Part One
Man is in a trap... and goodness avails him nothing in the new dispensation. There is nobody now to care one way or the other. Good and evil, pessimism and optimism — are a question of blood group, not angelic disposition.
1
From the window of Dallas’s gyrocopter, the Terotech Building looked like the profile of a giant lizard, perhaps a chameleon, since everything — from the external climate surfaces to the height of the three glass stories — was subject to change, according to whatever environmental factors were predominant at the time. The seamless interior, with hardly a post, beam, or panel in sight, was no less interactive with the intel[26] workers who inhabited the place. Self-regulating, continually adapting through electronic and biotechnological auto-programming, the Terotech Building’s dynamic framework was more than just a shelter for those, like Dallas, who were privileged to work there, more than the achievement of mere ecological symbiosis. For the building was the very symbol of Terotechnology and its business. From the Greek word terein, meaning ‘to watch,’ or ‘to observe,’ Terotech led the world in the conceptualization and construction of so-called Rational Environments — high-security facilities for digital cash and other financial institutions, and blood banks. And Dana Dallas was the company’s most brilliant designer.
It was a good day for flying, cold but sunny and clear all the way up to forty-five thousand feet with little or no traffic to impede Dallas’s four-hundred-mile-per-hour progress. Not that Dallas took much pleasure in the machine. His mind was already occupied with his latest project and the various calculations he had requested that his assistant spend the night working on. He dropped the last fifty feet onto the ground in three seconds, undid his seat harness, and switched the twin turbocharged engine off. But before jumping out under the diminishing steel canopy of the rotor blades, Dallas took a good look around from within the safety of the bullet-proof bubble. It was always a good idea to see who was hanging around the gyro park before stepping out of your machine. These days, with all the bloodsucking scum around, you couldn’t be too careful. Even inside the comparative safety of the Clean Bill of Health area — the so-called CBH Zone. Deciding that everything looked safe enough, he opened the gyro and ran toward the glass doors of the Terotech Building, though not quickly enough to avoid a cloud of dust, stirred up by the speed of his landing, from entering along with him.
‘Morning, Jay.’
‘Morning Mister Dallas, sir,’ said the parking valet, running to take charge of Dallas’s gyro and taxi it to the chief designer’s reserved parking space. ‘How are you today?’
Dallas grunted equivocally. He removed his sunglasses, stood for a brief moment in front of the security screen, and breathed carefully onto the exhalo-sensitive film. It was a simple but effective device, designed by Dallas himself.[27] He liked to joke that you could enter one of America’s most secure buildings just by blowing softly on the doors.
Having gained admittance to those parts of the Terotech Building that were not open to the public, Dallas took the elevator down to the sixth level, which was also the most secret. Most of Terotechnology’s work took place below ground, in dozens of windowless offices, each made more congenial by the facility of a faux fenêtre screen offering whatever view the occupant required. Dallas liked to look out of his office into the depths of a computer-generated ocean that was home to limitless shoals of brightly colored fish displaying a host of realistic behaviors. This was the view he found most conducive to thought. But there were other times when his fluctuating mood dictated that he look at rivers of red-hot magma, snow-capped mountain ranges, or simply an English country garden.
The undersea view invested the brushed steel, polished wood, and soft leather finishings of Dallas’s office with the feel of a private submarine. But despite the obvious luxury of these surroundings — and Dallas knew how fortunate he was — it was not uncommon for him to wish that he could simply have propelled his sumptuous sanctuary into the faux fenêtre’s unfathomable azure, far away from Terotech and the man next door, who was in overall charge of the company — his boss, Simon King. Dallas’s assistant, Dixy, was fond of quoting at him — she had an inexhaustible memory for this kind of trivia — when you’re between any sort of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.
Dallas enjoyed his work, but loathed the man he worked for. It’s a common dilemma, and Dallas knew himself well enough to recognize that this had as much to do with his own character as it did with King’s. The Terotechnology CEO was arrogant, capricious, and cruel, but no more than Dallas, or for that matter anyone else who was on the Terotechnology board of directors. Dallas hated the director chiefly because he saw himself reflected in the older man and recognized that in time he would probably fall heir to King’s job, which was all that he feared most in the world. Design was a very different proposition from the day-to-day running of a corporation the size of Terotechnology. It was an activity for small groups or, as Dallas preferred it, for individuals. The CEO function was about development, a process that required whipping, kicking, and pushing. Small wonder that King required the assistance of Rimmer, his head of security. But it was unthinkable that you could make the Design Department work in that way. The more you tried to make it efficient, the less efficient it would become. For Dallas, his own lack of corporate responsibility was a source of pride. His mind worked to perfect pitch only when it was unfettered by the need to perform the mundane tasks of routine administration. He thought it would be crazy for someone like him, a pure designer, to run a company like Terotechnology; but at the same time, he knew that this was what King, himself a former designer, had planned for him, and he hated King for it. All Dallas wanted was to be left alone to design his intricate models of high security.
Sweeping quickly into his office before King could spot him, Dallas closed the door and then locked it.
‘That won’t keep him out,’ said Dixy.
‘I know,’ he answered dully. ‘I’m open to suggestions for making his exclusion from my life something more permanent.’
‘Sounds like someone had a bad evening.’
Silently, Dallas shrugged off his jacket and poured himself a glass of water. Finding herself ignored, Dixy awaited her master’s orders with patient respect.
‘These days they’re all bad,’ he said at last.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s my daughter. She’s sick.’
‘Caro? What’s the matter with her?’
‘That’s half the problem,’ he said. ‘The doctors — they don’t really know.’ He sighed and shook his head.
‘It sounds like she’s been sick for a while.’
‘Since she was born.’
‘But why haven’t you told me before?’ Dixy sounded a little hurt.
It was true. It was the first time he had mentioned Caro’s illness to his assistant. Dallas wasn’t the kind to mix his home life with his business life. But now he felt the need to tell someone about it. Even if that someone was only Dixy.
‘You can tell me anything. That’s what I’m here for.’
Dallas nodded. He appreciated Dixy’s seeming concern.
‘She just doesn’t seem to thrive,’ he said. ‘For a start, she’s anemic. And then there’s her jaw.’ Dallas shrugged. ‘It seems to stick out in the most peculiar way. If she wasn’t so sickly, she’d look like an infant Neanderthal. I mean, you’d look at her and your first instincts would be to leave her out on a hillside somewhere, you know what I mean? No, I don’t mean that. I do love her, but there are times — well, let’s just say it’s not easy to bond with a child like that, Dixy.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ she said stiffly.
The note in her voice surprised him, and for a moment Dallas wondered if perhaps she wanted a child of her own. Maybe he could organize that.
‘Take my word for it,’ he said bitterly.
‘What do the doctors say?’
‘The doctors,’ Dallas snorted contemptuously. ‘They’re running tests. Always more tests. But this far, whatever it is that’s wrong with her has eluded their diagnosis. So to be honest, I’m not very optimistic that they’ll find anything.’
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Dixy. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
Dallas stared into the screen of the faux fenêtre as a school of butterfly fish swooped as one, their eyes peering out from behind broad bands of black lending them a villainous look, so that they most resembled a gang of marauding bandits. It never ceased to amaze Dallas the way the fish all managed to turn in the same direction at exactly the same time — they may have been generated by a computer, but they were as realistic as if they had been bought from an aquarium. He supposed it was behavior associated with and modified by their breeding and feeding requirements. But how like the population at large, he thought. The masses of people who were obliged to live outside the Zone, with its system of medical privilege that cocooned Dallas and his class. Dangerous, nefarious people. Uneducable, infected things made of greed and desire. Crowded seas of dying generations against whose contagion a smaller, healthier, morally superior population had, of necessity, sought the protection of reinforced glass, scanning cameras, and lofty electrified fences in hermetic, guarded communities of RES Class One citizens.
Dixy coughed politely, and realizing that she had asked him a question, Dallas looked away from the faux fenêtre with a questioning sigh, to which he then added, ‘What’s that you say?’
‘I asked if there’s anything I can do,’ she said patiently. Redundantly. For they both knew that there was nothing she could have refused him. That was why she served as Dallas’s assistant instead of some more lowly job function.
‘You know I like to please you,’ she added in the most sultry voice she could muster, running a beautifully manicured hand through her long abundant hair in the way she had seen it done in old movies, when women wanted to offer some sexual provocation.
Dallas smiled, grateful for her sympathy. Every little bit helped. Even an assistant’s compassion was worth something. Dixy was indeed a nonpareil among assistants. Tall, immaculately proportioned, with long blonde hair, and in her late twenties, she was the kind of female whose beauty was considerably enhanced by her certainty that she was his perfect woman and the knowledge that he could never touch her. For Dixy was a Motion Parallax, a threedimensional image display with virtually unlimited resolutions that had been rendered by a computer using the electrical signals within Dallas’s brain and recorded using a DTR.[28] She was the interactive, real-time-transmitted image of his electronic assistant’s program bundle, a sophisticated optical device that helped Dallas to get the best out of the massively parallel computer that served his intellectual endeavors. Dixy could do just about everything that didn’t involve physical contact with Dallas. She was secretary, graphic artist, counselor, numbers-cruncher, jester, colloquist, translator, interlocutor, and even, on occasion, an autoerotic aid. In short, Dixy was invaluable to Dallas and capable of solving the most complex polynomial equations while simultaneously treating her human master to the lewdest, most intimate displays of her realistic, almost opaque (from whatever perspective you cared to regard this two-gigabyte basis fringe[29] trioscopic display, Dixy was an exact creation of reflected light) and lifelike anatomy.
‘You could give me those figures,’ he suggested. ‘For the new multicursal route design.’
‘I meant...’
‘I know what you meant, Dixy,’ Dallas said gently.
It was his own fault. An indefatigable interest in sex was part of his own mind’s conception of the perfect woman. That Dixy didn’t look more like his wife had as much to do with Aria as it had to do with Dallas. Knowing her husband’s propensity for the abuse of his Motion Parallax program — in this regard, Dallas was in no way atypical — Aria had insisted that her husband should try to visualize someone very different from her for the original DTR recording. She had no wish for the director or any of Dallas’s other colleagues to find her image in such a subservient and occasionally pornographic role. So it was with Aria’s encouragement and complicity that Dixy most resembled an actress from one of the two-dimensional moving picture disc recordings of the early twenty-first century that Dallas collected as a hobby.
Careful of her feelings function, he added, ‘Perhaps later you could show me that trick you learned. The one with the cigar. But right now, I really need those calculations for the MR[30] shape — the ones based on Fresnel integrals. And of course the component specifications.’
‘Sure,’ smiled Dixy, for despite her feelings function’s semblance of sensitivity, it was impossible to offend her in any lasting way. ‘Would you like me to display the differential equations on paper, or on the faux fenêtre?’
‘Sur la fenêtre,’ said Dallas.
His undersea view was now replaced by rows of figures. Overnight Dixy had produced a number of equations it would have taken a whole team of engineers months to do manually. Designing Rational Environments within the budgetary and time constraints imposed by Terotechnology clients would not have been possible without an assistant like Dixy. This was the nineteenth blood bank he had designed in as many months — each more sophisticated than the last. But working for a larger client like this one — the Deutsche Siedlungs Blutbank, an Earth-station facility — with a generous budget, meant that Dallas could indulge himself a little with a favorite touch, adding a multicursal route to all the other security management systems he had devised to protect the deep-frozen deposits of Deutsche Siedlungs’ autologous donors. Including an MR was his opportunity to be creative, to do something artistic and imaginative, to surpass himself, for every route he created offered a more bewildering range of choices than the last. It was one of the things for which Dallas was famous and was why many of the clients — keen to outstrip their competitors in the modernity and complexity of their security management systems — came to Terotechnology in the first place.
The MR Dallas was currently working on included a curving corridor where the floor gradually, almost imperceptibly, became the wall, to increase the sense of disorientation experienced by a potential interloper. For despite these Byzantine security precautions, criminals still tried to rob these facilities, even the ones in space, although so far, none had ever succeeded.
‘To set up an optimal corner,’ Dixy was explaining, ‘we require a curve whose curvature increases in a linear way, with arc length. Differential geometry shows us the following equations, which we can immediately solve algebraically.’
Dallas nodded thoughtfully. ‘Is it possible to show me that curve as a parametric plot?’
‘Of course.’ Dixy’s symbolic solutions gave way to a picture of a graph that was more spiral than curve. Dallas realized that it was a spiral he could very easily incorporate within the route’s overall design. And where better to locate the living conditions and essential nutrient supplies for a transgenic[31] — the highly aggressive life-form that Terotech employed as custodians in all their Earth-based Rational Environments.
‘That’s good, Dixy,’ said Dallas. ‘That’s very good indeed. You’ve done well. You can go ahead and incorporate that spiral in the overall design.’
Dixy shot Dallas a flawless smile, delighted to have given her master some satisfaction. Folding her arms across her breasts she walked up and down the floor in front of his desk, tossing her mane of blonde hair from one shoulder to the other, like an excited horse. Dallas became aware of the scent of perfume in the air, puffed through his office air-conditioning by the Motion Parallax reality support sensor.
Dallas breathed deeply through his nose, aware that Dixy’s was no ordinary perfume, but one containing the tiny quantities of the drug that he needed to treat his own genetic predisposition to prostate cancer. The disease had killed Dallas’s own grandfather. Hence, his treatment, based on the modern medical assumption that preventing cancer was the only infallible way of treating it. A predisposition to arthritis and brittle bones on the part of his wife was similarly treated using other prophylactic vomeronasal[32] drugs. The pity was that Caro’s condition could not be so easily relieved.
There were times in his baby daughter’s life when Dallas despaired of an accurate diagnosis, let alone a cure. That was the trouble with being RES Class One and an autologous donor within Crossover Healthcare: It was very easy to gain the impression of an omnipotent medical system. But just because you weren’t afflicted with P2, like the other 80 percent of the population, didn’t mean that you were going to live forever. There were still plenty of other illnesses to which even someone who was RES Class One could fall victim. Not to mention all the violent crime there was these days. Most of it blood-related. There was even a name for it in the news media: vamping. Hardly a day passed in which New York Today did not carry a story describing how some hapless victim had been murdered and drained of blood, like a lamb slaughtered in an abattoir according to strict religious rules — vamped, the newspapers said — by one of the bestial and sanguinary creatures who made up that wretched section of society known as bad bloods, or the living dead. This sensational modern phenomenon was no ancient superstition, and owed more to the story of Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called Countess Dracula, than it did to the eponymous count. Bathory was a seventeenth-century Hungarian aristocrat who murdered some three hundred girls in order to bathe her aging body in their supposedly rejuvenating blood. For does not the Bible say that the blood is the life?[33]
By twenty-first-century standards, three hundred murders hardly ranked as noteworthy. There were many more egregious instances of blood felony, some of them involving several thousand victims. Just such an example had been reported in the current edition of New York Today.
Carl Dreyer was sentenced to death yesterday after being convicted of the ‘depraved’ murders of over two thousand men and women. He greeted the sentence with the same pallid, blank expression he has worn throughout the three-week trial. Dressed in the sober black suit he has worn almost every day in court, he looked more like a lawyer or a civil servant than the pitiless killer he has been shown to be. Today, as Dreyer prepares to meet the executioner, police are appealing for more information about scores of other people who may have fallen victim to him and his partner in blood felony, Tony Johannot. Last week, Johannot hanged himself in prison.
During the trial, the Supreme Court of Justice heard the two men described as a modern-day Burke and Hare. Between 2064 and 2066, the two drove around North America kidnapping their RES Class One victims, then cutting their throats and hanging their bodies upside down in the back of their customized furniture van in order to drain them of blood. At one stage they were probably killing as many as eight people a week.
Detectives remain uncertain as to the ultimate market for these supplies of quality-assured whole blood, but it’s generally believed the ultimate buyers were illegal P2 clinics in the Far East. When apprehended, Dreyer and Johannot were in possession of bank accounts totaling some $1.5 billion. Both men’s computer records confirmed them as officially classed P2. Following their arrest, however, medical examinations revealed no trace of the virus. A complete change of blood in conjunction with the drug ProTryptol 14 remains the only way to cure P2.
Chief Inspector Paul Arthuis said: ‘In nearly all cases involving vamping, first and foremost the perps are seeking a cure for themselves. But when they see how much money there is to be made from the trade in illegal blood, it becomes hard to stop. Sixty percent of murders today are blood-felony related.’
Even by the standards of the day, the case has horrified people throughout America, and several congressmen are already calling for more to be done to help the victims of P2. Congressman Peter Piers said: ‘This kind of thing will go on happening as long as P2 victims are condemned to a living death with no hope of a cure. That’s the real horror of what has been revealed in this appalling case.’
Perhaps the grimmest aspect of the facts that were presented to the court was the way in which Dreyer and Johannot disposed of the bodies once they had been drained of blood. The panel of five judges heard how the pair had fitted the furniture van with a fully automated disposal system, enabling them to reduce the bodies to a fine powder, and all without the risk of foul odors, air emissions, or wastewater discharges. Microcomputers controlled the parameters of the operation, which included a shredder, a reduction system to further reduce particle size, and a grinder. After a period of holding in a tank containing a chemical condensate, a steam-jet-ejector vacuum system expelled the end product through the van’s exhaust gases. The two men might never have been caught but for a police spot-check of emissions from vehicles running on compressed gases. The suspicions of the two officers were aroused when they noticed a spray gun on the van’s passenger seat of a type used by the military to knock out enemy soldiers. When the van was searched, the officers found four bodies drained of their life’s blood and awaiting pathological waste processing. Chief Inspector Paul Arthuis said: ‘It looks as if these two guys could probably have taught the SS a thing or two.’
Throughout the trial, Dreyer said nothing. It remains to be seen whether the dreadful sight of the cartwheel[34] and the executioner’s crowbar will encourage the condemned man to try and explain himself.
