This Other Eden (42 page)

She
found herself half-quoting some Shakespeare she had heard long ago. “‘This
royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of
Mars, this other Eden . .

‘Richard
the Second,’
said Max, who had done a lot of acting
classes.

‘I
thought it was an old Claustrosphere advert,’ said Rosalie.

‘That
too. Good choice, don’t you think? It certainly sums up this place.’

There
was a long silence, broken only by the soft buzzing of the bees, special bees
that could make honey out of old toenail clippings, lived for fifteen years and
had no sting.

Finally
Rosalie spoke again.

‘Max.
Let’s close it up.’

‘What
do you mean?’

‘You
know what I mean. Let’s shut the BioLock.’

‘It is
shut, darling. The cycles don’t work unless it’s sealed.’

‘No,
let’s shut it properly. Put it on the time-safe.’

‘You
mean… with us on the inside, don’t you?’

Rosalie
did not reply, instead she took Max in her arms and kissed him. It was a long
kiss, passionate and committed, but with also just a hint of sadness, perhaps
even despair.

Time-safe.

All Claustrospheres were
equipped with a time-safe lock. This was because people feared the constancy of
their resolve. Once faced with a lifetime inside a small shelter, they
suspected that their will might crack after a while. That they might be tempted
to ignore the numerous indicators and gauges with which their shelters were
equipped, and open the door to have a look outside to see if things were really
as bad as they were being told. If they did this while the outside environment
remained poisonous, then those poisons would enter the ‘Sphere and hopelessly
compromise the eco-system within, killing everybody inside. It had therefore
been decided that when the Rat Run finally came, the authorities would issue an
estimate as to when the environment might be safe enough again for people to
emerge. It might be one year, it might be a hundred. Whatever it was, the
occupants of a Claustrosphere would set their timer for that duration. Once
set, the BioLock would not open under any circumstances until the time had
elapsed. This system was thought particularly necessary in the case of the big
community BioShelters. People recognised that it would only take one crazy
lunatic to crack up and open the door, and they preferred the idea of voluntary
imprisonment to mass poisoning.

Adam
and Eve.

Rosalie released Max from
the tension of her embrace. He was a little stunned.

‘You
want us to lock ourselves in?’

‘Sure,
why not? People will be forced to pretty soon anyway, if not this year, maybe
the next. I was an environmental activist, I know how bad things are.’ Rosalie
spoke quickly, as if fearful that having made her decision, she might, on
reflection, change her mind. ‘Let’s do it now, forget them all. There’s only
us, anyway. This is our world. Let’s lock the universe out.’

Max
thought about it for a while.

‘How
long would you want to set it for?’ he asked.

‘I
don’t know, ten, maybe fifteen years. Just till our baby’s grown. We can
reassess the situation on the monitors then.’

‘Our
baby?’

‘That’s
right. Our baby.’

‘I
didn’t know we were going to have a baby.’

‘Well,
we are, and I want it to live in a beautiful world.’

Max
looked at Rosalie and he smiled, a great happy smile. It was dusk in the
Claustrosphere but that smile lit up Rosalie’s whole universe.

‘OK,’
he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

Out
of paradise.

They left the
Claustrosphere for the first time since their honeymoon had begun. Max had one
or two things which he wanted to put in order and Rosalie had to ring her
grandparents. She knew they would be saddened at the collapse of her principles
but she did not care. They were in the past, her baby was the future. She had
the chance to give her baby a childhood in paradise and she was going to take
it.

They
went out through the BioLock and up to the house. After weeks inside the
pristine environment of the Claustrosphere it seemed to Max and Rosalie as if
the world was already dead. The air stank and the filtered sunlight was weak
and watery.

Max
made a few calls. Cancelling his subscription to
Life
magazine. Putting
all his money into high-yield long-term accounts and informing his astonished
agent that he was retiring. Soon they were ready. Rosalie had only to make her
call, and they could go back into their little private paradise and lock the
Earth out behind them.

Then
the front door bell rang.

‘Leave
it,’ said Rosalie. ‘We don’t live in this world any more.’

‘Oh,
come on, we might as well see who it is,’ said Max, and before Rosalie could
stop him he had flipped on the video camera that covered his front door.

Judy
was standing outside.

‘I
don’t believe it!’ Rosalie gasped. ‘It’s that little bastard from the FBI.’

‘Bad
call,’ said Max.

‘Max.’
There was panic in Rosalie’s voice. ‘Don’t answer the door, let’s go, now, into
the Claustrosphere, leave him. We were going to go, let’s go.’

Max
spoke gently. For the first time in their relationship it was he who would have
to be the sensible and realistic one.

‘Rosalie,
listen, you’ve got yourself thinking about that Claustrosphere as if it was a
whole other world —‘

‘It
is,’ said Rosalie.

The
bell rang again.

‘It
isn’t, Rosalie, it’s a Claustrosphere. A building on a piece of real estate
which exists in the real world. Now that man is an FBI agent, an agent who’s
already tried to arrest you once. The chances are he’s come to do it properly
this time. If we disappear, believe me the first thing they’ll do is blast open
the BioLock on the Claustrosphere. What you have to do is hide while I talk to
him. Maybe I can get him to go away. Then we can plan our next move.’

Suddenly
Rosalie saw her dream idyll fading like the dream it was. Desperately she tried
to save it.

‘Let’s
kill him,’ she said.

Max
looked at Rosalie, a little shocked.

‘Now I
hope you said that because you’re hormonally imbalanced, due to being
pregnant,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from the fact that icing people is kind of
dubious in a moral sense. Practically, it would be a no-win call. If you kill
FBI agents, they send more, lots more. It’s a rule they have. Now you get
behind the two-way mirror, and I’ll let the guy in.’

