In World City (8 page)

They had been home only a few days when Miranda Whitlam's father told her she would have to go to school. He said she needed to be in the company of children like herself and he had identified somewhere he could trust. He said it was called Spielman's.

“Why can't I have another tutor?” Miranda asked. Ever since she heard Mr Staels tell her father she needed to go to school, she had been working out her responses. She had even checked out Spielman's on the web to confirm it really existed.

“You need more experience, Miranda. You need to learn to get to know what it's like to be out in the world. Tutors won't give you that. Listen, the place I've found for you has some new ways of teaching. It's called ‘teaching you how to be an operator'. You learn how to make things happen the way you want them to.”

“Why can't I have Lissel back? – I liked her.”

“I've called her already. She'll give you some lessons to help you get ready. You get three months' intensive tuition, then we go away for the summer and after that you start at the school.”

So her father had discussed this with Lissel already, and Lissel had been prepared to come back for just three months. Miranda felt her regard for her old tutor cool. She had liked Lissel because Lissel treated her as an equal, in contrast to her earlier tutors, who had treated her as a child. But she had also liked her because she had always been there, at least until they were forced to move. The thought of Lissel being willing to just come and go was unwelcome to Miranda. She would prefer to be tutored in these few remaining months by a complete stranger.

But she was going to have to salvage something out of a situation she clearly had very little choice in. She asked, “Will I learn how to change things like you do with those lines you move around – with your ‘hand'?”

Catching the focus of her interest, her father said with exaggerated conviction, “Yes, that's definitely one of the things you'll learn there.”

Miranda heard the exaggeration, but still thought there might be something in it. The urgency of her need to move those lines had eased a little – especially since leaving the island – but only a little. She still yearned for her father's powers. If she could only move those lines like he had, there would be not the slightest chance of her ending up in the wildwood, or in the place where she had seen that boy die. She asked her father, “How did you learn to be an operator?”

“I never needed to learn,” he said, dismissively. Then, catching himself, “- no more than you'll need to. But it helps to get to know some of the techniques.”

Miranda felt a check in her rising enthusiasm. “But I don't know how to make those lines move, I don't know how to make them move so they'll make things change how I want them to. Do you mean you never learned that – you just did it?”

“Listen, I only move those lines around on the screen because it's convenient. It's like using the automatic channel changer on the screen instead of getting up and pressing the buttons on the set. What matters is that you have a screen to operate and to have that – and much more – you need to be an operator.”

He paused, then, decisively, “Miranda, being an operator is about working the world. You just need to know that everything around you is there for you to use and all you have to do is tell it what to do. It'll provide you with work to do, then people to do the work for you. You just need to know that it's all there for you. Anyway, you couldn't help but be an operator any more than one of our young trout couldn't help but swim, or a foal run around the paddock. You're going to school to be among people like yourself and to be taught by people who understand you, who accept that an operator is what you'll be in life. It'll also give you a chance to make some real money – Spielman's expects you to make at least the cost of your time there. If you don't, I'm expected to pay out five times the shortfall. But you'll succeed. I've no doubt about that.”

Miranda still felt her enthusiasm cooling. If it was all supposed to come so naturally to her, why did she feel her inability to move those lines so keenly?

Seeing her uncertainty, her father continued more insistently, “Listen Miranda, all those lines you see on my screen, they just make it easier – easier to extend yourself and make things work how you want them to. Everything is connected now. What you need to do is learn how things are connected and how to work the connections. So they won't teach you maths at Spielman's, like you've been learning from the screens; they'll teach you credit transfer and investment, shares and futures; they won't teach you sport or art, instead they'll teach you about the entertainments' industry and how to put on a show; and they won't teach you science and technology, they'll teach you information management and product development. They won't teach you how to be just a cog in the machine – they'll teach you how to work the machine. Do you see what I mean?”

Miranda nodded. She did see and, to her surprise, was reassured. Having the words somehow made it easier to make sense of things – like her detestation of that island, where her chances of extending or applying herself to anything had been non-existent. And the wildwood – a place so chaotic and amorphous it was impossible to get a handle on anything – a place where you left behind all that was familiar – a place where anything might be done to you.

*

Spielman's was in Switzerland. Lissel and Donnell accompanied Miranda to the airport. She gave Lissel a rather stiff farewell and Lissel gave her a brisk hug in return. A private jet flew Miranda to Zurich and a helicopter took her up into the mountains. Donnell accompanied her all the way.

Seen from the outside, the school was a scattering of traditional wood chalets set in meadows. The old pastures swelled out of the land, rising up behind the grounds to merge with an enclosing rampart of mountains high above. Inside, the chalets resembled the more functional luxury hotels favoured by business people the world over, but with rather more wood showing.

Miranda was taken to her room, which had a veranda and a spectacular view facing south-west over the valley. It was one of the best outlooks, but she would only have noticed had it not been. She was aware, however, that she liked the room better than her one at home. The bare boards, Chinese rug and pervasive smell of pine and polish she found pleasant, and there was an agreeable lack of the kind of clutter that had already begun to accumulate in her room after they had returned home.

Miranda also preferred the view. She could go out onto her veranda in the chilly early morning and gaze into the blue, open spaces between the mountain peaks. The brilliant air and light contrasted wonderfully with the dark expanses of ancient forest that filled the mountain valleys. The perimeter woods reminded her of home, but she could see so much further beyond now, up into the great expanses of sky and mountain. She also knew the trees were mainly there to hide the surrounding ring of electrified fences, dogs and guards. These, too, reminded her of home. It was strange though that, unlike home, the absolute security she was surrounded by was never openly acknowledged.