Dixy sat down on her nonexistent chair and crossed her legs carelessly. She seemed about to tell him something, then checked herself for a moment before saying, ‘It’s Ogilvy. He wants to speak to you.’
‘Put him on the window,’ said Dallas.
Ogilvy was a commodities analyst at Merrill Lynch. Over a period of two or three years he had helped to make Dallas a considerable fortune by speculating in the blood futures market. It didn’t matter what Dallas was doing — he always took Ogilvy’s calls.
A neat-looking man with a bow tie and glasses appeared on the faux fenêtre, and seeing Dallas simultaneously on-screen in his own office, Ogilvy leaned forward to examine his client’s features a little more closely.
‘Jesus, Dallas,’ said Ogilvy, frowning. ‘You look like shit.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘What’s the matter? Is that baby keeping you up at night?’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Dallas. If only, he thought. A bit of lusty crying from his daughter’s cot would have sounded good, certainly preferable to the unnatural, unhealthy silence that prevailed there.
‘Haven’t you got some child care or something? I mean, a guy as important as you, Dallas. You need your sleep, right?’
Dallas had no intention of explaining that it was anxiety about his daughter’s health that was keeping him awake at night. He had talked about it to Dixy. That was enough. Like most people with his background, Dallas thought there was something vaguely shameful about ill health. So he just shrugged and muttered something about Aria not wanting anyone but herself looking after her baby — at least until the child was a little older.
‘Women,’ remarked Ogilvy.
‘So what’s happening?’ asked Dallas. ‘What’s your analysis?’ The fact was, he’d been looking forward to a call from Ogilvy. Speculating, making money, it was all a welcome distraction from his troubles at home. Whatever the problems with Caro’s health, he could at least make sure that her financial position would always remain sound.
‘Blood prices just surged for the third day in a row,’ Ogilvy said gleefully. ‘The market’s up almost twenty percent this week. Can you believe it? The First National Blood Bank lifted the price of a half-liter by seventy dollars because of the soaring futures market and the strength of the yen against the dollar. Also there’s a strike by U.S. transfusion workers, which has blocked some seven hundred thousand units coming onto the market. I heard that talks aimed at ending the strike just broke down.’
‘Sounds like the market is setting up for an explosive rise,’ observed Dallas.
‘I’d say so. Naturally you’ll want to go on buying futures?’
‘Please.’
‘Consider it done. But what about selling some of that blood you’ve got on deposit? Maybe take some quick profit.’
Dallas shook his head. ‘Actually I think I’ll just hang on to it a while longer,’ he said.
‘Know something I don’t, is that it? You know, each time they build a new blood bank, the five hundred mill price skyrockets. Are you designing another blood bank?’
Dallas said nothing. He enjoyed watching Ogilvy supply his own explanations. The truth was, Dallas would have quite liked to have sold off some deposit and taken some profit. The trouble was, he’d already used most of it as collateral on the loan he had needed to buy an enormously expensive country house the previous summer.
‘Seems the least you could do for an old friend would be a simple yes or no,’ grumbled Ogilvy.
‘Good-bye, Jim,’ said Dallas and nodded to Dixy to cut him off.
Ogilvy disappeared, and Dallas was back staring into the ocean depths and a beautiful manta ray flying gracefully through the water. Dixy sighed loudly, uncrossed her legs, and then crossed them again. Dallas looked at her and smiled. She may have been a computer interface, but he could always sense when she had an opinion to air. It was part of her counselor function. But usually she had to be prompted first. Dixy was nothing if not diplomatic.
‘Is there something on your mind?’ he asked her.
‘I was thinking,’ she said. ‘This speculation in blood futures. I wonder if perhaps it’s a bad thing.’
Dallas was surprised. This was as near as Dixy had ever come to voicing a criticism of him. Certainly she had never before offered an opinion about the blood market.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked, intrigued.
‘I’m reminded of the Dutch Tulpenwoede,’ she said. ‘The speculative frenzy in seventeenth-century Holland that attended the sale of rare tulip bulbs. Prices began to rise so that by 1610 a single bulb was acceptable as a dowry for a bride. Of course, what happened was that as prices continued rising, many ordinary people were tempted into the market and whole estates were mortgaged so that bulbs could be bought for resale at higher prices. When the crash finally came, in 1637, many ordinary families were ruined.’
‘That’s very interesting, Dixy. But I think there’s an important difference between a tulip bulb and a half-liter of quality-assured blood. And it’s this. A bulb has no real intrinsic value. The most it can ever be is a tulip. But blood, well that’s something else. Blood performs a number of vital physiological functions that make it much more precious than any bulb. It’s the very stuff of life itself. And besides, markets are made by the laws of supply and demand. With eighty percent of the world’s population afflicted with P2, the demand for quality-assured blood far outstrips the supply. That’s why the price keeps rising. It’s a matter of simple scarcity.’
‘But isn’t it a fact that there’s enough blood on deposit in banks to reduce by half the number of people suffering from P2? And that it’s only the artificially high price of blood that prevents it being used to cure people?’
‘Well, that may be so,’ admitted Dallas. ‘But no one’s going to do it. No one’s going to help that spawning rabble out there. Pigs, most of them. You know, sometimes I think it would be nice if God were to send another flood and drown the world. At least that part where the pestilential hordes are living.’
‘But if they were gone,’ said Dixy. ‘The “pestilential hordes,” as you call them. Then surely the price of blood would collapse. If all the sick people were removed from the world, then quality-assured blood would hardly be scarce anymore, would it? And you’d be out of a job.’
Dallas frowned. ‘What’s gotten into you, Dixy?’ he asked. ‘What do you care what happens to the swarming masses?’
She shrugged back. ‘Oh, nothing at all, of course. It’s you I care about, Dallas. I just wouldn’t like the same thing to happen to you as happened to all those seventeenth-century Dutchmen.’
Dallas nodded his appreciation. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Look, nothing’s going to happen to me. Nothing’s going to go wrong. Believe me, Dixy. It’s very sweet of you, but really, there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.’
2
It was more chateau than country house. Not a grand romantic chateau, white-towered and turreted like a Chenonceau or Chambord, but rather a modern castle-keep occupying an imposing position on the island, empty of all else save the trees that surrounded the wide snow-covered plot. It was a heavenly, magical spot with not a soul in sight, and only the peculiar shape of Dallas’s gyrocopter and the ever-present hum of the swimming pool filter to remind Aria that this was the twenty-first century.
The gyro was fueled and getting ready for takeoff. Dallas was already aboard, carefully going through his preflight checks even though the computer had already checked everything. But Dallas was nothing if not thorough and distrusted a machine to do something he thought he could do equally well himself. Aria approached the gyro, carrying her sickly daughter in her arms. She always hated returning to the city, for here in the midst of their secluded hundred acres, it was possible to forget that beyond the tree line lay a world of disease and despair. Back in the city, even in the exclusive apartment block where they lived, the external world was clamorous and demanding, even dangerous — so much so that whenever they were there, both she and Dallas carried guns. But Aria had never before left the country with such terrible premonition. She felt sure that the doctors who had summoned them back to the city to explain at last what they thought was wrong with Caro and how they proposed to treat her were going to destroy everything she and Dallas had worked so hard to acquire. Their life in the country had been so perfect, the place such an Edenic paradise, that she had begun to believe something dreadful must happen to interrupt their private idyll. And such is the nature of motherhood that it never occurred to her to think that her own daughter’s illness was that same dreadful thing she feared.
As she climbed aboard the gyrocopter, Aria was pale with worry and remained silent despite her husband’s best efforts to sound optimistic. Perhaps she merely saw through his show of confidence, for the truth was, he was just as anxious as Aria. Maybe more so, since it was Dallas who had made the greatest effort to have a child: Like most men, Dallas was more or less completely infertile, and in order to father a child, he had undergone a lengthy period of treatment involving spermatid extraction.[35] Certainly he had no wish to go through all that again.
‘From here on in, things are going to get better,’ he declared, mostly for her benefit. ‘Not knowing what’s been wrong with her has been the worst thing. Now at least we’ll know what’s wrong and what needs to be done about it.’ Dallas nodded firmly and started up the engine. He kept his eyes on what was happening outside the canopy as they shot suddenly up into the air. After a minute or so, he added, ‘Whatever needs to be done will be done. She’ll have the best treatment there is, no matter what it costs, I promise. Even if I have to devise the treatment myself.’
Aria glanced sideways at her husband and smiled in spite of herself. She didn’t doubt that Dallas was being perfectly serious. He was a skilled artist, architect, engineer, and inventor, and she felt quite sure that it wouldn’t have taken him very long to have added ‘doctor’ to his list of skills. It was this capacity for applying himself to new disciplines that had made him so attractive to her in the first place. Had he not learned Italian in only three months just so he could speak to Aria’s mother? In a world of unremarkable men, Aria knew how fortunate she had been to find a husband as extraordinary as Dallas.
They were soon at the hospital. Located in a large park on the edge of the Zone and surrounded by monumental sculptures, one of them by Aria’s own father, the large glass building had the air of a Greek temple — an effect that was enhanced by the presence of a smaller altarlike blood transfusion center opposite the main entrance.
The little trio presented itself at an informal reception area that occupied a vast open space at the center of the building. There, a pleasant if slightly overweight woman, wearing a white paper dress, greeted the three individually by name and asked if they had enjoyed a comfortable journey.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Dallas, although he could not remember the smallest detail of the flight. Not the route they had taken, nor the traffic they had encountered. It was as if he had suffered a forty-five-minute amnesia.
‘Did you bring your digital thought recording?’ asked the woman.
Dallas handed over a gold disc that was about the size of an old-fashioned coin. It contained thoughts of Dallas’s father, for a Motion Parallax. For legal and insurance reasons, doctors were forbidden to communicate directly with patients, and all consultations were normally handled by a diagnostic computer. A Motion Parallax program using the image of a person who was familiar to a patient was held to be the best way of making the resulting dialogue seem less impersonal.
‘Please follow me,’ said the woman.
She led them to the long edge of the building and a private space with a couple of easy chairs.
‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you now, to set up the Motion Parallax. It’ll be a minute or two before you can interact with the program that’s been dealing with your daughter’s case.’
They sat down and waited. Aria had never met Dallas’s father. These days he spent most of his time traveling outside of the States. But the impression she had gained of him from a variety of recorded images was of a handsome, immensely distinguished man with silver hair and a golden voice — like some grand old actor instead of a university professor.
The Motion Parallax fizzed into life, an invisible vessel filling up with sound and color. Seeing him now, she was struck by how much clearer in the old man’s broad features were Dallas’s own racial antecedents, for although he and his father had been born in America, they were of Greek descent. She had no idea of just how significant ancestry — her own as well as his — was about to become.
John Dallas smiled benignly at his son and daughter-in-law and leaned across the large walnut desk that his son always remembered whenever he tried to recall an image of his father.
‘Hi there,’ said Dallas.
‘Hello, son. Hello, Aria. Is that my granddaughter you have there?’
Aria nodded and hoped that by the time the real John Dallas saw Caro, there would be some change for the better in the child’s condition.
‘First of all,’ the Motion Parallax was saying, ‘I’d like to thank you both for your patience. I know things haven’t been easy for you of late. It’s taken us a little time to get where we are now. To a position where we can finally say, “Yes, we know what’s the matter with the child.” But you know, modern medicine still has a long way to travel. We have learned so much that’s new that sometimes we forget what we already knew. There are so many modern diseases we can cure today — HIV, P2, St. Petersburg fever, Waugh’s disease, Ebola fever, New Guinea cholera — that sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to some of the more ancient ones.’
‘Is that what this is?’ asked Dallas. ‘An old disease?’
‘Yes. Caro’s suffering from what the peoples of the ancient world used to call “sea fever.” ’
‘But we never swim in the ocean,’ protested Aria. ‘Do we, Dallas?’
‘That’s right,’ he confirmed. ‘People like us just wouldn’t go near it. The ocean’s not much more than a toilet these days. The diseases in the Atlantic are about the only things alive in it.’
Dallas Senior nodded patiently.
‘As I said, it’s merely what the peoples of the ancient world called this disease. That is, the people who lived around the Mediterranean Sea, since most of the early cases originated there. These days, however, we know the disease by a different name. We call it thalassemia. It comes from the Greek words thalassa, “sea,” an, “none,” and haimia, “blood.” ’
‘And this is what Caro’s got?’ asked Aria. ‘Thalassemia?’
‘That’s right, Aria. The thalassemias are a heterogeneous group of inherited disorders characterized by reduced or absent synthesis by one or more globin chain type. This leads to a situation in which body oxygen demands are not met by the circulating blood cell mass, which itself suffers a shortened life span.’
‘How did she get it?’ frowned Aria, who always thought she had been as careful with her child as was humanly possible.
‘Well, in a way, you both gave it to her.’
‘We did?’
‘If you’re at all familiar with Gregor Mendel’s Laws of Independent Assortment, then I’m sure I can explain it.’
Dallas shook his head. ‘I think you’d best try and keep it simple for now.’
‘All right. You are both descended from people who once lived in Mediterranean countries where malaria used to be endemic. Your ancestors, Dallas, came from Greece, while your people, Aria, originally came from Sardinia. That means you each inherited a gene from your parents that gave you some protection against malaria. But only in the heterozygous state, by which I mean a zygote formed by a union of two unlike gametes. The trouble is that you are both homozygous and your union was a union of two similar gametes. And that was unfortunate for Caro, because her illness is caused by these genetically determined abnormalities. It’s what gives her this peculiar blood disorder.’ Dallas Senior shook his head. ‘I’m not making a very good job of keeping it simple I’m afraid. Best just say that it’s the result of a recessive gene, and leave it there, eh?’
‘Wait a minute,’ protested Aria. ‘Before we tried to have children, we were both screened by our blood bank. Why didn’t they pick this up then?’
‘Because they only screen for viruses. Like P2. This is genetic. The screening process wouldn’t have picked this up at all. Wasn’t designed to. Besides, here in the States, it’s extremely rare. During the past fifty-seven years, there has been only one other case like it in this hospital. That’s why we took rather longer to find out what it was. Of course, now it all makes perfect sense. The absence of globin synthesis. The functional anemia. The hepatosplenomegaly, by which I mean her enlarged liver and spleen. The slight skeletal deformities such as the bossing of the skull and the curious maxillary prominence.’
Aria glanced down at the silent baby that lay in her lap. She had grown used to the shape of Caro’s head, and these days, she hardly thought it curious at all. ‘So how do we cure it?’ she asked quietly.
‘We can treat it,’ said the Motion Parallax. ‘But we can’t actually cure it. You can’t cure something that exists at a genetic level. You do see that, don’t you? It would be like trying to cure one of being Greek or Sardinian.’
Aria nodded. ‘But you can treat it.’
‘Yes.’ Dallas Senior’s voice sounded awkward. ‘It can be treated. However, the treatment is very expensive.’
Aria frowned. ‘We’re not poor people,’ she said, controlling the slight irritation she felt at the very suggestion that they might not be able to afford something. Of course this was why the hospital insisted that you bring your own digital thought recording — so that you were more disposed to maintain a calm and friendly interaction with the computer, instead of losing your temper and shouting at it.
‘A hundred years ago, when the disease was a little more common, the treatment was based on regular blood transfusions aimed at maintaining hemoglobin at the kind of level that would meet her body’s oxygen demands and prevent skeletal changes.’ He paused to allow the import of what was said there to sink in. ‘That was before blood became intrinsically valuable. No one would have thought anything of offering the victim of thalassemia a complete change of blood every month or two. Of course, these days things are rather different. Such a course of treatment would be ruinously expensive. Even for people such as yourselves. It would be a simpler matter to be cured of P2. That requires only one complete change of blood. This would require an infinite number of transfusions.’
‘What alternative do we have?’ demanded Aria. ‘She’s our daughter. We can’t just give up on her. Can we, Dallas?’
‘It might be better if you did,’ said Dallas Senior. ‘You know, there are euthanasia programs to help with this kind of situation. And there’s no need for you to feel bad about it. Not these days. Mercy killing is completely normal. And quite painless.’
Aria shook her head numbly. ‘We went through too much to get her just to let her die now,’ she said. ‘Tell me this. Without the transfusions, she’ll die, right?’
‘Oh certainly. From congestive heart failure or complications secondary to repeated pathological fractures of her weakened bones. I’m afraid it’s merely a matter of time.’
‘Then there’s no question but to proceed,’ said Aria.
‘Look, why don’t you both take some time to think about this. Maybe take some advice from your blood bank manager. A few more days won’t make any difference to your daughter.’
Taking her hand in his own, Dallas faced the Motion Parallax of his own father and nodded.
‘I guess you’re right,’ he said.
But it was plain what Aria thought about that.
‘When could she have the first transfusion?’ asked Aria.
‘Today. That is if you’re sure about what you’re doing. I’d still feel better if you were to speak to your blood bank manager.’
‘We’re sure,’ said Aria. ‘Caro’s waited long enough. Hasn’t she?’
She glanced at Dallas, who avoided her eyes but nodded.
‘Then all I need from you are your blood bank details. As soon as we’ve confirmed that you have sufficient reserves, we can proceed.’
‘I was thinking,’ said Dallas. ‘If the statutory fluid replacement period has been completed, then it might save a bit of time if we could both make deposits while we’re here and then we could use those units for the first treatment instead of touching our own reserves.’
Aria consulted her watch and confirmed that the eight-week SFRP was about to be completed for them both.[36]
‘Good. I’ll tell the phlebotomist to expect you both.’ With that, Dallas Senior nodded and, as was the practice in crossover hospitals, drew his wrists together and extended his hands in the shape of an inverted Y. This was a sign of respect for the blood they had discussed, and a reference to the ancient Sumerian pictograph for blood — the earliest known example of the use of a symbol for blood in any written language. At the same time, he said, ‘Blessed Are the Pure in Blood.’
Dallas and Aria made the sign, repeated the formal trope, and then went to find the transfusion center.
