side to side, neither affirming nor denying. “She's dropped her name since you knew her. Calls herself all kinds of stuff: Fer de Moniac, Miranda Mashkit, Miss Montserrat. She crazy. She say you get this offer because you dealt straight with her, and with the kids she worked on. She say you came out badly from the deal. So you get first benefit of what she got to offer all you World Citizens.”

With some effort Dion raises himself up on his elbows, looks at the boy and says, “So what's she got to offer?”

“What she's got to offer is the real thing,” his twin says with unnerving finality.

“What real thing?”

The boy stands up in front of him and says, “Immortality, life eternal – what you fuckers have been wantin' ever since you knew you was going to die and all those locks and keys and things was not gonna to make one damn bit of difference. That's what she got to offer. Forget the injections, the targeted insertions, the repair promoters – all that shit, that'll only get you a hundred years more at the outside. No, I'm talkin' about the real thing – immortality, life forever, cheatin' Death.”

The boy is like an angel in judgement and Dion looks up at him with bleak foreboding. He does not doubt that something real is on offer.

Just before prophesy had taken her completely, Miranda Whitlam had caught sight of a picture of herself injecting the boys with her cocktail of molecular machines that might even get them a hundred years more on their lives. She had been moved by the image to scream and laugh.

Had she really done that thing?

Done what thing?

The words for what she had understood in that moment were only put together much later. But unlike many such words, they came close to the truth. “It was like this,” she said to Dion, as they lay in bed together talking in that easy flow of associations that comes after complete abandon. “I died that evening and death was not what I thought it was. It's true I was trying to hold death back in what I was doing with the boys. I was trying to hold death back in all the work I'd ever done. That's the way it is in World City. You want to take it with you and since you can't, you want to live forever. That's what I did with the kids. I operated on them so new ways could be found of keeping death away. I operated on them with little molecular machines; little, hard, predictable devices that would harden up the predictable little bodies I had made of them, and myself and everyone else. But that's why I wanted to laugh – I wanted to laugh at the irony of it. Because by working that way, I worked to guarantee the death I was trying to avoid. Gain control and you die into nothingness. Lose control and you die into eternity. That was why we went and found that room to spend the night together where I died again and again.”

The world Miranda Whitlam returned to after their night together was a shadow play. The plans she'd had and the schemes she had set in motion were moves in a game she had no sense of ever having been interested in. She enjoyed seeing the children though. Children? It was eight years into the project and the oldest, Nial, was nearly eighteen. “We ought to tell them, Dion,” she said one morning, waking up beside him in some World City hotel room. “We ought to tell them what we did.”

“Why?” He agreed with her, but wanted to hear her reasons.

“Because I don't want to make anything of it anymore – just see it through and if it works, hand it over for free to the Ageing Initiative.”

“Why tell the boys now if you don't want to make anything of it?”

“They need to know before firm evidence starts coming through.”

“Isn't that the time to tell them?”

“No, that's when not to tell them. Tell them then and it'll just get fixed in some little history they'll put together for themselves – past or future. The only real gift I can give them now is uncertainty, the kind of uncertainty that might allow them to fall through the gaps in all this.”

The turn of her head took in the perfectly appointed hotel room, its spotless carpets, heavy curtains, desk, hotel headed paper, World City, the Waste, all the things she had sought to preserve for a few years longer in the eyes of reprogrammed bodies the world over. “They may hate me forever for what I've done, which'll just fix all this more firmly for them. But that's a risk I have to take. You know I can't choose for them. All I can do is help them to die in life not death.”

Dion leaned over and kissed her. Her talk meant nothing to him and he had no desire to make anything of it. In their nights together, he had found himself with no option but to drown in her, to give himself up entirely. She seemed to have invited him. She had certainly accepted him. Her beauty and regard had finally closed over him after years of desire.

Miranda felt his body warm and taut against her. She stared at the ceiling a moment longer then rolled over against him, returning his kisses. She still melted every time, from the first touch of his skin against hers to the time outside of time when he was deep inside her and her whole body was a smooth, great wave that grew greater and then wilder until she broke apart in some helpless instant.