‘Two-way
mirror?’ said Rosalie, returning to the real world with a bump.

‘Yeah…
…… yeah, the guy who had the house before me was a porn king,’ said Max,
and, pushing Rosalie into a recess in the wall behind a mirror, he buzzed open
the door and let Judy in.

‘Come
on up!’ he called, and Judy nervously climbed the stairs.

‘I nearly
went off home,’ Judy said, arriving in the lounge area.

‘Yeah,
I was out the back in the Claustrosphere. Nice to see you again, man, what’s
happening?’ Max replied.

‘Ms
Connolly not with you?’ Judy inquired. ‘The way you two seemed to be getting on
in Ireland, I rather thought she might be.’

‘No,
she ain’t here.’

‘It
doesn’t matter anyway,’ said Judy. ‘It’s you I need to speak to.’

‘Me?’
replied Max, full of suspicion. ‘What do you want with me, man?’

‘I need
your help to catch a ruthless, callous, immoral viper, a man with not a single
shred of compassion or decency in his body, a man who cares nothing for
anything or anybody but himself.’

‘Hey,
man, this is Hollywood,’ said Max. ‘I know a lot of guys like that, you’ll have
to be more specific.’

Chapter
Twenty-Four

The sale of the century

Waiting
for the drugs to warm up.

Max had been with Plastic
Tolstoy for about half an hour. He had requested a meeting under the pretext of
discussing the progress of the film project which Nathan had been supposed to
write, but really he was Judy’s spy.

Tolstoy
had readily agreed to the meeting and invited Max up to his house. Busy though
Plastic Tolstoy was, Max was one of the most popular stars in the industry and
even as exalted a figure as Tolstoy still understood the value of ‘the money’.

They
were talking in Plastic’s office, Max having declined an invitation to go
through to the Claustrosphere. He was carrying a tiny transmitter and he knew
that nothing, not even radio waves, escaped from a closed Claustrosphere.

‘I’ve
just spent nearly a month in mine,’ Max said by way of explanation. ‘A guy can
get too much fresh air and sunshine. I hate to feel that healthy.’

‘You’ve
been in your Claustrosphere for a month? How come?’

‘As a
matter of fact I’ve been working on the first fermentation from my vineyard. I
brought a bottle with me, I’d appreciate your opinion.’

Max had
brought along a half bottle of red wine labelled ‘Wine to the Max’.

‘You
brewed this inside your Claustrosphere? Wow! I don’t have a vineyard in mine.’

‘Hey,
you have to have a vineyard, Plastic. What can you do with a rain forest?
Nothing, hunt iguanas maybe. A vineyard will keep you occupied as many years as
you have to be in there. Try it.’

‘Nice.
Very nice,’ said Plastic, taking a delicate little sip. ‘Lotta nose. I like a
wine with a big schnozzle … So this is what you’ve been up to then? I heard
you’d gone to ground.’

Max
wondered whether Tolstoy knew that he had been at Nathan’s house on the night
of Nathan’s murder. Had the killers recognised him in his VR helmet? Had they
reported it to Tolstoy? Max had to presume the worst, so he confessed.

‘Yeah,
I did hide out for a while there. To tell you the truth, Plastic, I was kind of
shaken by something … You know Nathan Hoddy? The guy who was going to write
our film?’

‘Yeah,
I know, he died,’ said Plastic with apparent indifference.

‘I was
there the night he got it,’ said Max.

‘No
kidding? You were there?’ Tolstoy certainly seemed genuinely surprised. ‘So who
bumped the poor guy off, then?’

‘That’s
the stupid point,’ Max replied. ‘I was there, but I don’t know who did it. We
were playing a Virtual Reality game and we were both inside the helmets when
they killed him. I didn’t see him die. Believe it or not, what I saw was his
thoughts
while he died, although of course I didn’t know that was what they were
until afterwards. It was extremely weird.’

‘You
saw his dying mind? Wow! Did you get a tape? I could sell something like that.’

‘No
way, man. When I found him, I just ran. That’s why I kind of disappeared, you
know? Like, I didn’t feel that was the wrong thing to do… I had no
information that could help the cops or anything. .

‘And
you didn’t want to get involved.’

‘In a
murder investigation? No way! Would you? That kind of shit sticks. I can just
hear what they’d say about me. Wild, tough Max Maximus… hear about him? He
was in the room when his pal got wasted and he didn’t lift a finger. Says he
was playing a game and didn’t notice!’

‘Well,
I guess it’s all blown over now, huh? The cops have got about another thousand
unsolved murders to deal with since then,’ Plastic Tolstoy assured Max with a
kindly slap on the shoulder. Max could not help but feel a tiny shiver at the
man’s touch. He hoped Plastic did not notice.

‘Yeah,’
said Max, ‘I reckon that’s history now, and so I was wondering what was
happening about the film, you know? I mean, it’s too bad about Nathan,
obviously, but like, you know, the town’s full of writers. You hear what I’m
saying?’

‘I
certainly do, Max,’ said Plastic. ‘And let me tell you, I am still very
interested in putting you into a picture about those Mother Earth assholes.’

‘Well,
that’s great, Plastic,’ Max said, and he knew that he could prevaricate no
longer. If the drug was going to work, it would have worked by now; it took
only the tiniest amount and its effects were virtually instantaneous. It was
time to put it to the test.

‘So
Plastic,’ Max said casually, ‘I hear you like to watch girls go to the toilet,
is that right?’