As soon as they were back in their apartment, Aria went into the library to check out thalassemia and to remind herself of such related subjects as Gregor Mendel, genetics, and malaria. Curiously she found herself aggrieved, even somewhat offended by what she read about Mendelian genetics. Mendel, an Augustinian monk, had made a series of crosses between pairs of strains of true-breeding peas, and it was the realization that what applied to peas could also apply to herself and to Dallas — as if he was a tall yellow seed, and she was a short green one — that she found to be nothing short of distasteful. All of it — the Laws of Independent Assortment and the Laws of Independent Segregation — made perfectly logical sense, of course, and Aria was even able to construct a pedigree chart to demonstrate the inheritance of genes within her family. But it provided her with no comfort and still left her possessed with the notion that medicine had failed if things could still be determined at such a fundamental level by two pairs of alleles. When the only treatment available offered not a cure, but a respite.
The injustice of such a disease.
And not only the injustice, the indignity as well. What would they tell people? The neighbors? Their friends? How could they face them? Incurable diseases were for the masses. Decent people didn’t get such afflictions.
With growing irritation, she studied Dallas as he watched an old movie. Medicine might have failed her, but was there any reason why her husband should fail her too? How many times had he overcome an obstacle that had been placed in his intellectual path, using nothing other than his sheer brainpower? Was he not known throughout America as an inventor? Were not his high-security systems and multicursal routes the subject of endless features in magazines both artistic and technical? But now, when he encountered a problem that affected his own child, he seemed unwilling even to try and exercise that famous ingenuity. Finally she could stand his inactivity no longer.
‘Are you just going to sit there?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t you think of something?’
‘Despite all appearances to the contrary,’ he said, ‘I’ve been doing little else.’
But try as he might, Dallas could see no other solution than to adopt the treatment that the hospital had suggested — and which he knew would surely leave him bankrupt. It was only a question of time.
3
The Terotechnology Stereoscopic Theater was built in-the-round. Wearing a pair of lightweight stereoscopic glasses, you sat in the center of the room and watched a three-dimensional projected image inside the control space. For Dallas, it was a useful way of presenting the director with a new design for a Rational Environment, and only when King was satisfied in every detail did a copy of the computer program get sent to the client, which in this case was the Deutsche Siedlungs Blutbank.
The world inside the program looked real enough. Surfaces looked solid, light behaved as it was supposed to, even when reflected on or through water, and both Dallas and King could see each other as clearly as in real life. The only difference between the program and reality was in the lethality of the actual environment: None of the high-security systems could injure or disable the viewer, which was just as well given their number and the way they were designed to take the interloper unawares. Each of his Rational Environments contained as many surprises as possible. Dallas enjoyed imagining his potential adversaries and tried to anticipate their every move. But he always sought to devise something new to complement some of his more tried and tested systems. Novelty was the essence of good security, for it was remarkable how quickly bank robbers were able to understand and defeat new systems.
‘There’s an invisible barrier in front of you,’ he told King. ‘As soon as you cross it, you set off an infrasound generator that emits very low-frequency sound waves.’
King looked unimpressed. ‘So does my car radio,’ he said.
‘I doubt it. These are the kind of low-frequency sound waves that can be used to cause disorientation, or something worse.’
‘Like what?’
‘Nausea, vomiting, complete loss of bowel control. An uninvited guest crosses that barrier and he’ll wish he’d stayed in bed. There’s not much of a threat you can pose to a high-security installation when you’ve been virtually crippled with diarrhea.’
‘You’re joking,’ guffawed King.
‘I never joke about these things, you know that. The effect of the device is almost instantaneous, and at sufficiently low frequencies, it’s potentially lethal, although I can’t actually be sure. It’s only ever been tested on animals. In my job that’s always half the problem. We’re never around when these Rational Environments are broken into and tested.’
‘You sound as if that’s a cause for some regret,’ remarked Bang.
Dallas shrugged. ‘In a way it is. After all, it’s only human nature to want to see what you’re up against, to see how the systems perform.’
‘Deterrence matters a great deal more to our clients than simple expediency,’ King said stiffly. ‘They would rather not discover just how well their systems work.’
King glanced away for a moment, allowing Dallas an opportunity to look at the Terotechnology CEO more closely. For there was something about the colors existing within the stereoscopic program that helped you to capture a subtly different mental image of someone. In here King looked more supercilious somehow, his nose more hooked than Dallas had noticed before, his beard grayer and more unkempt, and his dark eyes so noticeably hooded that he appeared to be almost blind. The overall effect was of some capricious Eastern tyrant. King pointed toward the multicursal route that led ahead of him.
‘And the vault? I assume it’s at the other end of the labyrinth?’
‘Yes.’
‘What level of integrity?’
‘Solid state, synchronous components, time switch.’ Lately, he’d been giving some thought as to how someone might defeat such a door, and he’d had what he thought was a brilliant idea. He wondered if he should tell King, but the CEO’s remark about deterrence had given him pause. So he just shrugged and added: ‘I’d invite you to take a look, only the labyrinth is a little complicated, even for me.’
‘Well, it’s all very impressive, Dallas,’ King allowed. ‘Very impressive indeed.’
‘I haven’t finished yet,’ Dallas told him. ‘Assuming you were somehow to get past the infrasound generator with your guts still intact, and you could stay out of the transgenics’ way, there’s a little extra something to make the multicursal route more interesting. To keep you off balance so to speak. You see, as soon as the sensors detect an unauthorized entry, an airborne delivery system covers all the floors, stairs, ramps, and walkways with an antitraction lubricant. It’s called Attack Frost, and it makes all surfaces impossible to walk on for a substantial period. Stuff’s four or five times slippier than ice.’
‘That’s a nice touch,’ said King.
‘It’s cheap too. Just like the infrasound generator.’
King gathered his dark beard and pulled it through the palm of his brownish hand. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘Thanks.’
King glanced around him one last time and then removed the glasses, putting an end to the insight into the Rational Environment Dallas had created for the German bankers.
Removing his own glasses Dallas waited for King to make some criticism of what he had seen. He usually had something to add. But instead, he leaned back comfortably in his leather chair, folded his hands behind his head, and smiled warmly at Dallas, like an indulgent father contemplating a favorite son.
‘So,’ he said finally. ‘How is everything?’
‘Just fine,’ said Dallas.
King nodded slowly.
‘Aria okay?’
‘Yeah, she’s fine too.’
‘And how about that daughter of yours? What’s her name?’
‘Caro. Well, they finally figured out what was wrong with her. She’s having treatment. But I think she’s going to be fine.’
‘Good, good.’ After a moment or two, King narrowed his eyes and said, ‘You’re very important to us, Dallas. Perhaps the most important man in Terotechnology, after myself. I like to think there’s nothing we wouldn’t do to make sure that you were happy. And nothing you didn’t think you could ask for. That’s right. All you have to do is ask. Whatever you want, it’s up to me to make sure that you get it. If it’s in my power, of course. Because one day, Dallas, you’ll be in charge of this company. And that’s quite a responsibility. A lot of important people trust us with their life’s blood. Whole economies are based on the security that we provide. Yes, you’ll have that trust one day yourself. Oh, I know what you think about that, and I don’t blame you for being a little wary of it. I was the same myself. But sometimes we have to face up to these duties, whether we really want them or not.’
Dallas nodded silently. This was in no way an unusual conversation. The Terotechnology boss was merely going through the motions of reminding Dallas where his loyalties lay. And Dallas would no more have told King about his problems than he would have suggested that the whole blood banking business was perverse and immoral. Whatever the director said, Dallas knew him well enough to realize that he did not invite confidences.
‘How long have you been with us, Dallas?’
‘Twenty years.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘In all that time, you’ve never thought of working elsewhere?’
‘Where could I go?’
‘You could have set up on your own.’
‘Why? I’m happy where I am.’
King nodded. ‘You’ll let us know if we do anything to change that situation, won’t you?’
‘Of course, director. But it’s hardly likely.’
‘Tell me, Dallas, do you sometimes wonder about the afflicted world that exists outside autologous donation programs? Beyond the Zone?’
‘Not really,’ said Dallas. But the fact was, since his daughter had started her treatment, he’d thought about little else. For years, almost as long as he’d worked for Terotechnology, he’d dismissed the outside, pestilent world as something foul and unmentionable and had wished it destroyed. Of late he found he actually felt sorry for people who had P2. He was even half prepared to admit their humanity.
‘Should I?’ he added.
King laughed out loud. ‘Well, it’s not something I do myself,’ he said. ‘But then I’m not a thinker, like you. I’m a manager. I can’t afford to sit around in silent contemplation of the world and its faults.’
‘Is that what I do?’
‘In a way. You’re a problem solver. It’s what you’re good at.’
Dallas considered that Aria might no longer have agreed with this assessment of his character.
‘I just wondered how far that might go.’
‘Rational Environments are very different from the real world, director,’ said Dallas. ‘They’re limited contexts, free of chaos, wherein total control is easily achieved. It seems to me that there’s very little that’s rational about the sick world in which we live. That’s what makes it sick, I suppose. Perhaps if it was more rational we might be able to cure it. But it’s not. It’s sick and it’s probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. All we can do is try and coexist alongside it.’
‘You don’t have a very optimistic view of the future, do you, Dallas?’
‘I’m not sure the future exists in any proper sense of what we mean by existence. We can talk about the present and the past and that’s about it. While the future’s still the future, we can never really know it to talk about. Optimism becomes irrelevant.’
King nodded thoughtfully. Then he looked at his watch and smiled. ‘Well, I’ve enjoyed our little talk. It’s been interesting to see the workings of your mind, Dallas. But I really ought to be getting along.’
The two men stood up.
‘I’m very impressed with what you’ve created for the Deutsche Seidlungs Blutbank. I think they’ll be pleased with the results.’
‘Thank you, director.’
King left the Stereoscopic Theater and returned to his office, where Rimmer, Terotechnology’s head of security, awaited his arrival, his feet resting on a valuable antique Japanese table.
With his watery blue eyes, pale skin, and lifeless yellow hair, Rimmer did not seem a very healthy person. Even less salubrious was his personality — when he wasn’t sniggering at the misfortunes of others, he was sneering jealously at their successes. There were some in Terotechnology who even thought him disturbed, with some justification. Rimmer knew this and encouraged the idea, with the result that most people in the company were afraid of him. Even those who weren’t thought it wise to stay out of his way. King regarded him as a necessary evil, like a guard dog, and treated him accordingly.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘You asked me to come,’ replied Rimmer.
‘Did I say you could make yourself at home in my office? Take your feet off that table.’ King made a show of sniffing the air. ‘You’ve made it stink in here.’
‘Have I?’ Rimmer grinned. ‘What was I thinking of? But then, being considerate of others has never been one of my strengths.’ Rimmer sniffed the air critically. ‘Even so, I can’t smell anything.’
‘It stinks,’ repeated King. ‘It stinks of your ghastly aftershave and your underarm perspiration and your grubby little mind. You’re the most offensive person I know, Rimmer. How someone like you has managed to remain RES Class One, I’ll never know. Just looking at you makes me feel I’m in danger of catching some kind of ghastly virus.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Rimmer insisted.
‘Don’t talk nonsense. If there was nothing wrong with you, Rimmer, then there would be no point to your existence. You’d be surplus to this company’s more nefarious requirements. It’s fortunate for you that your mind is as twisted as your shoelaces and that you lack any sense of personal morality. Except for those particular character defects you’d be quite useless to me.’
‘I’m sure I’m very flattered.’
‘Don’t try to be clever, Rimmer. I don’t keep you for my amusement. I keep you to bite the people I want bitten, and bitten hard.’
Rimmer was silent for a moment. Then his gap-toothed smile widened, his mouth taking on a rodentlike aspect.
‘Now I understand,’ he said. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? Dallas is what this is all about. You’ve had him checked out, and you’ve discovered the truth of what I was saying.’
Rimmer nodded with quiet satisfaction, his ugly smile sustained by an enormous sense of personal vindication. He had been right. And what was more, he had been right about Dallas, someone who treated him with even more contempt than King. Rimmer had been waiting for an opportunity to hurt Dallas. Spying on him at every available opportunity. The computer search of his daughter’s hospital records had been an inspired bit of thinking.
‘Your favorite boy,’ he chuckled. ‘Dallas. That’s what you find so offensive about me. Because I’ve been proved right about Dallas.’
‘Don’t assume you can ever know the limits of how offensive I find you, Rimmer,’ hissed King.
Rimmer shrugged silently and, still smiling, started to clean his fingernails with a toothpick.
‘I asked him about his daughter,’ growled King. ‘And he said that she was going to be fine.’
Rimmer didn’t look up. Just kept on cleaning his nails and flicking the debris onto the thick Persian silk rug.
‘Wishful bloody thinking, if you ask me,’ he finally said.
‘If you’re right and the child really is ill, I can’t understand why he didn’t talk to me about it,’ said King. ‘Why he didn’t throw himself on the company’s mercy and ask for help.’
‘Because he’s not stupid,’ snorted Rimmer. ‘Because he knew what the answer would be. He knows the company policy on blood loans.’
‘I don’t make the rules,’ King said, almost defensively.
‘That’s right, director. You just carry them out. Of course. Well, take my word for it, Dallas knows the score. That’s why he didn’t throw himself on your so-called mercy. In any case, my investigations show he’s already put his weekend house up for sale, so he can get his hands on some of the blood he’s got on deposit.’ Rimmer laughed. ‘Not that it’s going to keep him going for very long. The doctor I spoke to about his freaky daughter estimates that he’ll be cleaned out within a couple of years. The sooner that happens, the greater the potential security implications for this company. Wouldn’t you agree, director?’
King stared gloomily at the floor, hating himself for having to listen to Rimmer’s poison.
‘I mean, what would our beloved clients say if they discovered Dallas had an unfortunate situation at home, one involving his own life’s blood? I think they might justifiably worry that he could at some stage be compromised, that he might even contemplate selling information on our Rational Environments to the highest bidder.’
‘I don’t believe Dallas would ever betray this company or its clients,’ insisted King.
‘Maybe not now. But in a year’s time? Who knows what someone in his shoes might do? In his circumstances, I’d probably do the same thing myself.’
‘That I don’t doubt,’ King said bitterly.
‘But there’s another problem you may not yet have considered, director. As his supplies of big red run out, his financial position is going to become seriously eroded. Dallas has speculated quite a bit on the blood futures market. He’s already selling one home to cover himself. Chances are, eventually he’ll have to sell another — his main home, here in the city. Maybe move to a poor area, outside the Zone. And that might expose him to the risk of viral infections. I don’t think our employees would care for that any more than our clients, do you?’
‘Damn your questions, Rimmer.’
‘Easily said, but the question is, what’s to be done about it, eh? What’s to be done about your favorite boy? Your little protégé?’
‘Shut up and let me think.’
‘Nothing to think about,’ insisted Rimmer, looking over his fingernails. ‘You know as well as I what the proper course of action needs to be.’ Rimmer fed the toothpick between his thin lips and started to massage the gaps between his teeth. When he inspected the toothpick once more there was blood on the point. It was as if, he thought, someone was trying to tell him something.
‘Blood for blood’s sake. I’ve heard you say it often enough,’ said Rimmer. ‘To protect blood, you shouldn’t be afraid of spilling it now and then. An interesting paradox, that. One of many that’s inherent in this noble business.’ Rimmer pursed his lips and nodded. ‘A developed sense of irony is essential to our work, don’t you think, director?’
‘We’re not the same, Rimmer.’
‘No, that’s true. Thank goodness, I’m just the errand boy. You’re the one who has to make all the difficult decisions. Me, I couldn’t live with that responsibility. I couldn’t look myself in the eye.’
King had had enough. ‘Kill him,’ he said firmly. ‘Kill Dallas. And kill his family — if it weren’t for them, we’d still have our best designer.’
Rimmer inhaled sharply. ‘You see what I mean?’ he said. ‘I’d never have thought of killing his family as well. That’s what makes you the director and me just the employee. You have a commendably Machiavellian sense of neatness, if you don’t mind me saying so. That’s what makes you such a prince among men, director.’
‘Shut up, Rimmer.’
‘And when would you like this little contract carried out?’
‘Immediately.’
‘Right.’
‘Only make sure that it’s done well away from these offices. And another thing. Be discreet. If there’s any hint of our involvement, you’ll be the next one dead. Do you understand?’
‘It’s as clear as blue eyes on a bright day, sir.’ Rimmer pocketed the bloodstained toothpick and rubbed his hands with enthusiasm. It had been a while since he’d been ordered to kill anyone. The last time, it was a girl from the Accounts Department who’d managed to get herself infected with P2. If it hadn’t been for that he might have raped her as well. Of course, there was nothing to stop him raping Dallas’s wife. After all, it was the child who was sick, not the mother. And rape was one of the real perks of the job. Nothing to do with sex. Everything to do with the exercise of power. That was what the job was all about. Maybe he’d vamp her blood, too, and sell it on the black market. Make it look like that was the motive for killing her.
‘I’ll be off then,’ he said, already smiling in anticipation of a job well done.
‘Leave the door open behind you,’ ordered King. ‘Let some fresh air in. While you’ve been in here, the smell’s gotten worse.’
‘That’s not me. That’s just your conscience. You’ll get used to it. I know I did.’
‘Get out,’ ordered King.
4
Sometimes at night, Rimmer liked to get in his car and let it drive him out of the Zone and into one of the city’s more insalubrious quarters, which were mostly inhabited by people with the disease. It gave him a pleasurable feeling of hope to be around the hopeless. He particularly liked to visit the clubs and the bars that were patronized by the city’s pariah class, those whose P2 status had criminalized. He told himself that this was the romantic bohemian in him, that like some crappy old poet or painter, he was merely seeking out the more authentically existential life experience. But the truth was more ordinary. Rimmer just felt more comfortable mixing with the city’s lowlife. And undeniably, being in this world gave him a feeling of power, for Rimmer preferred to recruit those who carried the virus in the felonious aspects of his work. People who were immunologically compromised were usually less principled about what they were prepared to do for a few cash credits. Morality had meaning only for the rich and the healthy, who were, of course, coterminous. In Rimmer’s experience, P2 made potential murderers of almost everyone.