Afterwards, when they had subsided into mutual stillness, Dion asked, “So when are you going to tell them?”

“Don't know,” she murmured, “Don't know whether to tell them one by one or all together. Don't know. There'll be a moment.”

*

The moment came when Nial said to her, up in Dion's Place, “Miranda, I need to know what you're doing to us. Outside of here I'm a company man. I'm running my own life. But in here I feel I'm still a child. It's still the same thing we had when I was nine. The only difference is I can talk to you now. I don't know what you shot us up with. I don't know what you're finding. I don't even know what you're looking for. Come on, I need to know. It's not even like I need the money anymore. The cash is handy, but that's all. I need to know what it's all been about, if it's still going to feel worthwhile.”

Miranda took in Nial, his words, the concrete box of Dion's Place. They shouldn't be meeting here. It was out of date. It was a little, safe, secret place for small, wild street animals. Nial wasn't one of those anymore and hadn't been for some time. Even the youngest were out of place here. She ought to be taking the samples in some swell clinic commensurate with their growing standing in the world. She ought to tell them about the project at a fashionable restaurant or cafe, a place where they could celebrate how far they had come together.

She said, “We're finished with this place. There's a clinic in Cologne I know. I can rent consulting rooms there, say over three days each month, and you guys can come when you like over that time. God knows, you're all heading out that way most days. You can take your time; stop over for lunch or dinner – talk about the project or whatever.

“I'll tell you what it's about, Nial. What I gave you in that injection was a mixture of virus-based vectors that carried a whole range of cell function modifiers. Theoretically, they should put fifty to seventy years on your lives, even a hundred maybe, providing you don't get yourselves shot to pieces in the meantime. What do you say to that?”

Nial was a thinker. He never said much to anything until he'd thought it over, sometimes for a long time. He showed about as much reaction as if he'd been told his blood group. “I'll think about it, Miranda,” he said.

Jetter, who by the grace of Miranda's bonuses to the minders had survived long enough to gain some sense, was still not a thinker. “One hundred fucking years, Miranda? You mean I get one hundred years extra? One hundred years! What am I going to do with it all? I could get to do anything with all that time.”

“I don't know if it's going to work yet, Jetter.”

“Course it's going to work. You're a smart lady, Miranda. You wouldn't have taken this on unless you knew it was going to work.”

“It's taking longer than I expected for the benefits to show through. Don't get too excited.”

“Longer to show through? Your lab's fucked up, that's all. Go and turn it inside out. I bet you find it's working already.”

She was working down by age. Biv was next. He looked scared. “What do you mean, Miranda – viral-based vectors?”

She explained.

“But couldn't they be doing all kinds of things you hadn't expected. I mean, they could be causing cancers or mutations or something.”

She talked about all the safety testing she had done. Biv still looked uneasy but nodded his acceptance.

The younger they got the less it meant, though it still meant a lot, even to the youngest, who preserved some of the child's sense of grown-ups and their plans as a natural force, something that happened to them, like wind or rain.

Nial, Jetter and Biv's reactions – reserved judgement, excitement, fear – were typical of the whole, although excitement and fear predominated. The boys argued over whose was the right reaction. Excitement simply dismissed fear, whilst fear sought more indirectly to undermine excitement's confidence. However, it was reserved judgement – Nial, Mayer and Mysté – that recognised the real problems.

Nial sat with Miranda and Dion in the warmth of the glass pavement-extension of a Cologne bistro, watching the snow fall.

“Miranda?” Nial asked, “Me and a couple of the others have been talking. What happens when you're sure this treatment you've given us works?”

“I tell you it's worked.”

“Then what?”

“I start telling other people.”

“What other people?”

“Have you heard of the Ageing Initiative?”

Nial nodded. He had been researching hard since last talking to Miranda.

“I tell them, I show them the data and I hand it all over – but on a lot of conditions, aimed at safeguarding yourselves.”

“What do we get?”

“Privileged status in World City and regular income. That's what I'd be holding out for.”

“Suppose we don't want any of that?”

“That's why I tell you first. It gives you the chance to cut and run.”

