In World City (25 page)

The afternoon has faded further into cloud and rain and the room is almost dark. Dion raises a hand to flick on the table lamp. The boy gazes into the light, eyes burning and Dion feels old and empty. He looks up and asks, “How's it done?... This life forever... cheating Death.”

His twin stares into the light of the table lamp. “You gotta make that question more personal.”

“Okay, what do I have to do?”

“You have to kill me.”

Dion remains sitting on the bed, silent. His twin looks at him for a long moment then reaches into his tattered jeans and produces a knife. “You have to sacrifice me.” He hands Dion the knife, “Here, now.”

Dion takes the knife, looking at it as if it is a dish mop or lavatory brush, a commonplace object used for unwelcome chores. Still holding it, he lets his hand fall and looks up at the boy again. “I don't understand,” he says.

“That's right,” says his twin, “You don't.” Then, squatting so his face is level with Dion's, “A life for a life. That's what's on offer: your life for my life.”

“How does it work?”

Dion's twin begins pacing the room again.

“The way it works is you get given your life, you live it then you give it up so there's room for new life. It's the new life and the new life and the new life that keeps it all going, Mister Dion. Death must have your life, else everything finishes. I'm your life. Sacrifice me and you get to live forever.”

The words fall on Dion like rain, old leaves, evidences of some great, natural cycle that, bereft of spirit as he is, he would gladly give himself up to.

“Why's she doing it?” he asks, temporising.

The boy paces the room more quickly.

“She's doing it for the good of World City,” he says, with only a trace of sarcasm. “You know we got twins lined up for the fund managers, the regulatory agencies, all those people who told her she was bad for giving them what they wanted, all those people who built this world we're in right now, with its locks and doors and cameras, all set up so they can keep out Death; all of them who hired people like her to fix them up for real; all of them who kicked her out because she went about it in a way that offended their lilywhite consciences. Well now all those lilywhite people is going to get to know what it really takes. What I just told you, Mister Dion, is the only way it can be done. They're goin' to have to kill their twin. You know some of those lilywhite people is going to get to know themselves for the first time.”

Dion smiles. A sudden lightness comes over him. “So am I one of those people?” he asks, with a kind of relief.

The boy shakes his head, “Not necessarily, but maybe you get to know yourself for the first time.

“But you gotta believe,” the boy adds fiercely, “That's the price of entry. You gotta believe, same price for everyone.”

“And if I don't believe?”

“If you won't believe,” the boy replies, emphatically changing the word, “Then it won't work.”

“But what's in it for you?”

“Oh, I've got my reasons,” the boy replies easily, moving around the room now with a dancer's lightness.

He has his reasons, Dion thinks; and the equation hangs between them, unstated but entirely obvious. If Dion won't believe and sacrifice his twin, then his twin, who believes with incandescent fury, will take back the knife and use it himself.

The boy stops to face Dion and they share an absolute conviction. Both are silent, hardly breathing. Dion gazes back. He begins to raise the hand that holds the knife, ready to offer it to his twin, ready to give himself up. He is ready now, he realises, to expiate not only his abandonment and attempted betrayal of Miranda Whitlam – or whatever she calls herself now – but something else as well, something even greater than her, something he has betrayed not only in her but in himself. He hears the far-away whisper of the air change. Images come to him unbidden – a land breeze at evening, wind-blown grass, high mountain peaks, beaches of black sand, a mountain valley high in a jungle-clad island. Then the world caves in and a great upwelling of memories rushes over him, washing away in a smooth great wave the obscuring fabric of appearances he has invested himself with. The way is clear for Dion to look back down through every moment he has ever known, down through the desolate wealth of World City, the schemes that have entangled him, the arid exchange of material riches; all the way down through his rejection of Miranda Whitlam, his acceptance of Miranda Whitlam, the alienation of his youth that led him inevitably to the marginal activities in the World City economy, down through his arrival in Europe. All the way back to his childhood, he has perfect recall.

Dion says to his twin, his own face shining now, “I've lived forever already. I'll tell you.” And, with his memories more present than the room they occupy, Dion speaks of his island, of its jungle-clad mountains, its dark, wave-washed beaches, its rivers and waterfalls, his grandmother and the death of a white cockerel up on the Cabrits in the deep, indigo twilight.

Dion looks into his twin's eyes, “I've lived forever already,” he concludes, “What use would I have for immortality?”

The boy gazes back, transfixed, living Dion's memories as if they are his own. Dion places the knife beside him on the bed, gets up and pours two whiskies from the room's drinks cabinet. He sits back opposite the boy and hands a glass across. His twin sips slowly, regularly, as if avoiding anything that might draw him away from the images. One sip goes astray and the boy chokes. He looks up at Dion, confused, back in the present, and Dion watches him struggle for his previous assurance.

“You know what's in it for me,” the boy says angrily.

Dion speaks into his glass, “You get to sacrifice me.”

His twin says, “That's the chance we get. They gotta believe. If they won't, then it's open season for us.”

“And I believe, but I don't want what you're offering. So you get your chance anyway.”

Dion laughs. He suddenly understands the irony she has contrived to confront World City with. He says, “If they won't believe, then it's open season for you. But if they will believe then what they find out about themselves leaves them wanting to be sacrificed anyway. I know them. I know what it feels like at the core of World City.

“What I found out may be different,” he adds, “But it comes to the same thing: in the end we're not going to want to keep going. She's given you good odds you know.”

There is a terrible bitterness in the boy's reply. “Listen, Mister Dion, I never had no Paradise to measure my life against. I set out ready to take what came, whether it was the grave or the whole of World City. You didn't want what I got to offer then I'd take your life and just keep on living, keep on going, maybe get to be King of World City in a hundred years' time.”

“So, what's the problem?”

The boy's eyes are gazing back down Dion's memories. “I can't kill you,” he says hopelessly, and Dion feels the identity between them as absolute.

There is a long silence, the boy pacing desperately like a caged animal, and Dion sitting on the hotel bed cast in stone. Then Dion reaches inside his coat, “Listen, let's try it a different way.” He pulls out his personal file, all the credit chips, addresses, numbers, contacts, account identifications, the strands of information that tie him and all other citizens to World City. He hands it all to the boy, “All yours. You don't have to make a sacrifice of me. I can do that.” He rises from the bed and steps across the floor. He embraces his twin then walks out of the door back into the Waste, where he will walk, free to let Death or Life take him, perhaps to lie down under an old tree and dissolve with the fallen leaves into the winter ground. Or perhaps to find his way back to the woman who was once Miranda Whitlam, operator now of all that is not World City, who in Dion's Place once offered him his island.