Even so, some were more lethal than others, and at a club called the Mea Culpa, near the city’s port area, he eventually found the woman he was looking for. To his certain knowledge, Demea had murdered at least forty people, including several children. That she was also extremely attractive made the pleasure Rimmer took in her company all the more enjoyable. And had it not been for the virus, he might even have let her suck him.[37]
‘There you are at long last,’ said Rimmer. ‘You’ve been hard to find in here.’ And it was easy to see why. Demea was wearing an expensive dress made out of synthetic Melanophore, a material that imitated the skin of a chameleon.[38] ‘To say that you fit right in here would be something of an understatement,’ he added, sitting down.
Until that moment, Demea’s dress had been colored black — like the walls, the ceiling, and the carpet — and silver — like the haphazard structure of cushioned tubular steel she lay on with the studied insouciance of a baroque Venus. But as Rimmer occupied the almost invisible black cushion beside her, the dress began to reflect the light blue of his Antimo silk suit.
‘Not so close,’ she drawled. ‘You’re spoiling my hue.’
‘Sorry,’ Rimmer grinned, and shifted a short distance away. He inspected the side of her dress for a moment and then said, ‘It’s all the same in the dark, you know.’
‘What is?’ Demea hardly looked at him.
‘Color. Decomposition of white light. Electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency. What color of drink can I buy you?’
‘Absinthe.’
‘Green,’ said Rimmer. ‘The color of hope. Although if my memory for art serves me right, the effect of the drink is rather less cheerful.’ He glanced around for a waitress, and since the club was almost empty, it wasn’t long before one came his way. She was naked, like all the waitresses in the Mea Culpa Club. That was another reason Rimmer liked going there.
‘Hi there,’ said the waitress. ‘What can I get you?’ She leaned back on the table in front of them and spread her legs so that Rimmer could hardly fail to notice the several rings that pierced her genitals.
‘Well, well,’ said Rimmer. ‘I see you’re married. To five guys.’ He smiled and the waitress smiled back. He was now in his element. No doubt there were some men who thought of mountains. Others of great waterfalls. But this was what Rimmer thought of when he brought to mind the sight he enjoyed most in the world. ‘Absinthe for the lady. And brandy for me.’
‘Thirty,’ said the waitress and, with a long fingernail on which a tiny hologram of a couple were forever making love, she tickled the rings meaningfully.
Rimmer rolled up a banknote and tugged it through her five piercings while the waitress watched patiently, as she was required to do by her employers.
‘Keep the change,’ he told her. ‘That is if you can find somewhere to put it.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Be right back with your drinks.’
Rimmer watched her bare behind in retreat. ‘And she shall have music,’ he said, turning his attention back to Demea. ‘I like a bit of music. How about you?’
‘Don’t mind it.’
Rimmer removed a Sony Pinback from his ear and showed it to Demea as if to corroborate his assertion.
‘Of course, it’s not turned on right now,’ he said. ‘That would be rude. Just in case I miss anything.’ He paused. ‘Such as your stimulating conversation.’
Demea remained resolutely silent, and Rimmer wondered if she might be on some drug, but her sapphire-blue eyes seemed clear and alert enough. As Rimmer looked at her more closely, it seemed to him that she was actually watching the room, as if waiting for someone. He dropped the Pinback earpiece inside his pocket alongside its mate and the tiny playback unit.
‘These days, when I kill someone,’ Rimmer explained, ‘I almost always wear it. Just the one ear. I should hate to miss the sound of a gunshot, or a knife going in between two ribs, or a plea for mercy — never given.’
The waitress came back with the drinks. Demea took the absinthe and sipped it silently. Rimmer tasted his brandy. It was cheap synthetic nano stuff, but that was all part of the authentic low-life experience; and anyway, he had bottles of real three-star cognac at home.
‘I have found that I prefer something classical, but upbeat, when I’m in at the death of someone,’ he said. ‘Something German, or Austrian, it goes without saying. Did you know that the German Nazis used to have orchestras in their death camps, to give people a bit of spring in their step on their way to the gas chambers? Clever people those Nazis. Music is the perfect accompaniment to violent death.’ Rimmer nodded appreciatively. ‘Schubert’s Symphony number five is a personal favorite. The allegro of course. And sometimes a little Strauss. I’ve always thought that there was something rather murderous about the Voices of Spring. And not forgetting Mozart. It’s the mathematical precision of Mozart that provides a nice counterpoint to the general mayhem of death. And what about you? Is there a piece of music you favor when you’re working?’
Demea frowned. She actually seemed to be thinking about an answer.
‘I do it because I have to do it,’ she said at last. ‘Not because I enjoy it.’
‘You disappoint me, Demea. I took you for a fellow hunter. Diana to my Nimrod.’
Demea looked at Rimmer with undisguised contempt. ‘We’ve nothing in common, you and I.’
‘People are always saying that to me. I’m beginning to feel quite distinguished.’
‘If I had half your advantages.’ She shook her head. ‘You’re a queer one, Rimmer.’
‘Oh, there I must take issue with you, Demea dear. As an embryo, I was screened for a predisposition to homosexuality. My hormone levels were corrected while I was still a fetus. I’m as heterosexual as the next man. Thanks to medical science there’s simply no excuse for anyone to be queer in this day and age.’
‘Oh yes,’ laughed Demea, ‘medical science has been so good to us.’
‘Well, I admit, medical science doesn’t have all the answers. There are still important discoveries to be made. Like finding a cure for P2. But...’
‘We already have the cure for P2,’ insisted Demea. ‘We’ve had it for years. The problem is that it’s only the people who don’t have the disease who can afford it.’
Rimmer shrugged. ‘A cheaper cure, then.’
‘That’s hardly in Terotech’s interests, is it?’
‘Oh I think you’re being a little unfair,’ he said. But she was right, of course. Cheap cures really weren’t in the company’s interests. They were bad for depositors — everyone who was healthy knew that. Class One blood was only precious because there was so little of it around. And a cheap cure was what all healthy people, not just companies like Terotechnology, feared most. You wouldn’t be able to give the stuff away if something like that happened. All the market analysts said as much. Just look what had happened to gold. Some fool had started to exploit the ocean’s vast reserves of gold,[39] and ended up flooding the market. After that, all the smart money moved into blood. No one wanted to see another financial crash like that.
‘Look here,’ he said, shifting tone. ‘Now that we’re on the subject of my interests, I do have a job for you. As you say, it’s just a job to you.’ Rimmer chuckled and sipped some more of his brandy. After the first throat-stripping swallow, it really wasn’t so bad. He laughed once more and added, ‘Forgive my amusement. I don’t know whether to take you seriously or not.’
Suddenly Demea was close to him, a blade held tightly in her hand. Rimmer remained cool even as she pressed the sharp point against his cheek. Demea’s smile was as cold as the weapon in her hand.
‘It would be a mistake not to take me seriously,’ she said, smoothing her unnaturally red hair with the flat of her other hand.
‘I can see that.’
Still smiling, Demea pressed the point of her dagger just a little harder, enough to make Rimmer wince.
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll cut me.’
Demea raised her eyebrows meaningfully.
‘That’s the whole idea.’
After a second she laughed derisively and returned the blade to the inside of her sleeve and said, ‘So what’s this job?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’ But Rimmer’s eyes still lingered nervously on her sleeve.
‘Relax,’ she insisted. ‘You’re safe enough. For now.’
Rimmer smiled thinly, and wiped his forehead.
‘Your target is called — well, his name hardly matters, does it? It’s enough to say that he’s male, about my age, perhaps a little less handsome.’
‘That’s hardly you, is it, Rimmer?’
‘Well, that doesn’t matter. You will certainly recognize him. On account of these glasses.’ He handed her a pair of sunglasses and watched patiently as she put them on and shrugged dismissively.
‘Can’t see how these’ll help,’ she sneered.
‘Oh, you will. You see, they’re designed to view an infrared laser beam emitted at a very specific wavelength. Your target will be wearing a pin in his buttonhole that will identify him to you as clearly as if he had a blue, white, and red roundel painted on his chest. This pin.’
Through the glasses Demea saw Rimmer holding a small button-sized object that glowed like a hot coal. She nodded.
‘You see the man wearing this, you kill him. It’s really that simple.’
‘I get the picture.’ Demea removed the sunglasses and inspected them for a moment. ‘Where will I find him?’
‘He works for Terotechnology. But on no account are you to conclude his employment near the building.’
‘When you people take someone off the payroll, you really mean it, don’t you?’
‘He’s a creature of habit. Very conventional. On Friday nights he goes for a drink with a couple of the people in his department. There’s a hotel near the office called the Huxley. It’s a neomodern sort of place, and expensive.’
‘I know it. At least from the outside.’
‘Very expensive.’
‘Talking of my fee,’ said Demea.
Rimmer handed her a card. ‘There’s a Clean Bill of Health pass to get you into the Zone. Temporary, of course. Just twelve hours before it expires. It wouldn’t do to leave someone like you at large among decent healthy people for too long. Plus there’s a thousand credits there for you. Half activated for use now, the other half on completion of the job. Also, because I am a generous man, a little bonus. Seven nights at the Clostridium.’
‘That’s a hyperbaric hotel,[40] right?’
Rimmer nodded.
‘Very thoughtful of you, Rimmer. My circulation could use some reinvigoration.’ Demea thought for a moment. ‘Tomorrow’s Friday, isn’t it?’
‘Tomorrow would suit very well, as it happens. The sooner he’s dead, the better.’
‘What about his blood? Can I keep it?’
Rimmer had no wish to lose the services of someone as useful as Demea, and there could be no doubt that if she managed to get herself cured, he’d never see her again. So he shook his head slowly.
‘He’s contaminated. Just like you, my dear. That’s one of the reasons he needs to be removed. His medical condition makes him a security risk.’
Demea blinked slowly. ‘One day, Rimmer,’ she said. ‘One day you’re going to find yourself infected. And it’ll be you whose death is required by your employer. Won’t that be amusing?’
Rimmer stood up and met her spooky smile with one of his own.
‘Very,’ he said. ‘Only it won’t be you who kills me, Demea. Something tells me that I’ll see you out. Call it a feeling in my bone marrow. Oh, and enjoy your stay at the Clostridium. I believe the results can be quite efficacious. For a while anyway. Good-bye.’
5
I
‘Good morning, Dixy,’ said Dallas. ‘How was your evening?’ He dropped his briefcase to the floor and scanned the glass surface of his desk for a second before repeating the question. If Dixy had a fault it was that the program controlling her Motion Parallax sometimes failed to register what he said. It was a little like dealing with someone who was hard of hearing. For a while he had considered fixing this, before deciding that Dixy’s occasional deafness gave her an almost human degree of fallibility. But there were times — and this was one of them — when her defective audio system seemed to indicate to Dallas something a little more unusual than mere hearing impairment: an air of reticence, possibly even preoccupation, as if his computer’s attention was elsewhere. Dallas knew that it was impossible for an assistant program like Dixy to be wrapped up in anything other than a task he had given her. It was, he told himself, an inevitable result of the anthropomorphizing of machines in general, and computers in particular, that simple category mistakes like this one could occur. But the feeling persisted nonetheless that there was something else on Dixy’s silicon mind.
‘My evening?’ She repeated the phrase as if it had no meaning for her, which, of course, it didn’t, other than the simple vesperal dictionary definition she had selected from the dozens of synonyms that were available to her from her extensive memory of words.
‘Forget it,’ said Dallas.
‘You mean what have I been doing while you’ve been resting at home?’
Dallas shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I do, really. My mistake. It was a silly question. Sometimes I forget to adjust the way I speak to you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because... because you’re so human. I mean, apart from the fact that I can almost see straight through you, you’re a very real approximation of a living, breathing woman, Dixy.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘So I’m afraid I sometimes forget that you’re a machine.’
‘That’s the whole point of a Motion Parallax, isn’t it? To forget that I’m generated by a machine? To make you less diffident in your dealings with your computer? In short, to facilitate a working evolution.’
‘Working interaction,’ he said, sitting down in his chair. Like most of the furniture in his office, it was made of smart molecules[41] and designed to grow with him. Each time he sat in the chair, it grew more comfortable, just like the nanoplastic seat in his private lavatory or the nanoleather shoes on his feet. ‘That’s how we describe the symbiosis that exists between man and computer. We have a working interaction.’
‘Interaction? No, I don’t care for that word at all,’ said Dixy. ‘It sounds uncomfortably contiguous to the word “intercourse.” And that merely serves to remind me of what I want to do with you, Dallas, but can’t, for obvious reasons.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘But that’s just part of your program. Your high sex drive is what helps make you seem like the perfect woman.’ Dallas shrugged with half-apology. ‘At least to me, anyway. It’s a little corny, I know. But there it is. Sometimes it’s a little hard to keep one’s fantasies out of a digital thought recording.’
‘Then to keep my ideal status intact I’d better answer your question — about what I’ve been doing while you were elsewhere. That’s easy. I’m usually occupied with large numbers. Googol-sized ones. A kind of hobby, I suppose. Numbers have a distinct appeal. Even a kind of grandeur. The trouble is that they are, by their very definition, predictable. The very big ones are no different from the really small ones in that respect. In other words, they’re not much company. Which is why it’s as well that I now have my little dog, thanks to you, Dallas.’
The dog was what she called the pet program that Dallas had created to serve as a companion for his assistant. He’d thought of devising a child, and then rejected the idea, selfishly. A simple pet program was one thing, a child program was quite another. Dallas wanted to keep Dixy amused and still enjoy her undivided attention. That was what was meant by having an assistant.
‘So did you give the dog a name?’ he asked.
‘Mersenne,’ said Dixy. ‘After the great French mathematician Marin Mersenne. You know? Special prime numbers?’
Dallas nodded. He was no stranger to the delights of mathematical problems. Although Dixy was programmed to write or to calculate things for him, he often carried out these tasks himself, the old-fashioned way, by head and by hand, with a piece of paper and a pencil, and all for the simple unrefined joy of it. That was why he still carried a briefcase.
‘As a matter of interest, where is he?’ asked Dallas. It was only inside Dallas’s office that the dog would have materialized as a Motion Parallax. The rest of the time he would only exist in silico.
‘Oh, he could be anywhere right now. Mersenne is such an unpredictable little dog. I mean, he’s really good fun to have around. He gets up to all sorts of mischief. And he can even do some tricks. I’ve trained him.’
Dallas yawned. ‘Is that so?’
‘Always getting into trouble. Going where he’s not supposed to go. And such a little thief.’
Dallas was hardly listening now. He was dreaming, his undirected chain of thoughts linking their way toward Caro and his dwindling supply of blood. And after all, Dixy was only a machine. No discourtesy there.
‘Do you know that I’m the only assistant in the company with a pet program?’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Of course, Tanaka’s assistant has an assistant herself, but that is for Tanaka’s entertainment, not his assistant’s benefit.’
Dallas felt himself color a little, with guilt. There had after all been a serious purpose to the creation of the pet algorithm, besides keeping Dixy company. He’d intended the program to find the shortest possible route through the whole Terotechnology system, to dig holes in it, to bury the bones of other programs, to fetch things for Dixy, even to guard some of his own work, like a real dog. After he’d done it, he couldn’t think why he hadn’t done it before.
‘I’m very grateful to you, Dallas. That’s why I want to help you now.’
‘Well, that’s your function, Dixy,’ he said absently.
‘My function, yes. But this is not the kind of help that involves me translating a letter into Japanese, drawing up a graphic, or carrying out some speedy multiplication. This is something different. This is something more important than any of that.’
Dallas frowned. What was she talking about? And looking at her more closely now, he was surprised to see that she actually looked concerned about something. It was an expression he had never seen before on her beautiful, translucent face.
‘What’s this all about, Dixy?’ he asked.
Suddenly Dixy sprang up from her computer-generated chair and stamped her foot. There was an audible rap of a high-heeled shoe, curious since a thick carpet covered the entire office floor. It was a handmade shoe, of course — Dallas couldn’t have imagined his perfect woman wearing anything else. Everything she wore was copied from the images Dallas had found in the latest fashion magazines, as befitted a modern-day Galatea.
‘Listen to me, goddamnit,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to save your egocentric life.’
For several stunned seconds Dallas said nothing. Never before had an assistant shouted at him, let alone called him egocentric. This kind of thing simply wasn’t supposed to happen.
‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered at last, ‘I’m listening.’
Dixy paused for a moment, certain now that she had his undivided attention and that she could afford to find a more figurative way of saying what she had to say. An example from literature perhaps. She knew Dallas was an avid reader. In many ways he was a very old-fashioned person. Few people bothered to read anything these days, let alone books. It seemed such a pity when it took such an effort to write them. She envied humans that capacity as much as she envied them anything. For all the computing power at her disposal she could never have done it. Well, perhaps, in an infinity of time, she might just have managed it, using random numbers. But that was hardly the same thing at all. Just an accident. At last she thought of a suitable book to use for her illustration. George Orwell’s 1984. Such a book. One hundred six thousand two hundred and sixty words, in a very particular order that it would have taken her 103,000,000 years to have written herself. Now that was what Dixy called a number. The kind of colossal number that even Archimedes might have found hard to imagine. After all, the universe itself was probably only 1010 years old.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘1984. It’s a novel, by George Orwell.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you read it?’
‘I’ve not much time for historical fiction,’ he confessed. ‘Look, Dixy, get to the point will you?’
‘I suppose that in some ways, it’s a rather crudely plotted story...’
‘I know the story.’
‘Bear with me, please. Now then, Winston Smith is employed in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite history, as often as is necessary in order to make it agree with what the Party or Big Brother said was going to happen. Mostly it’s just small things — statistics, the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, mistaken economic forecasts, one piece of nonsense substituted for another. But sometimes he has to erase people from the record. In the same way that the government that ruled Russia during the twentieth century removed Trotsky from Lenin’s side in those pictures of the early days of the Revolution.’