*

“You are here to learn how to operate the world in the same way that your parents have so successfully done. Your choice of parents, if I may put it that way, has ensured that you yourselves have done most of the work necessary. We are here merely to give you the necessary skills.”

There were seven new children and the principal talked to them in her reception room over what she called a ‘working breakfast'. They were not to be assigned to classes in the way Miranda had read about in the school stories Lissel had given her. Instead, they were each to join a company. The chalet where her room was located belonged to a company, and she would eat with her company, talk with her company and work with her company. For their first year, each new recruit would be considered a trainee, regardless of their age on joining. After that, they rose in their company hierarchy according to ability, still regardless of age. The principal explained that they would be promoted according to the scale of the operations they were capable of managing and the success of the innovations they made. If they didn't become CEO before they finished, each one of them was at least expected to leave having made enough credit to cover their entire education. The teachers were called consultants and expected to be treated as such.

Miranda spent her first term getting the feel of the place. She noticed how the steady pressure that operated in the companies suited her. There were no opportunities for boredom and she would willingly work far into the evening. Labour was divided within a company so there was little personal competition to irritate her. There was, however, intense competition between companies as they vied for hegemony within the programmed market simulations that provided a safety screen between their own efforts and the real world of profit and loss. Miranda was told that in their final year the screen was taken down and they were expected to operate for real as an associate in one of a range of businesses that cultivated the school. The few who were incompetent or couldn't be bothered had been quietly excluded by then, so those that remained were a genuine asset to any organisation that took them on. That was when they were expected to make up the costs of their education. With all this in mind, Miranda was disturbed by how immature some of the younger ones seemed, but she was also aware how the steady peer pressure of the company organisation sorted them out fast. The majority of the pupils appeared sensible.

There was something else Miranda noticed in her first months, which she found unaccountably disturbing and which had nothing to do with the education she was absorbing so readily. It was simply the feeling of the year passing in the alpine valley. First the clear light of late summer with its warm sun and cool air. Then the early morning mists hanging over the trees lower down the valley, the yellowing of the leaves, and the first grey rains sweeping across the meadows. And finally, shortly before she was returned to her father's estate, the sharp night frosts, followed by the great, intimate blanket of Christmas snow that whirled past the windows for days on end.

At night Miranda walked barefoot out onto her veranda to feel the snow between her toes. Snow was everywhere and she could hear it slithering off the trees with soft, powdery thumps. She would stand watching her breath mist in the icy starlight barely conscious of the pain from the coldness on her feet. Then she would shake the spell from herself and scurry back to the warmth and light of her room.

Just before she was about to return home, Miranda received a Christmas card. It had on the front a painting of a town covered in snow, with a broad river curving through its centre. The text inside told her this was Basel, painted a long time ago by someone she had never heard of. The writing on the other side of the card wished her season's greetings from William Burger.

Who was William Burger? The name sounded familiar, but a kind of block came up when she tried to remember him. Miranda felt slightly unnerved to have been sent a card by someone she didn't know, at a place where few people knew she was. She concentrated on the feeling of being unnerved and finally remembered the island and the young man who had come with the two older men. That had been William Burger – the one who had told her he was working on making people live forever.

Why should William Burger remember her? She had barely remembered him and she was sure she had made even less impression on him than he on her. Miranda wondered whether she should send him a card in return. But there was no address. She could remember her father telling her the name of the institute where Burger was working, but she couldn't remember what the name was, and she didn't feel like bothering her father to find out. It was odd though that William Burger should have taken the trouble to find out where she was.

*

At home for Christmas, Miranda noticed how different the house felt from the agitated time before they had left for the island. Her father seemed relaxed and in good humour. He had a lot visitors and dinners and there was a woman who spent more time with him than the other visitors did. Miranda didn't like her. She was beautiful and young, and said things that didn't sound sincere. Miranda was relieved to get back to school where, for the remainder of her first year, she play-acted being her father, adopting the mannerisms she had seen him use while at work in his study. Beneath this appearance, however, she was developing her own style and beneath her developing style, there was an expanding intelligence. This intelligence was too much a part of her for Miranda to be conscious of, but the school had identified it rapidly and ensured Miranda received appropriate opportunities. During the spring term, she was given a clothes factory in West Africa to manage, which she did so well that for the summer the executive board of her company gave her an electronics production facility in one of the outer islands of Indonesia to set up. After an initial setback arising from her failure to take into account some local traditions regarding the proposed factory site, she did well at that too. She was told she would make project-management executive at the start of her second year, and she accepted the anticipated progression as a matter of course. Why shouldn't she be a project-management executive? – Or CEO for that matter? She didn't doubt that she would be equal to the task.

But none of this was about changing the world by moving glittering lines on a screen. She mentioned to her company's executive vice-chairman what she had seen her father do. He said, “Oh, you don't need to bother with that yet. It's a handy convenience if you're trying to keep personnel light at the top end, but it's no more than that. The IT consultant'll give you a run-down if you want.”

Miranda went to see the IT consultant who told her that what she had seen her father working with was no more than a handy convenience for keeping personnel light at the top end. Miranda insisted on a demonstration though, and spent an hour being the managing director of a pharmaceuticals combine. She found it hard to accord the prosaic transfers of personnel, materials and credit she found herself performing, with the powers and hopes she had invested in the procedure. She might as well have been issuing the kind of e-mails that her managers could have issued and she said so to the IT consultant. He looked surprised and told her that was essentially what the programme did. Most business situations, he said, embodied no more than a limited number of options, which could be handled by a limited number of formal instructions. All that the programme did was select the formal instructions appropriate to the move that had been made on the master screen, and make sure that those instructions found their way to the right people.