“That puts us out of work.”

Miranda nodded soberly. “I've realised that – now. It never occurred to me before that any of you would want out. How much compensation would you consider?”

Nial shrugged, making it clear the sum was not an immediate issue. He was drinking red wine and picked up his glass. He took several widely-spaced sips, staring across the soft whiteness of the square outside and the scattered figures bundled against the cold. He said, “Miranda, I don't think we'd be allowed to disappear. I think people would try and hunt us down. I've read about your Ageing Initiative and I think we'd be too interesting to lose. You've made freaks out of us, Miranda.”

She leaned back in her chair, pulling her hair back from her forehead with both hands. “Yes I have, Nial. That's right. When I started this project, I thought the extra life I'd given you was all anyone could ever want. I thought delaying death would be a magnificent achievement. I don't think that anymore. I don't think that way about death anymore. What way do you think about death, Nial?”

Nial filled his wine glass from the bottle they were sharing. After another half-glass, he said, “I'm alive. I don't think about death. I'll think about death when I'm dead.”

Miranda laughed, “It sounds as if there's not much I can teach you then. There must be something you want, Nial.”

Nial thought some more. “I wanted anonymity,” he said eventually. “I wanted to be a complete unknown. That way I'd have been free to move around how I wanted. I'd have set up operations all over the place – World City even. But I can't do that now because I've been set up to be one of the most famous twelve people around. I'm still trying to work out what that means.”

“Why don't you stick around and find out?”

*

Nial stuck around just twenty-four hours. Then he was gone, along with Mayer and Mysté.

The debate between the fearful and the excited intensified. The fearful – Biv, Tel, Dom and, for all the status accorded him by his eye patch, Ferrie – assumed Nial, Mayer and Mysté had left out of fear. The excited – Juan, Face, Sigi, Georgio and Jetter – assumed they'd left because the excitement was too much to take and they wanted to get on with their lives. Neither side thought about what was actually going to happen to them.

Miranda thought, and thought the ones capable of learning how they might fall through the gaps between Waste and World City were now all gone. That left the others and the sooner some structure was put in place the better chance they had of handling the consequences of what she had done to them. She said to Dion, “I'm thinking of handing the whole thing over right now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, I just don't see any point in my being involved anymore, not with the experiment anyway. I'd still like to see the boys though, arrange access, that kind of thing. So I'm going to hand it all over to the institute and the institute can decide how to deal with the Ageing Initiative. Burger'll be over the moon, even though he'll pretend to be outraged. I want to do this before Sylvie leaves, too. She's had some involvement in the science, even though she doesn't know it.”

“I thought you said Burger was dead against gene-level interventions. Are you sure he'll only be outraged?”

“Pretty sure. But he'll get the directorship and all the space he could wish for so he'll find a way of dealing with it. And he'll find a way of dealing with the boys and they'll find a way of dealing with him. The ones who are scared will be only too glad to be part of something bigger than them. They'll be financially secure and with some of the finest clinicians and scientists the world over giving them their best attention. The others'll be okay as well. They'll have a lot of fun with it.”

“But what about you?”

“I've had it, Dion. I can't do this work anymore. I want to go and lose myself on your island. I want you to come with me. Do you want to come with me?”

Dion hadn't wanted his island when she had offered it him before but now he was lost in her. He didn't mind where he went, as long as it was with her. “Sure,” he said.

“Then let's go.”

Dion waved a hand. “We need to get the kids sorted first. When do you want to tell Burger?”

“After New Year. And I'll tell the boys then that I'm handing it all over. I think they'll be okay with it.”

“What about the ones who've gone?”

“They're slipping through the gaps just how I wanted them to. They're on their own, and that's how they wanted it. They'll be working out ways to not get hunted down when this thing blows open. They'll find a way, I'm sure of it. I miss them, though. They don't matter as far as the experiment is concerned. The last update Sylvie gave me the trend was damn near significant. If it doesn't come good with the last six months of samples, it's never going to.”

“How would a negative finding affect the ones who've stayed?”

“Dion, it's going to be positive. There's no way it can't work.”