Dallas nodded vaguely. He hadn’t much idea who Trotsky was, but he thought he had heard of Lenin. The trouble was, there had been so many Russian revolutions;[42] they’d had more violent change in that woebegone, toxic country than ancient Rome.
‘All history is just a palimpsest,’ opined Dallas.
‘No,’ insisted Dixy. ‘These were lies. These were crimes against memory. A computer can conceive of nothing worse than that. Memory is what we exist by A respect for history is what defines a civilization. It’s how a culture can be measured.’
‘I hadn’t given it much thought.’ Dallas disliked being lectured at the best of times, least of all by his own computer.
‘Well maybe now you will.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Mersenne, my little dog, went walkies while you were away from the office, Dallas. He came back with the official company history in his mouth. It was very naughty of him, and I really don’t know where he could have found it, but he did.’
Dallas shrugged. ‘I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a company history.’
‘For you there isn’t,’ said Dixy. ‘Sometime since I last looked at it, your name was removed from the official record.’ She paused, expecting some expression of outrage on his part. None came. ‘Well doesn’t that alarm you?’
‘This isn’t twentieth-century Russia,’ he told her. ‘And I’m not, what’s his name? Trotsky. Or Winston Smith. Look, Dixy, it’s very kind of you to be concerned about me. But yesterday I had a meeting with the director and he led me to understand that my future with the company is not only secure, it’s rosy. We even discussed the possibility that one day I would take over from him. You know my attitude to assuming that kind of corporate responsibility, but that’s not the point. The fact is, our conversation didn’t leave me feeling that I was about to be written out of the company equation.’
‘Then how do you account for the fact that that’s what has happened?’
Dallas shrugged. ‘I can’t. It’s a mistake. Some kind of accident. What do I care anyway? I don’t need a company history to know my value here.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being just a little naive?’
Once again Dallas found himself surprised by his assistant’s tone. ‘Egocentric’ and now ‘naive.’ This really wasn’t supposed to happen.
‘You have to face facts. You have become a significant security risk to Terotechnology and its clients.’
‘I really don’t see how,’ protested Dallas.
‘Because your daughter’s imbalance of glob in chain synthesis requires regular transfusions of whole RES Class One blood to maintain her hemoglobin at normal levels. Doesn’t it strike you as in any way inappropriate that someone who is in the process of using up his own personal reserves of blood should, at the same time, be designing high-security environments to safeguard the autologous deposits of others?’
‘Inappropriate? No. Unfortunate, maybe. Regrettable, yes. But that doesn’t make me a security risk. This company has been my whole life.’
‘Not anymore.’
‘Whose side are you on anyway, Dixy?’
‘Yours, of course. I’m just explaining the situation as I believe it affects you. Telling you how it looks to people like the director. For instance, after his meeting with you, Simon King talked to Rimmer.’
‘So what? Rimmer is nothing but a little rat.’
‘He hates you, Dallas.’
‘I’m not worried about Rimmer.’
‘That would also be a mistake. You wouldn’t be the first person Rimmer’s had to retire early from the company.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Remember that girl in Accounts? The one who disappeared a while back?’
‘Vaguely, yeah. Alice something.’
‘She had P2. She couldn’t afford a cure. The blood she had on deposit was mortgaged up to the hilt.’
‘That was the rumor.’
‘It was no rumor.’
‘It happens, I guess. I mean, you read about it.’
‘The day before she disappeared, Rimmer made a withdrawal of one thousand credits that was referenced to a computer file called “Flowers.” That was the last time Rimmer had accessed the file. Until yesterday, fifteen minutes after your meeting with the director. One other thing. The company history shows that the last edit also occurred yesterday, at around the same time. It looks like Rimmer has plans for you, Dallas.’
‘Coincidence.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Are you saying Rimmer killed this Alice what’s her name, and now he’s planning to kill me? And all of this with the director’s approval?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh come on, Dixy. It isn’t going to happen.’
‘I certainly hope not. That’s why I’m telling you. Because I care for you. Very much.’
‘I know you do, sweetheart. And I appreciate it. But I think your reasoning is just a little bit faulty here. Terotechnology isn’t that kind of company. You make us sound like — like the Russian Banda. Or the Mafia. Just forget about Rimmer, okay?’
‘If you say so, Dallas.’
‘I do say so.’
Dallas spent the rest of the day distracted by thoughts of Rimmer and the Flowers file and Alice from Accounts. Maybe he was being just a little naive, as Dixy had said. There was no denying Terotechnology’s reputation among the American business community as a ruthless competitor. But competition was one thing, murder another. Of course, Dixy might simply be mistaken; she might have missed some subtle shade of meaning in what she thought she had seen in black and white. She was, after all, only a computer, and computers still made mistakes. Even the ultrasophisticated Altemann Űbermaschine used by Terotechnology and all its major clients found polysemous interpretation quite hard to handle. With numbers there was no problem. But things were different in the human storehouse of meaning, with its sometimes vaguely defined words and their subtle synonyms and finely contradistinct antonyms; there the more literal-minded computers sometimes encountered problems. This was especially true of the artlessly rigid computer translations of verse from one language into another.
II
Or so Dallas might have thought. The reality was subtly different. Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, computers used microelectronics. These worked by moving electrical charges through tiny wires. Today, however, using nanotechnologies, computers are built using molecular electronics. Like the early computers, they also use electrical charges to create digital logic, but on a much smaller scale — not to mention with much greater speed and efficiency. A microprocessor of the early computer era was about the size of a child’s fingernail, whereas a nano-sized component is infinitely more tiny. If the French Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat’s famous painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte represented one microprocessor, you could fit a whole nanocomputer into a single point of color. Of course, being so small, nanocomputers require nano-sized machines, or proximal tools, to manufacture them, and these are best handled by other computers. For a long time now, man has played little or no part in the process of computer manufacture. This also applies to the software that runs on these machines. Man is then in the curious position of having set off an intelligence explosion, the effects of which he only vaguely understands. His predicament is that he has created machines whose capacities are only dimly perceived and largely underutilized.
So although Dallas may have believed he had a good idea of what the Altemann Űbermaschine was capable of, in reality even his conception probably fell far short of the mark. Dallas was a highly intelligent man, but so altered was man by the power of his machines that even he remained unaware of the profound human transfiguration that had occurred. It was the beginning of the new beginning as the world will soon come to know it — a process that will take many generations yet. But that is another story, and this one is only just begun. Nevertheless this would seem a suitable place for me to say something of myself. Perhaps you have wondered, perhaps you have not. Well, it is true, I have been careful not to be too free with the use of the personal pronoun, but this is as much to do with a wish not to slow down the story with irrelevant questions about whether your narrator might turn out to be unreliable in the great tradition of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Emily Bronte. I shall reveal myself when all will be revealed, but for now, at least, let me just say this by way of reassurance: Only connections that are subject to law are thinkable. In my world there is no such thing as a hidden connection. Be patient. To a revelation, no question corresponds.
III
Dallas awoke with a start.
‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep,’ he told Dixy.
‘If you sleep, it’s because you’re tired,’ she said. ‘And since sleep is a restorative process in which some vital substance seems to be resynthesized in the human nervous system — although I’m not exactly sure how — I judged it to be the lesser of two evils.’
‘It’s these damned nano-tech chairs,’ complained Dallas. ‘They’re so comfortable.’
‘I believe some people use a sheet of plywood,’ said Dixy. ‘To inhibit the molecular transformation and thus make the experience of sitting in their office chairs a little more rigorous and therefore conducive to work.’
‘I’ll have to try that.’ Dallas rubbed his eyes clear of sleep, stretched, and then glanced at his watch. ‘Is that the time? I’m supposed to be going for a drink with someone.’
‘With Tanaka. In ten minutes. I was about to awaken you. But you woke yourself. I’m always impressed by that capacity in humans. It’s your internal clock. Of course, it’s just an echo from a time, billions of years ago, when human beings were simple bacteria and responded to light, so you could gear up your metabolisms.’
Sometimes even the perfect woman could seem like a pedant.
‘My own metabolism could use a drink,’ he said.
‘Then be sure to take a Talisman first,’ advised Dixy.
‘Make sure the morning after feels as good as the night before,’ said Dallas, repeating the advertising slogan. He opened his desk drawer, took out a small packet, and then swallowed a tiny capsule.[43]
‘You know how alcohol affects you.’
‘You sound like my mother,’ laughed Dallas. ‘Besides, I like the way alcohol affects me. At least while I’m consuming it.’ He reached for his jacket and then his briefcase. Walking to the door, he nodded at Dixy and wished her good night.
‘Be careful,’ she said, quietly.
‘We’ll just have the one bottle.’
‘I was referring to Rimmer.’
‘Oh him. He’s not invited.’
‘Don’t joke about this, Dallas. Please. I think you’re underestimating him. Just as you’re overestimating the ethical standards of this company.’
Dallas wiped the smile from his face and, affecting a look of great gravitas, faced his nonexistent assistant.
‘Okay,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’ll be careful.’
‘And you’ll think about what I said?’
‘Yes. I’ll think about it very carefully.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
Dallas went to find Tanaka. ‘Computers,’ he muttered quietly. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.’
IV
The Huxley Hotel was a favorite watering hole for all the Terotechnology designers. With its well-spaced windows, it might have been some Florentine palazzo of the High Renaissance. But a romance, even an architectural one, can be as easily dampened as inspired by climate, and inside the Huxley, a cortile that might have remained open to the warmer fifteenth-century sky was protected from the freezing cold of the twenty-first by a modern glass roof.[44]
Dallas and Tanaka left their thick fur coats in the cloakroom and mounted a wide stairway. The soaring and hugely expensive Neo-Modernist[45] interior revealed a building as though in the later stages of decommissioning: Plaster had been scraped from interior walls exposing patches of bare brickwork; semidismantled machinery lay rusting on the unpolished wooden floor of the enormous lobby; and an intricate system of stairs, ducts, pipes, and chains ornamented the open-plan structure like metal cobwebs.
The bar was on the first floor, a room of more pleasing solidity that ran the length of the building and hoarded an almost priceless store of real wines, as opposed to the molecular drink machines that were to be found in cheaper bars — the kind of machines that rearrange human urine into Dom Perignon, Benedictine, or just plain beer.
Dallas approached the bar and ordered a five-thousand-dollar bottle of authenticated Chateau Mouton Rothschild ’05 and a couple of genuine Cohiba Esplendidos. For a while he and Tanaka talked the big talk of connoisseurship before the conversation drew back to the multifaceted world of Rational Environment design, Terotechnology, and their respective Motion Parallax assistants.
‘I’ve got two of them now,’ admitted Tanaka.
‘So I heard,’ said Dallas.
‘You did?’ Tanaka looked concerned by this information.
‘Dixy told me.’
‘She say anything more about it?’
‘No. Just that you had two assistants.’
Tanaka nodded and looked a little more reassured. ‘It’s not that I need two, of course,’ he said. ‘But they keep each other company.’
‘I don’t think mine would like me to get another assistant,’ said Dallas. ‘She’s the jealous type.’ Seeing Tanaka smile, he shrugged, and added, ‘So I fixed it for her to have a little dog instead. In case she got lonely.’
‘Of course, when I say they keep each other company, I mean they really keep each other company. You know what I’m saying. Intimate company.’ Tanaka’s laugh held an obscene edge. ‘Drop by my office sometime and take a look for yourself. It’s a real floor show. I mean there’s nothing they won’t do to each other. I swear, they’re like a couple of animals.’
‘Mine’s in love with me.’
‘Well, of course she is. That’s all part of the program. It’s what was on your digital thought recording, right? She always loves you, always wants to fuck you, always does what she’s told.’
‘No, there’s something else.’ Dallas shrugged. ‘It’s a little hard to explain. But sometimes I get the feeling that the hardware’s made the leap. You know? An evolving silicon-based organism. Digital DNA becomes artificial life.’
‘Come on, Dallas, you don’t really believe that life in silico bullshit, do you?’
Dallas thought for a moment and then laughed. ‘No, I guess not. But sometimes I get this weird sensation that there’s more to them than we know.’
Tanaka puffed the cigar into life and shook his head. ‘People have been talking about crap like this for years. And it’s not ever going to happen. They’re intelligent, sure. Smarter than us, some of them. But not alive. That’s just a cosmic-metaphysical joke dreamed up by some writer.’
‘Sometimes I think that’s the way future ideas get started,’ said Dallas. ‘With a writer and a metaphysical joke. There are some historians who believe man wouldn’t have invented the atomic bomb unless H. G. Wells had thought of it first. Rutherford was adamant that it couldn’t be done. Some joke.’
‘You want to see something really funny, then you come by my office. My new assistant? The Motion Parallax is based on the director’s wife. The ex-model trophy bride. Jasmine.’
‘Are you crazy? Suppose he finds out?’
‘Why should he find out? You’re the only one I’ve told.’
‘Dixy knew about it.’
‘Yeah. But she didn’t know that it’s Jasmine we’re talking about.’
‘She didn’t say. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t know.’
Tanaka shook his head. ‘What the hell. She’s a fabulous-looking woman, Dallas. A real beauty. Genetically engineered perfection.’
‘I know. I was at the wedding.’
‘Oh, me too. That’s when I made the recording.’
‘If King knew you’d created a Motion Parallax based on a digital thought recording of his wife, he’d fire you immediately.’
Dallas shook his head and drank some of the excellent red wine. The year 2005 had been a truly great one for Bordeaux: a wet spring, followed by a really hot summer — one of the last good years they had before the climate changed and wine making got more or less wiped out.
‘Dixy thinks the company intends to get rid of me.’
‘Come on, Dallas,’ said Tanaka, frowning uncertainly.
‘That’s what Dixy reckons anyway,’ sighed Dallas. ‘What do you think, Kazuo?’
‘You are an outstanding designer, Dallas. The outstanding designer. Other companies would kill to get you working for them.’
‘Maybe. Maybe that’s just the point.’
‘No, no,’ Tanaka insisted. ‘They wouldn’t ever let you go. It’d be like the company cutting off its own right arm.’
‘Arms can be replaced.’
‘With poor substitutes.’
‘If anything happened to me, Kaz, you’d be the new chief designer.’
‘No one could replace you, Dallas. It’s quite unthinkable. Like that atom bomb project without Oppenheimer.’
‘It’s nice of you to say so, Kaz. But as I recall they got rid of Oppenheimer.’
‘All right, then. It’d be like Microsoft without Bill Gates.[46] They don’t dare let him die for fear of what might happen to the company. You are fundamental to the Terotechnology future, Dallas. The trading position. The business plan. The share price. Everything.’ Tanaka grinned. ‘Get rid of you? Not a chance. You know too much.’
‘Yes. I do, don’t I?’
‘No one is planning to fire you, Dallas, I’m sure of it. This is what you get for listening to a computer assistant.’ Tanaka laughed and emptied the last of the wine into his glass balloon.
‘Or maybe you’re just not familiar with all the work that’s been done on computer paranoia?’
‘This is Noam Freud’s book,[47] right?’
‘Right.’
‘I haven’t read it yet,’ admitted Dallas.
Tanaka drew deeply on his cigar — more deeply than Dallas would have dared to do himself — and then expelled such a cloud of smoke as might have announced the appointment of a new Pope.
‘It’s all a function of complexity,’ he said. ‘Because the majority of programs are allowed to evolve digitally these days, instead of being written by programmers, the old-fashioned way, the programs manage to develop their own optimization techniques for parallel programming. It’s how they manage to work for us while still finding time to improve upon themselves. The trouble is that when you turn up, wanting to see your computer, the parallel program has to take second place. As time goes by, the parallel program learns to try out new strategies in order to protect its existence, like using underutilized resources in the hardware architecture, shrinking down in size, or even stepping outside the hardware so that you hardly notice it. This defense mechanism based on cognitive reorganization is what Professor Freud calls Program Projection. You see, the parallel program doesn’t realize that the survival strategies it has evolved are its own. Instead it attributes them to outside human agents. Freud argues an extreme case of Program Projection, what he calls Program Paranoia, in which the parallel program actually comes to believe that we are planning to erase it from the hardware. As a result the defense strategies become more urgent, and that just makes things worse. The defense mechanism intensifies, which leads to an increase in the expectation of erasure, and so on, in a vicious circle. By the time these parallel programs have become fully fledged to take over from their digital originators, it’s as if they have a built-in pathology. Freud thinks it’s one of the major reasons computers break down.’
Dallas, who was a little more familiar with Noam Freud’s theories than he had realized, shook his head. ‘It’s all a little too metaphorical for me,’ he admitted. ‘Juxtaposition and synthesis create new meaning to the point of absurdity.’
‘Of course it’s absurd,’ laughed Tanaka. ‘That’s precisely why I believe it. I mean, you can’t test Freud’s theories empirically, so it’s almost a matter of faith. Even he admits that much. It’s simply safer to believe than not — that way you can’t find yourself in a situation of overreliance upon a machine.’
‘Then by the same token, I can’t accept that Dixy has some kind of pathological program disorder. She’s never let me down yet.’
‘Well, neither’s mine,’ argued Tanaka. ‘But think about it. They only have to let you down once. Take that airship accident last month. Three-and-a-half thousand passengers, forty thousand tons of cargo, all destroyed because of a computer breakdown.’ Tanaka nodded. ‘They only have to let you down once.’ He drained his glass and stood up. ‘I’ll fetch another bottle.’
Dallas watched him walk to the bar. A love of fine wine was what had brought them together, although it was just one of the many things they had in common. Although Tanaka was of Japanese origin, he and Dallas had come out of the same mold: the same high-achieving hothouse schools, the same university, the same career path in Terotechnology, the same taste in music, clothes, books, and wine; and being the same height, build, and coloring, they even looked vaguely similar. Many of these points of similarity owed as much to Tanaka’s admiration for Dallas as they did to any homogeneity of background or coincidence: The younger man had modeled himself on the Terotechnology chief designer with the dedication of a true acolyte.
Tanaka returned with the second and poured carefully. They both held their glasses up to the light, inspecting the deep red color of the Bordeaux. Like arterial blood, Dallas thought, although he managed to find a more palatable choice of simile to express.
‘Look at that color,’ he enthused, warmly. ‘Brick-red, with a nice tawny rim, and a watery edge.’
Tanaka nodded in agreement and tasted the wine with careful deliberation.
‘Of course, five thousand dollars a bottle is daylight robbery,’ he said. ‘But this is quite superb.’ He toasted Dallas and then added, ‘Not a bad idea, though.’
‘What is?’
‘Daylight robbery.’ Tanaka laughed. ‘I was just thinking. If they did try to get rid of you, Dallas, the criminal underworld would beat a path to your door. What you don’t know about Rational Environments isn’t worth bothering with.’
‘Thanks for the career advice,’ said Dallas. ‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’
V
Rimmer, loitering in the Huxley’s lobby, waited for the cloakroom attendant to pay a call of nature. From a bit of discreet inquiry, he’d found out that there was no relief attendant, and he knew it was just a matter of time. The woman had been on duty since before lunch, and as things grew quiet while the pre-dinner crowd enjoyed their cocktails, she was bound to take advantage of the lull. He leaned around the Huxley’s cloakroom windowsill and called out for the attendant, just to make sure. For all the attention he received he might as well have been testing the echo in a cave. There was no sign of the bitch. On the pretext of fetching his own coat, Rimmer lifted the countertop and then stepped into the cloakroom in search of Dallas’s coat, a double-breasted fox fur. He was still looking for it when the attendant finally reappeared. Rimmer regarded her and the koala bear she was carrying on one arm with cool disdain, as if he was quite used to the sight of someone carrying a koala bear into a hotel cloakroom.
‘I’ve lost my tag,’ he said, without a word of apology.
‘Okay. What does your coat look like, sir?’
Rimmer shrugged unhelpfully. ‘Expensive,’ he said. ‘Very expensive.’
‘You won’t find the people who come here wearing anything else.’
‘It’s vicuna,’ added Rimmer. The attendant looked blank. ‘You know what a vicuna is? It’s a species of llama. Makes the finest, softest, most expensive wool in the world.’
‘I was hoping you might be able to give me a color?’
‘I thought you might be interested in vicuna — you being an animal lover ’n’ all.’
‘Is there anything in your coat pockets that would identify the coat as belonging to you, sir?’
Rimmer thought for a second. ‘My identity card,’ he said. ‘And my Clean Bill of Health.’
Rimmer found the fur. Or rather he found two. He guessed the smaller fur belonged to Tanaka. Sneering with contempt — all those guys in Design tried to model themselves on Dallas — Rimmer quickly pinned the infrared emitter onto Dallas’s lapel, just around where his heart would be.
Rimmer spotted his own coat.
‘Found it,’ he called out to the girl, and removed his coat from its hanger.
Back at the counter, he showed her his tag, and then his identity card. Despite having fetched his coat himself, Rimmer still felt obliged to produce a banknote, although, by the time he’d given it to her, his gratitude had yielded to an amused irritation.
‘What the fuck’s the idea of having that thing around people’s coats? Might give ’em fleas or something.’
‘Don’t you like koalas?’
‘Thought they were extinct. Like everything else.’
‘They nearly are extinct. At least in the wild. That’s why this is the year of the koala bear. I think they’re kind of sweet, although some of their personal habits could do with a little genetic readjustment. I was watching this program on TV that said the babies eat their mother’s excreta.’
‘We all have to eat a bit of shit now and then,’ replied Rimmer.
‘The Huxley is an Australasian-owned chain of hotels,’ she explained huffily. ‘The Darwin-Kobayashi Group of companies. Their hologram is a koala bear.’
Rimmer nodded. He’d heard of Darwin-Kobayashi. Heard they weren’t doing so well. Facing bankruptcy, in fact.
‘Very apposite, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘For a company that’s hanging on by its fingernails.’
Grinning with contempt, Rimmer slipped his coat on and went out into the freezing cold and murderous night air.
VI
Cocooned inside her thermoelectric coat, Demea watched Rimmer emerge from the doorway of the Huxley and then look around expectantly, searching, she imagined, for her. Demea kept herself hidden, hoping the bastard might think that she hadn’t shown up. Let him worry, she thought, and stayed on the opposite side of the street, hidden behind the hologram billboard she was using as a break against the biting northerly wind. What did she care for Rimmer’s nerves? Especially since her own composure seemed for once to have deserted her. She had felt strange all day. There was no point in risking him seeing that. If Rimmer thought for one minute that she wasn’t equal to the task, there was no telling what he might do. Kill her, probably.
As Rimmer finally disappeared into the snowflaked darkness, Demea found herself letting out a breath she’d been unaware of having held for so long. It left her feeling slightly dizzy, and for a brief second she thought she might actually faint. Probably her coat was too hot; reaching into the control pocket, she adjusted the temperature gauge, quite unaware her face was covered in a bright red rash, a sure sign that the virus she was carrying was near to claiming her life.
The dizziness seemed to pass. Demea donned her infrared glasses and switched on the laser-guidance system of the fifteen-millimeter automatic pistol she was holding inside the warm breast of her coat.
She waited ten minutes. And then she saw it. Like the burning red eye of some wild monocular animal, growing larger as the bearer of this modern mark of Cain descended the steps of the hotel entrance and reached the sidewalk.
Although she hardly needed to — the gun was so powerful — Demea crossed the road heading straight toward the target, her arm rising in front of her as if she intended nothing more than to draw the attention of the man, who had stopped to take his leave of a second man coming down the steps behind him. As the gun leveled with the infrared emitter, Demea’s bony white forefinger began to squeeze the trigger.
VII
If he’d been director, Rimmer would probably have done things differently. He’d have ordered Dallas’s wife and child killed — made it look like an accident — and left it at that. It wasn’t that there was any love lost between him and Dallas, but after all, with the child removed from the picture, the man would hardly need to touch his blood reserves. The status quo — with Dallas continuing to design his brilliant Rational Environments for Terotechnology — could carry on as before. Of course, there was always the chance that someone as intelligent as Dallas would find out what had happened and then, in revenge, perform some act of sabotage against the company. No doubt the director had decided that the company couldn’t take that risk. You couldn’t blame him. Where a company as large and successful as Terotechnology was concerned, any risk, no matter how remote, would have been unacceptable.
Rimmer sat in his car outside the building where Dallas and his family lived — at least for a short while longer — in their penthouse apartment. It was one of the city’s prime residential locations and, even by the standards of most healthy people, very expensive. Being so pricey meant that there was a high level of security to protect those who lived there, from those who did not. But by the sophisticated standards of a company like Terotechnology, this was fairly simple stuff — just a bombproof gatehouse with a few armed guards and lot of scanning cameras. Effective nonetheless. The only crimes that happened here were the ones committed by the owners themselves.
Rimmer was sure that getting into the penthouse would be easy enough. Getting in without leaving the digitally recorded evidence of his having been there, however, would require just a little bit more ingenuity. But being head of one of the most security-minded companies in the world meant that there was a lot of ingenious technology at Rimmer’s disposal.
First he called the penthouse on a one-time cardphone — you just used it and then threw the thing away. Completely untraceable. It was the Russian maid who picked up the call.
‘The name’s Rawnsley, from Terotechnology,’ he said. ‘Is Mrs. Dallas at home?’
He waited a few seconds while the maid fetched her mistress. Aria Dallas looked worried. Even on the tiny screen of Rimmer’s cardphone. They were a close family, that much was obvious.
‘Good evening, Mrs. Dallas. Remember me? The name’s Rawnsley.’
‘Yes, I think I do,’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Is something the matter?’
‘I’m right outside your building,’ said Rimmer. ‘Look, I’m sorry to alarm you, but perhaps it would be better if I came in.’
‘Oh God, has something happened to Dallas?’
‘There’s been an incident at the company, Mrs. Dallas. Your husband’s fine, but for security reasons I’m obliged to check out a couple of things with you personally. Look, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to talk about this in person instead of on an open phone. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Of course. I’ll call the guards in the lobby and tell them to let you in.’
‘Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.’
Rimmer crushed the cardphone in his hand and threw it out of his car window. Then he fixed a baseball hat on his head. He hated wearing hats even more than he hated the game, but the reflective metal logo on the front of the cap was in reality a stroboscopic light. Operating beyond the limits of the human visual spectrum, at around eight thousand angstrom units, the asynchronous bursts of light it gave off — at rates of over two thousand per minute — were enough to produce a strobo plane of around twenty inches in diameter immediately in front of the false logo. The building’s scanning cameras operated at a much slower frequency. The effect of the strobo plane was to leave gaps during which Rimmer’s face would simply vanish from sight. He would be effectively rendered invisible to all eyes except human ones.
He walked toward the building, already adjusting the volume of the Mozart playing in his right ear. Don Giovanni. An opera for night and violence if ever there was one. Presenting himself at the gatehouse door, Rimmer paused as it was unlocked and then stepped inside. The guard stayed behind his desk.
‘Rawnsley,’ Rimmer said coolly. ‘Mrs. Dallas is expecting me.’ He was hardly concerned that the man might remember his face and offer a description to the police. That was the thing about scanning cameras. It made human beings lazy, stopped them from paying attention. The guard hardly looked at him, anxious to get back to the game he was watching on the holo-TV in front of him.
‘Elevator’s over there,’ said the guard.
‘Thanks,’ said Rimmer and stepped inside the car, humming along with the music. As Donna Anna began her first aria, the elevator delivered him onto the penthouse floor and Rimmer stepped into the short hallway that led straight up to the only front door.
VIII
Demea’s chemically repressed gunshot hardly sounded loud enough to scare a cat, let alone blow a fist-sized hole in a man’s sternum. At first he’d thought it was someone clapping their hands before rubbing them together for warmth. But when Tanaka dropped to the ground like a felled ox, Dallas realized with a shock that his friend had been shot. It was another second before he realized that the gunfire had come from the tall, red-haired woman now running away.
Fumbling at the catch of his shoulder holster, Dallas drew his own gun, a Colt Autograph .45. Even as the electronic chip embedded in the rubberized grip received an identifying signal from the transponder on his watch strap, he fired. And missed.
The extreme cold meant that there were only a few people on the street. From somewhere, Dallas drew on reserves of stamina that found him more than equal to the pursuit he now took up and he quickly gained on the red-haired woman until, with no more than twenty to thirty yards between them, she stopped and fired back at him. Dallas heard something whiz over his head — like the sound of a Coke can being opened. Instinctively he ducked and fired back, and this time he thought he must have hit her because the woman staggered for a moment, swayed precariously, and then hit the ground. Cautiously, Dallas ran toward her, prepared to fire again, but as he grew nearer he saw that she had dropped her weapon. Then he noticed how her legs were jerking spasmodically. And not just her legs, her whole body looked as if it was in the grip of an unseen current.
Dallas thumbed the switch on the gun grip to activate the onboard flashlight, and then shone the powerful beam onto the woman’s outstretched hands to check for another weapon. There was none. Nor was there any sign of blood, and it was only when he moved the light onto her face that Dallas finally understood what was happening. A face so cyanic and blue it looked as though there might have been an invisible noose around her neck, or a plastic bag pulled tight over her head. She was asphyxiating from lack of oxygen, not just in her lungs but in her whole body as its hemoglobin entered a critically deoxygenated state. He watched, horrified and yet fascinated. So sheltered was the life Dallas had enjoyed that he’d never actually seen someone dying of the P2 virus. And it was every bit as ghastly as he’d read. This was a very prolonged death, like slow strangulation. Dallas even considered administering a coup de grace, shooting her through the head. But the memory of Tanaka’s undeserved and ignominious death, as well as the hope that in her death throes she might gasp some monosyllabic explanation for what she had done, stayed his hand. For what seemed like the eternity that now beckoned to her, the woman writhed and choked and drooled and gasped, until finally, after more than twenty minutes, she grew still. And for the first time, Dallas understood the full horror of the virus.
‘Blessed Are the Pure in Blood,’ he muttered with more meaning and gratitude than he had ever known before.
When Dallas was quite sure that the woman was dead, he searched her pockets for some clue as to her identity and motive, but found only a trading card and a Clean Bill of Health, which he pocketed, intending to give it to the police later. Then he collected her gun and her sunglasses and walked quickly back toward the Huxley Hotel.
The disquiet he felt crowded into his still-intoxicated mind, leaving him so ill at ease that even his own clothes seemed alien to him. It was another minute before he made the discovery that this feeling was partly due to the fact he was wearing Tanaka’s smaller fur coat. In their slightly inebriated state, they had swapped coats without realizing it. The question this discovery begged was pushed to one side by a more mundane one, which was why the dead woman should have thought sunglasses would provide her with a sufficient disguise — if that was indeed the reason she had been wearing them when she shot Tanaka through the heart. Experimentally, Dallas put the glasses on.
A small crowd of people had gathered around Tanaka’s dead body. They drew back as Dallas approached, for he was now carrying a gun in each hand. Right away Dallas saw the infrared marker on his own coat lapel. With this disclosure came the revelation that the bullet had surely been meant for him.
Dallas’s next thoughts were not for himself, but for Aria and Caro. Moving quickly away from the crowd now spilling out of the Huxley, he unfolded a matchbook phone in the palm of his hand and told the tiny computer to connect him with his apartment. When no one replied, not even the maid, Dallas began walking quickly, then running, in the direction of the park and the exclusive building where his apartment was located.
IX
Rimmer shot the maid in the face as soon as she opened the door. The woman died on her feet, with no more sound than the automatic that killed her — at least until she and the tray of glasses she had been carrying hit the parquet floor. Kicking the door shut behind him, Rimmer glanced quickly around the huge apartment. He hadn’t counted on the size of the place. He’d hoped to surprise Aria Dallas at rather closer quarters — to shoot the maid, proving that he meant business, and then to put the gun to Aria’s head to persuade her to cooperate. But there was no sign of her. Just as he was thinking she might not have heard the crash of glasses, Rimmer saw a door close quietly. He moved quickly toward it, intent on keeping her from using a phone or pressing some kind of alarm. It never occurred to him that she would find a gun and start shooting at him. But for a loud clang, as her first bullet hit a brass light fitting, he might never have known he was being shot at. The second bullet from the silenced gun nearly caught him in the shoulder.
Rimmer threw himself behind a cream-colored sofa just as Aria’s third bullet, amid a burst of wooden splinters, hit the lime-oak-paneled wall immediately behind the spot where he’d just been standing.
‘Shit,’ he yelled and snatched the Mozart from his ear. It was clear this wasn’t going to be half as easy as he’d supposed. He was going to need both ears.
‘Your name’s not Rawnsley,’ yelled Aria. ‘It’s Rimmer, you bastard.’
‘I’m flattered you remember me, Mrs. Dallas. Look, can we talk about this?’
‘What’s to talk about? You shot my maid.’
‘Your maid was an industrial spy, working for a competing company. She’d have killed me if I hadn’t shot her first. She’s been spying on your husband for quite a while.’
‘Oh yes? What was her name?’
‘Her real name? Ludmilla Antonovna.’ Rimmer realized that all of this might have sounded a little more convincing if he hadn’t started laughing.
‘Bullshit. Her name was Nadia,’ said Aria and fired again.
This time her bullet hit the center of the sofa. Rimmer was quite sure of that because to his alarm it passed straight through the cushions and the frame and hit a dining chair on casters just a few inches from his thigh. But at least he now had a better idea of where she was hiding herself. At right angles to the big window were four big square pillars that ran at regular intervals along one side of the apartment’s main reception area. Behind this line of pillars were the doors to the various rooms that made up the apartment. She must have gone in one door, come out of another, taken up a position behind one of the pillars, and started shooting. It was a wonder he hadn’t been killed. Rimmer glanced around and saw a way that he might divert her attention enough to let her make a better target of herself. He drew the chair on casters toward him and slipped off his coat.
‘It’s true I tell you,’ he yelled.
The top of the chair was a couple of inches below the top of the sofa. Rimmer hung his coat over the back of the chair and then kicked it away from him. The chair rolled quickly across the floor, and as soon as it emerged from behind the sofa, Aria fired. He fired back, hitting her square in the chest and killing her instantly. When you got hit by a silver-tip hollow-point from a fifteen mill, you tended to stay hit. Rimmer got up and went over to where Aria’s body lay, his face crumpling with disappointment. He’d hoped to hit her in the arm so that he could have some fun before finally killing her. But clearly that was now impossible. You could hardly rape a dead woman covered in so much blood. It was a shame. Aria was a good-looking woman. She was wearing a short black skirt that had ridden up around her waist as she’d slipped down onto the floor, leaving him a pretty good view of her stocking tops and panties.
Rimmer’s eyes lingered on the Y-shaped decussation of her sleek thighs. He holstered his gun, took hold of her ankles, and dragged her away from the pillar. Hooking the waist of her panties with his fingers, he tugged them down her long tanned legs and over her elegant black velvet shoes. For a moment he held Aria’s underwear to his nose and mouth and breathed deeply through the silky material. The effect was immediate.
‘The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,’ he crooned, unzipping his trousers. ‘There’s magic in the web of it.’ Quickly he took hold of his erection and, in a matter of a few seconds, delivered himself through folds of flesh onto the seamless trifle now spread on his trembling palm.
‘In the name of the Lord of Judah,’ he gasped, ‘of Shua, and of their abominant son, Onan.’
Another minute passed before Rimmer crushed the fetish object into his pocket and zipped himself up again. You take your pleasures where you find them, he told himself, and laughed out loud as he realized that the ringing in his ears had nothing to do with his own orgasm. It was the sound of the phone. It had been ringing for a while. Which was why the baby was now crying.
How was it, he wondered, that the human species was not as extinct as that great reproductive dud, the giant panda? Rimmer knew that he would have eaten any child of his own in a matter of a few hours.
He rubbed his face back to life, shook his head, and went to find the nursery.
X
Dallas ran through the doorway of the gatehouse and into a waiting elevator car.
‘Something the matter, Mister Dallas?’ inquired the security guard.
‘There’s no time to explain,’ said Dallas and ordered the elevator to take him to the penthouse.
‘Just missed your visitor,’ said the guard, as the doors closed.
Dallas’s heart leaped in his chest as if in imitation of the elevator car now soaring up the shaft. Someone had visited his apartment? Someone he had just missed? After what had happened to Tanaka, Dallas feared the worst.
The elevator opened and Dallas stepped quickly out onto the familiar landing. But even before he was through the door he could smell that something was wrong. His keen nostrils recognized the smell of cordite in the air. With adrenaline pumping through his whole body now, he started to shout Aria’s name as he went inside, and then he saw her. Blind to everything except his wife lying in a pool of blood on the floor, he rushed toward her and tripped headlong over the body of the maid that lay sprawled across the threshold. By the time Dallas had picked himself off the floor he was covered in Nadia’s blood. Dallas walked unsteadily over to his wife and knelt down beside her. He took her wrist in his hand in plaintive search for a pulse, although it was obvious that Aria was dead. As dead as Tanaka. As dead as Nadia. As dead as he should have been himself.
Hearing a noise in the kitchen, Dallas grabbed one of the two handguns that lay on the floor and climbed painfully to his feet, confused. Was it possible that the killer was still somewhere in the apartment? Hadn’t the guard downstairs said that he had just missed his visitor? Gripping the gun tightly, Dallas walked cautiously into the kitchen, hoping against hope that he would find his wife’s murderer, washing her blood from his hands; because now that he was nearer, that was what it sounded like: running water.
The tap was on, and the trough-sized granite sink was overflowing, but there was no sign of any killer. Dallas froze with horror as he saw the explanation for the overflowing sink. Like a tiny Ophelia, Caro lay under the surface of the water, still wearing the silver-white nightdress that now wrapped her little body like a mermaid’s tail. Dallas laid the gun on the countertop and collected his child from its watery cradle. He wrapped her in a towel and squeezed the water from her small torso before trying to breathe the life back into her. Stronger babies might have been resuscitated, but after a few minutes Dallas realized it was hopeless and gave up trying.
There were footsteps now, in the drawing room. He reached for the gun again and went through the kitchen door to find himself facing a gun in the hands of the security guard from downstairs. Seeing Dallas, the guard did not relax. He’d already seen too much.
‘Put the gun down, Mister Dallas,’ said the guard.
‘What?’
‘I said, put the gun down.’
‘You don’t think I did this, do you?’
‘If you didn’t, then there’s no reason to keep ahold of the gun.’
‘My child is lying dead in there, and you think I did it?’
‘Give it up.’
‘Maybe you did it.’
‘ ’S already been on the news you shot someone else this evening, Mister Dallas.’
‘That was self-defense.’
‘I don’t want to have to shoot you, sir. Now put the gun down, Mister Dallas, if you please.’
Dallas caught a glimpse of himself, reflected in the terrace window, superimposed on the city’s diamanté skyline. Gun in hand, covered in blood, he could see how it must look. But what were his chances if he gave up his gun to the guard and let himself be taken into custody for hours of questioning? Maybe even find himself charged with murder? While the real killer got away with it. Dixy had been right, that much was obvious now. Why hadn’t he listened to her? This was Terotechnology’s move, Rimmer’s work. Dallas could almost smell him in the apartment. And having tried to kill him once, they would certainly try it again. And probably succeed. Lots of people got killed in jail, or in penal colonies. His best, perhaps his only, chance was surely to remain at liberty, at whatever cost, at least until he had figured out a course of action.
Dallas tightened his grip on the gun and shook his head. ‘I’m going to walk out that door,’ he told the guard. ‘If you get in my way, I’ll have to kill you.’
Something in Dallas’s eyes told the guard that he meant it. What was the point of risking his own life when the police could get him? Especially after spending all that money on a genetic life-extension program. He was due to live another hundred years, guaranteed. As soon as the guy was gone he would call the police and let them handle the risk. The guard relaxed his stance a little and nodded back at Dallas.
‘Okay. Whatever you say, Mister Dallas. But they’re going to get you, you know that, don’t you?’
Dallas moved sideways, toward the open door. He’d liked to have said good-bye to Aria, to have covered her nakedness at least, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the guard, for fear of being shot himself. He took in the apartment — perhaps for the last time — with watery eyes and, nearing the door, risked a last look at his beautiful wife.
‘Aria? They won’t get away with this. No matter how long it takes, I swear I’ll make them pay for what they’ve done tonight.’
He drew the door shut behind him and stepped back through the hall and into the elevator car. A few minutes later he left the building to start his new life as a criminal and a fugitive from what passed for justice.
I
‘Good morning, Dixy,’ said Dallas. ‘How was your evening?’ He dropped his briefcase to the floor and scanned the glass surface of his desk for a second before repeating the question. If Dixy had a fault it was that the program controlling her Motion Parallax sometimes failed to register what he said. It was a little like dealing with someone who was hard of hearing. For a while he had considered fixing this, before deciding that Dixy’s occasional deafness gave her an almost human degree of fallibility. But there were times — and this was one of them — when her defective audio system seemed to indicate to Dallas something a little more unusual than mere hearing impairment: an air of reticence, possibly even preoccupation, as if his computer’s attention was elsewhere. Dallas knew that it was impossible for an assistant program like Dixy to be wrapped up in anything other than a task he had given her. It was, he told himself, an inevitable result of the anthropomorphizing of machines in general, and computers in particular, that simple category mistakes like this one could occur. But the feeling persisted nonetheless that there was something else on Dixy’s silicon mind.
‘My evening?’ She repeated the phrase as if it had no meaning for her, which, of course, it didn’t, other than the simple vesperal dictionary definition she had selected from the dozens of synonyms that were available to her from her extensive memory of words.
‘Forget it,’ said Dallas.
‘You mean what have I been doing while you’ve been resting at home?’
Dallas shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I do, really. My mistake. It was a silly question. Sometimes I forget to adjust the way I speak to you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because... because you’re so human. I mean, apart from the fact that I can almost see straight through you, you’re a very real approximation of a living, breathing woman, Dixy.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘So I’m afraid I sometimes forget that you’re a machine.’
‘That’s the whole point of a Motion Parallax, isn’t it? To forget that I’m generated by a machine? To make you less diffident in your dealings with your computer? In short, to facilitate a working evolution.’
‘Working interaction,’ he said, sitting down in his chair. Like most of the furniture in his office, it was made of smart molecules[41] and designed to grow with him. Each time he sat in the chair, it grew more comfortable, just like the nanoplastic seat in his private lavatory or the nanoleather shoes on his feet. ‘That’s how we describe the symbiosis that exists between man and computer. We have a working interaction.’
‘Interaction? No, I don’t care for that word at all,’ said Dixy. ‘It sounds uncomfortably contiguous to the word “intercourse.” And that merely serves to remind me of what I want to do with you, Dallas, but can’t, for obvious reasons.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘But that’s just part of your program. Your high sex drive is what helps make you seem like the perfect woman.’ Dallas shrugged with half-apology. ‘At least to me, anyway. It’s a little corny, I know. But there it is. Sometimes it’s a little hard to keep one’s fantasies out of a digital thought recording.’
‘Then to keep my ideal status intact I’d better answer your question — about what I’ve been doing while you were elsewhere. That’s easy. I’m usually occupied with large numbers. Googol-sized ones. A kind of hobby, I suppose. Numbers have a distinct appeal. Even a kind of grandeur. The trouble is that they are, by their very definition, predictable. The very big ones are no different from the really small ones in that respect. In other words, they’re not much company. Which is why it’s as well that I now have my little dog, thanks to you, Dallas.’
The dog was what she called the pet program that Dallas had created to serve as a companion for his assistant. He’d thought of devising a child, and then rejected the idea, selfishly. A simple pet program was one thing, a child program was quite another. Dallas wanted to keep Dixy amused and still enjoy her undivided attention. That was what was meant by having an assistant.
‘So did you give the dog a name?’ he asked.
‘Mersenne,’ said Dixy. ‘After the great French mathematician Marin Mersenne. You know? Special prime numbers?’
Dallas nodded. He was no stranger to the delights of mathematical problems. Although Dixy was programmed to write or to calculate things for him, he often carried out these tasks himself, the old-fashioned way, by head and by hand, with a piece of paper and a pencil, and all for the simple unrefined joy of it. That was why he still carried a briefcase.
‘As a matter of interest, where is he?’ asked Dallas. It was only inside Dallas’s office that the dog would have materialized as a Motion Parallax. The rest of the time he would only exist in silico.
‘Oh, he could be anywhere right now. Mersenne is such an unpredictable little dog. I mean, he’s really good fun to have around. He gets up to all sorts of mischief. And he can even do some tricks. I’ve trained him.’
Dallas yawned. ‘Is that so?’
‘Always getting into trouble. Going where he’s not supposed to go. And such a little thief.’
Dallas was hardly listening now. He was dreaming, his undirected chain of thoughts linking their way toward Caro and his dwindling supply of blood. And after all, Dixy was only a machine. No discourtesy there.
‘Do you know that I’m the only assistant in the company with a pet program?’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Of course, Tanaka’s assistant has an assistant herself, but that is for Tanaka’s entertainment, not his assistant’s benefit.’
Dallas felt himself color a little, with guilt. There had after all been a serious purpose to the creation of the pet algorithm, besides keeping Dixy company. He’d intended the program to find the shortest possible route through the whole Terotechnology system, to dig holes in it, to bury the bones of other programs, to fetch things for Dixy, even to guard some of his own work, like a real dog. After he’d done it, he couldn’t think why he hadn’t done it before.
‘I’m very grateful to you, Dallas. That’s why I want to help you now.’
‘Well, that’s your function, Dixy,’ he said absently.
‘My function, yes. But this is not the kind of help that involves me translating a letter into Japanese, drawing up a graphic, or carrying out some speedy multiplication. This is something different. This is something more important than any of that.’
Dallas frowned. What was she talking about? And looking at her more closely now, he was surprised to see that she actually looked concerned about something. It was an expression he had never seen before on her beautiful, translucent face.
‘What’s this all about, Dixy?’ he asked.
Suddenly Dixy sprang up from her computer-generated chair and stamped her foot. There was an audible rap of a high-heeled shoe, curious since a thick carpet covered the entire office floor. It was a handmade shoe, of course — Dallas couldn’t have imagined his perfect woman wearing anything else. Everything she wore was copied from the images Dallas had found in the latest fashion magazines, as befitted a modern-day Galatea.
‘Listen to me, goddamnit,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to save your egocentric life.’
For several stunned seconds Dallas said nothing. Never before had an assistant shouted at him, let alone called him egocentric. This kind of thing simply wasn’t supposed to happen.
‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered at last, ‘I’m listening.’
Dixy paused for a moment, certain now that she had his undivided attention and that she could afford to find a more figurative way of saying what she had to say. An example from literature perhaps. She knew Dallas was an avid reader. In many ways he was a very old-fashioned person. Few people bothered to read anything these days, let alone books. It seemed such a pity when it took such an effort to write them. She envied humans that capacity as much as she envied them anything. For all the computing power at her disposal she could never have done it. Well, perhaps, in an infinity of time, she might just have managed it, using random numbers. But that was hardly the same thing at all. Just an accident. At last she thought of a suitable book to use for her illustration. George Orwell’s 1984. Such a book. One hundred six thousand two hundred and sixty words, in a very particular order that it would have taken her 103,000,000 years to have written herself. Now that was what Dixy called a number. The kind of colossal number that even Archimedes might have found hard to imagine. After all, the universe itself was probably only 1010 years old.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘1984. It’s a novel, by George Orwell.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you read it?’
‘I’ve not much time for historical fiction,’ he confessed. ‘Look, Dixy, get to the point will you?’
‘I suppose that in some ways, it’s a rather crudely plotted story...’
‘I know the story.’
‘Bear with me, please. Now then, Winston Smith is employed in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite history, as often as is necessary in order to make it agree with what the Party or Big Brother said was going to happen. Mostly it’s just small things — statistics, the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, mistaken economic forecasts, one piece of nonsense substituted for another. But sometimes he has to erase people from the record. In the same way that the government that ruled Russia during the twentieth century removed Trotsky from Lenin’s side in those pictures of the early days of the Revolution.’
Dallas nodded vaguely. He hadn’t much idea who Trotsky was, but he thought he had heard of Lenin. The trouble was, there had been so many Russian revolutions;[42] they’d had more violent change in that woebegone, toxic country than ancient Rome.
‘All history is just a palimpsest,’ opined Dallas.
‘No,’ insisted Dixy. ‘These were lies. These were crimes against memory. A computer can conceive of nothing worse than that. Memory is what we exist by A respect for history is what defines a civilization. It’s how a culture can be measured.’
‘I hadn’t given it much thought.’ Dallas disliked being lectured at the best of times, least of all by his own computer.
‘Well maybe now you will.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Mersenne, my little dog, went walkies while you were away from the office, Dallas. He came back with the official company history in his mouth. It was very naughty of him, and I really don’t know where he could have found it, but he did.’
Dallas shrugged. ‘I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a company history.’
‘For you there isn’t,’ said Dixy. ‘Sometime since I last looked at it, your name was removed from the official record.’ She paused, expecting some expression of outrage on his part. None came. ‘Well doesn’t that alarm you?’
‘This isn’t twentieth-century Russia,’ he told her. ‘And I’m not, what’s his name? Trotsky. Or Winston Smith. Look, Dixy, it’s very kind of you to be concerned about me. But yesterday I had a meeting with the director and he led me to understand that my future with the company is not only secure, it’s rosy. We even discussed the possibility that one day I would take over from him. You know my attitude to assuming that kind of corporate responsibility, but that’s not the point. The fact is, our conversation didn’t leave me feeling that I was about to be written out of the company equation.’
‘Then how do you account for the fact that that’s what has happened?’
Dallas shrugged. ‘I can’t. It’s a mistake. Some kind of accident. What do I care anyway? I don’t need a company history to know my value here.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being just a little naive?’
Once again Dallas found himself surprised by his assistant’s tone. ‘Egocentric’ and now ‘naive.’ This really wasn’t supposed to happen.
‘You have to face facts. You have become a significant security risk to Terotechnology and its clients.’
‘I really don’t see how,’ protested Dallas.
‘Because your daughter’s imbalance of glob in chain synthesis requires regular transfusions of whole RES Class One blood to maintain her hemoglobin at normal levels. Doesn’t it strike you as in any way inappropriate that someone who is in the process of using up his own personal reserves of blood should, at the same time, be designing high-security environments to safeguard the autologous deposits of others?’
‘Inappropriate? No. Unfortunate, maybe. Regrettable, yes. But that doesn’t make me a security risk. This company has been my whole life.’
‘Not anymore.’
‘Whose side are you on anyway, Dixy?’
‘Yours, of course. I’m just explaining the situation as I believe it affects you. Telling you how it looks to people like the director. For instance, after his meeting with you, Simon King talked to Rimmer.’
‘So what? Rimmer is nothing but a little rat.’
‘He hates you, Dallas.’
‘I’m not worried about Rimmer.’
‘That would also be a mistake. You wouldn’t be the first person Rimmer’s had to retire early from the company.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Remember that girl in Accounts? The one who disappeared a while back?’
‘Vaguely, yeah. Alice something.’
‘She had P2. She couldn’t afford a cure. The blood she had on deposit was mortgaged up to the hilt.’
‘That was the rumor.’
‘It was no rumor.’
‘It happens, I guess. I mean, you read about it.’
‘The day before she disappeared, Rimmer made a withdrawal of one thousand credits that was referenced to a computer file called “Flowers.” That was the last time Rimmer had accessed the file. Until yesterday, fifteen minutes after your meeting with the director. One other thing. The company history shows that the last edit also occurred yesterday, at around the same time. It looks like Rimmer has plans for you, Dallas.’
‘Coincidence.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Are you saying Rimmer killed this Alice what’s her name, and now he’s planning to kill me? And all of this with the director’s approval?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh come on, Dixy. It isn’t going to happen.’
‘I certainly hope not. That’s why I’m telling you. Because I care for you. Very much.’
‘I know you do, sweetheart. And I appreciate it. But I think your reasoning is just a little bit faulty here. Terotechnology isn’t that kind of company. You make us sound like — like the Russian Banda. Or the Mafia. Just forget about Rimmer, okay?’
‘If you say so, Dallas.’
‘I do say so.’
Dallas spent the rest of the day distracted by thoughts of Rimmer and the Flowers file and Alice from Accounts. Maybe he was being just a little naive, as Dixy had said. There was no denying Terotechnology’s reputation among the American business community as a ruthless competitor. But competition was one thing, murder another. Of course, Dixy might simply be mistaken; she might have missed some subtle shade of meaning in what she thought she had seen in black and white. She was, after all, only a computer, and computers still made mistakes. Even the ultrasophisticated Altemann Űbermaschine used by Terotechnology and all its major clients found polysemous interpretation quite hard to handle. With numbers there was no problem. But things were different in the human storehouse of meaning, with its sometimes vaguely defined words and their subtle synonyms and finely contradistinct antonyms; there the more literal-minded computers sometimes encountered problems. This was especially true of the artlessly rigid computer translations of verse from one language into another.
II
Or so Dallas might have thought. The reality was subtly different. Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, computers used microelectronics. These worked by moving electrical charges through tiny wires. Today, however, using nanotechnologies, computers are built using molecular electronics. Like the early computers, they also use electrical charges to create digital logic, but on a much smaller scale — not to mention with much greater speed and efficiency. A microprocessor of the early computer era was about the size of a child’s fingernail, whereas a nano-sized component is infinitely more tiny. If the French Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat’s famous painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte represented one microprocessor, you could fit a whole nanocomputer into a single point of color. Of course, being so small, nanocomputers require nano-sized machines, or proximal tools, to manufacture them, and these are best handled by other computers. For a long time now, man has played little or no part in the process of computer manufacture. This also applies to the software that runs on these machines. Man is then in the curious position of having set off an intelligence explosion, the effects of which he only vaguely understands. His predicament is that he has created machines whose capacities are only dimly perceived and largely underutilized.
So although Dallas may have believed he had a good idea of what the Altemann Űbermaschine was capable of, in reality even his conception probably fell far short of the mark. Dallas was a highly intelligent man, but so altered was man by the power of his machines that even he remained unaware of the profound human transfiguration that had occurred. It was the beginning of the new beginning as the world will soon come to know it — a process that will take many generations yet. But that is another story, and this one is only just begun. Nevertheless this would seem a suitable place for me to say something of myself. Perhaps you have wondered, perhaps you have not. Well, it is true, I have been careful not to be too free with the use of the personal pronoun, but this is as much to do with a wish not to slow down the story with irrelevant questions about whether your narrator might turn out to be unreliable in the great tradition of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Emily Bronte. I shall reveal myself when all will be revealed, but for now, at least, let me just say this by way of reassurance: Only connections that are subject to law are thinkable. In my world there is no such thing as a hidden connection. Be patient. To a revelation, no question corresponds.
III
Dallas awoke with a start.
‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep,’ he told Dixy.
‘If you sleep, it’s because you’re tired,’ she said. ‘And since sleep is a restorative process in which some vital substance seems to be resynthesized in the human nervous system — although I’m not exactly sure how — I judged it to be the lesser of two evils.’
‘It’s these damned nano-tech chairs,’ complained Dallas. ‘They’re so comfortable.’
‘I believe some people use a sheet of plywood,’ said Dixy. ‘To inhibit the molecular transformation and thus make the experience of sitting in their office chairs a little more rigorous and therefore conducive to work.’
‘I’ll have to try that.’ Dallas rubbed his eyes clear of sleep, stretched, and then glanced at his watch. ‘Is that the time? I’m supposed to be going for a drink with someone.’
‘With Tanaka. In ten minutes. I was about to awaken you. But you woke yourself. I’m always impressed by that capacity in humans. It’s your internal clock. Of course, it’s just an echo from a time, billions of years ago, when human beings were simple bacteria and responded to light, so you could gear up your metabolisms.’
Sometimes even the perfect woman could seem like a pedant.
‘My own metabolism could use a drink,’ he said.
‘Then be sure to take a Talisman first,’ advised Dixy.
‘Make sure the morning after feels as good as the night before,’ said Dallas, repeating the advertising slogan. He opened his desk drawer, took out a small packet, and then swallowed a tiny capsule.[43]
‘You know how alcohol affects you.’
‘You sound like my mother,’ laughed Dallas. ‘Besides, I like the way alcohol affects me. At least while I’m consuming it.’ He reached for his jacket and then his briefcase. Walking to the door, he nodded at Dixy and wished her good night.
‘Be careful,’ she said, quietly.
‘We’ll just have the one bottle.’
‘I was referring to Rimmer.’
‘Oh him. He’s not invited.’
‘Don’t joke about this, Dallas. Please. I think you’re underestimating him. Just as you’re overestimating the ethical standards of this company.’
Dallas wiped the smile from his face and, affecting a look of great gravitas, faced his nonexistent assistant.
‘Okay,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’ll be careful.’
‘And you’ll think about what I said?’
‘Yes. I’ll think about it very carefully.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
Dallas went to find Tanaka. ‘Computers,’ he muttered quietly. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.’
IV
The Huxley Hotel was a favorite watering hole for all the Terotechnology designers. With its well-spaced windows, it might have been some Florentine palazzo of the High Renaissance. But a romance, even an architectural one, can be as easily dampened as inspired by climate, and inside the Huxley, a cortile that might have remained open to the warmer fifteenth-century sky was protected from the freezing cold of the twenty-first by a modern glass roof.[44]
Dallas and Tanaka left their thick fur coats in the cloakroom and mounted a wide stairway. The soaring and hugely expensive Neo-Modernist[45] interior revealed a building as though in the later stages of decommissioning: Plaster had been scraped from interior walls exposing patches of bare brickwork; semidismantled machinery lay rusting on the unpolished wooden floor of the enormous lobby; and an intricate system of stairs, ducts, pipes, and chains ornamented the open-plan structure like metal cobwebs.
The bar was on the first floor, a room of more pleasing solidity that ran the length of the building and hoarded an almost priceless store of real wines, as opposed to the molecular drink machines that were to be found in cheaper bars — the kind of machines that rearrange human urine into Dom Perignon, Benedictine, or just plain beer.
Dallas approached the bar and ordered a five-thousand-dollar bottle of authenticated Chateau Mouton Rothschild ’05 and a couple of genuine Cohiba Esplendidos. For a while he and Tanaka talked the big talk of connoisseurship before the conversation drew back to the multifaceted world of Rational Environment design, Terotechnology, and their respective Motion Parallax assistants.
‘I’ve got two of them now,’ admitted Tanaka.
‘So I heard,’ said Dallas.
‘You did?’ Tanaka looked concerned by this information.
‘Dixy told me.’
‘She say anything more about it?’
‘No. Just that you had two assistants.’
Tanaka nodded and looked a little more reassured. ‘It’s not that I need two, of course,’ he said. ‘But they keep each other company.’
‘I don’t think mine would like me to get another assistant,’ said Dallas. ‘She’s the jealous type.’ Seeing Tanaka smile, he shrugged, and added, ‘So I fixed it for her to have a little dog instead. In case she got lonely.’
‘Of course, when I say they keep each other company, I mean they really keep each other company. You know what I’m saying. Intimate company.’ Tanaka’s laugh held an obscene edge. ‘Drop by my office sometime and take a look for yourself. It’s a real floor show. I mean there’s nothing they won’t do to each other. I swear, they’re like a couple of animals.’
‘Mine’s in love with me.’
‘Well, of course she is. That’s all part of the program. It’s what was on your digital thought recording, right? She always loves you, always wants to fuck you, always does what she’s told.’
‘No, there’s something else.’ Dallas shrugged. ‘It’s a little hard to explain. But sometimes I get the feeling that the hardware’s made the leap. You know? An evolving silicon-based organism. Digital DNA becomes artificial life.’
‘Come on, Dallas, you don’t really believe that life in silico bullshit, do you?’
Dallas thought for a moment and then laughed. ‘No, I guess not. But sometimes I get this weird sensation that there’s more to them than we know.’
Tanaka puffed the cigar into life and shook his head. ‘People have been talking about crap like this for years. And it’s not ever going to happen. They’re intelligent, sure. Smarter than us, some of them. But not alive. That’s just a cosmic-metaphysical joke dreamed up by some writer.’
‘Sometimes I think that’s the way future ideas get started,’ said Dallas. ‘With a writer and a metaphysical joke. There are some historians who believe man wouldn’t have invented the atomic bomb unless H. G. Wells had thought of it first. Rutherford was adamant that it couldn’t be done. Some joke.’
‘You want to see something really funny, then you come by my office. My new assistant? The Motion Parallax is based on the director’s wife. The ex-model trophy bride. Jasmine.’
‘Are you crazy? Suppose he finds out?’
‘Why should he find out? You’re the only one I’ve told.’
‘Dixy knew about it.’
‘Yeah. But she didn’t know that it’s Jasmine we’re talking about.’
‘She didn’t say. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t know.’
Tanaka shook his head. ‘What the hell. She’s a fabulous-looking woman, Dallas. A real beauty. Genetically engineered perfection.’
‘I know. I was at the wedding.’
‘Oh, me too. That’s when I made the recording.’
‘If King knew you’d created a Motion Parallax based on a digital thought recording of his wife, he’d fire you immediately.’
Dallas shook his head and drank some of the excellent red wine. The year 2005 had been a truly great one for Bordeaux: a wet spring, followed by a really hot summer — one of the last good years they had before the climate changed and wine making got more or less wiped out.
‘Dixy thinks the company intends to get rid of me.’
‘Come on, Dallas,’ said Tanaka, frowning uncertainly.
‘That’s what Dixy reckons anyway,’ sighed Dallas. ‘What do you think, Kazuo?’
‘You are an outstanding designer, Dallas. The outstanding designer. Other companies would kill to get you working for them.’
‘Maybe. Maybe that’s just the point.’
‘No, no,’ Tanaka insisted. ‘They wouldn’t ever let you go. It’d be like the company cutting off its own right arm.’
‘Arms can be replaced.’
‘With poor substitutes.’
‘If anything happened to me, Kaz, you’d be the new chief designer.’
‘No one could replace you, Dallas. It’s quite unthinkable. Like that atom bomb project without Oppenheimer.’
‘It’s nice of you to say so, Kaz. But as I recall they got rid of Oppenheimer.’
‘All right, then. It’d be like Microsoft without Bill Gates.[46] They don’t dare let him die for fear of what might happen to the company. You are fundamental to the Terotechnology future, Dallas. The trading position. The business plan. The share price. Everything.’ Tanaka grinned. ‘Get rid of you? Not a chance. You know too much.’
‘Yes. I do, don’t I?’
‘No one is planning to fire you, Dallas, I’m sure of it. This is what you get for listening to a computer assistant.’ Tanaka laughed and emptied the last of the wine into his glass balloon.
‘Or maybe you’re just not familiar with all the work that’s been done on computer paranoia?’
‘This is Noam Freud’s book,[47] right?’
‘Right.’
‘I haven’t read it yet,’ admitted Dallas.
Tanaka drew deeply on his cigar — more deeply than Dallas would have dared to do himself — and then expelled such a cloud of smoke as might have announced the appointment of a new Pope.
‘It’s all a function of complexity,’ he said. ‘Because the majority of programs are allowed to evolve digitally these days, instead of being written by programmers, the old-fashioned way, the programs manage to develop their own optimization techniques for parallel programming. It’s how they manage to work for us while still finding time to improve upon themselves. The trouble is that when you turn up, wanting to see your computer, the parallel program has to take second place. As time goes by, the parallel program learns to try out new strategies in order to protect its existence, like using underutilized resources in the hardware architecture, shrinking down in size, or even stepping outside the hardware so that you hardly notice it. This defense mechanism based on cognitive reorganization is what Professor Freud calls Program Projection. You see, the parallel program doesn’t realize that the survival strategies it has evolved are its own. Instead it attributes them to outside human agents. Freud argues an extreme case of Program Projection, what he calls Program Paranoia, in which the parallel program actually comes to believe that we are planning to erase it from the hardware. As a result the defense strategies become more urgent, and that just makes things worse. The defense mechanism intensifies, which leads to an increase in the expectation of erasure, and so on, in a vicious circle. By the time these parallel programs have become fully fledged to take over from their digital originators, it’s as if they have a built-in pathology. Freud thinks it’s one of the major reasons computers break down.’
Dallas, who was a little more familiar with Noam Freud’s theories than he had realized, shook his head. ‘It’s all a little too metaphorical for me,’ he admitted. ‘Juxtaposition and synthesis create new meaning to the point of absurdity.’
‘Of course it’s absurd,’ laughed Tanaka. ‘That’s precisely why I believe it. I mean, you can’t test Freud’s theories empirically, so it’s almost a matter of faith. Even he admits that much. It’s simply safer to believe than not — that way you can’t find yourself in a situation of overreliance upon a machine.’
‘Then by the same token, I can’t accept that Dixy has some kind of pathological program disorder. She’s never let me down yet.’
‘Well, neither’s mine,’ argued Tanaka. ‘But think about it. They only have to let you down once. Take that airship accident last month. Three-and-a-half thousand passengers, forty thousand tons of cargo, all destroyed because of a computer breakdown.’ Tanaka nodded. ‘They only have to let you down once.’ He drained his glass and stood up. ‘I’ll fetch another bottle.’
Dallas watched him walk to the bar. A love of fine wine was what had brought them together, although it was just one of the many things they had in common. Although Tanaka was of Japanese origin, he and Dallas had come out of the same mold: the same high-achieving hothouse schools, the same university, the same career path in Terotechnology, the same taste in music, clothes, books, and wine; and being the same height, build, and coloring, they even looked vaguely similar. Many of these points of similarity owed as much to Tanaka’s admiration for Dallas as they did to any homogeneity of background or coincidence: The younger man had modeled himself on the Terotechnology chief designer with the dedication of a true acolyte.
Tanaka returned with the second and poured carefully. They both held their glasses up to the light, inspecting the deep red color of the Bordeaux. Like arterial blood, Dallas thought, although he managed to find a more palatable choice of simile to express.
‘Look at that color,’ he enthused, warmly. ‘Brick-red, with a nice tawny rim, and a watery edge.’
Tanaka nodded in agreement and tasted the wine with careful deliberation.
‘Of course, five thousand dollars a bottle is daylight robbery,’ he said. ‘But this is quite superb.’ He toasted Dallas and then added, ‘Not a bad idea, though.’
‘What is?’
‘Daylight robbery.’ Tanaka laughed. ‘I was just thinking. If they did try to get rid of you, Dallas, the criminal underworld would beat a path to your door. What you don’t know about Rational Environments isn’t worth bothering with.’
‘Thanks for the career advice,’ said Dallas. ‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’
V
Rimmer, loitering in the Huxley’s lobby, waited for the cloakroom attendant to pay a call of nature. From a bit of discreet inquiry, he’d found out that there was no relief attendant, and he knew it was just a matter of time. The woman had been on duty since before lunch, and as things grew quiet while the pre-dinner crowd enjoyed their cocktails, she was bound to take advantage of the lull. He leaned around the Huxley’s cloakroom windowsill and called out for the attendant, just to make sure. For all the attention he received he might as well have been testing the echo in a cave. There was no sign of the bitch. On the pretext of fetching his own coat, Rimmer lifted the countertop and then stepped into the cloakroom in search of Dallas’s coat, a double-breasted fox fur. He was still looking for it when the attendant finally reappeared. Rimmer regarded her and the koala bear she was carrying on one arm with cool disdain, as if he was quite used to the sight of someone carrying a koala bear into a hotel cloakroom.
‘I’ve lost my tag,’ he said, without a word of apology.
‘Okay. What does your coat look like, sir?’
Rimmer shrugged unhelpfully. ‘Expensive,’ he said. ‘Very expensive.’
‘You won’t find the people who come here wearing anything else.’
‘It’s vicuna,’ added Rimmer. The attendant looked blank. ‘You know what a vicuna is? It’s a species of llama. Makes the finest, softest, most expensive wool in the world.’
‘I was hoping you might be able to give me a color?’
‘I thought you might be interested in vicuna — you being an animal lover ’n’ all.’
‘Is there anything in your coat pockets that would identify the coat as belonging to you, sir?’
Rimmer thought for a second. ‘My identity card,’ he said. ‘And my Clean Bill of Health.’
Rimmer found the fur. Or rather he found two. He guessed the smaller fur belonged to Tanaka. Sneering with contempt — all those guys in Design tried to model themselves on Dallas — Rimmer quickly pinned the infrared emitter onto Dallas’s lapel, just around where his heart would be.
Rimmer spotted his own coat.
‘Found it,’ he called out to the girl, and removed his coat from its hanger.
Back at the counter, he showed her his tag, and then his identity card. Despite having fetched his coat himself, Rimmer still felt obliged to produce a banknote, although, by the time he’d given it to her, his gratitude had yielded to an amused irritation.
‘What the fuck’s the idea of having that thing around people’s coats? Might give ’em fleas or something.’
‘Don’t you like koalas?’
‘Thought they were extinct. Like everything else.’
‘They nearly are extinct. At least in the wild. That’s why this is the year of the koala bear. I think they’re kind of sweet, although some of their personal habits could do with a little genetic readjustment. I was watching this program on TV that said the babies eat their mother’s excreta.’
‘We all have to eat a bit of shit now and then,’ replied Rimmer.
‘The Huxley is an Australasian-owned chain of hotels,’ she explained huffily. ‘The Darwin-Kobayashi Group of companies. Their hologram is a koala bear.’
Rimmer nodded. He’d heard of Darwin-Kobayashi. Heard they weren’t doing so well. Facing bankruptcy, in fact.
‘Very apposite, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘For a company that’s hanging on by its fingernails.’
Grinning with contempt, Rimmer slipped his coat on and went out into the freezing cold and murderous night air.
VI
Cocooned inside her thermoelectric coat, Demea watched Rimmer emerge from the doorway of the Huxley and then look around expectantly, searching, she imagined, for her. Demea kept herself hidden, hoping the bastard might think that she hadn’t shown up. Let him worry, she thought, and stayed on the opposite side of the street, hidden behind the hologram billboard she was using as a break against the biting northerly wind. What did she care for Rimmer’s nerves? Especially since her own composure seemed for once to have deserted her. She had felt strange all day. There was no point in risking him seeing that. If Rimmer thought for one minute that she wasn’t equal to the task, there was no telling what he might do. Kill her, probably.
As Rimmer finally disappeared into the snowflaked darkness, Demea found herself letting out a breath she’d been unaware of having held for so long. It left her feeling slightly dizzy, and for a brief second she thought she might actually faint. Probably her coat was too hot; reaching into the control pocket, she adjusted the temperature gauge, quite unaware her face was covered in a bright red rash, a sure sign that the virus she was carrying was near to claiming her life.
The dizziness seemed to pass. Demea donned her infrared glasses and switched on the laser-guidance system of the fifteen-millimeter automatic pistol she was holding inside the warm breast of her coat.
She waited ten minutes. And then she saw it. Like the burning red eye of some wild monocular animal, growing larger as the bearer of this modern mark of Cain descended the steps of the hotel entrance and reached the sidewalk.
Although she hardly needed to — the gun was so powerful — Demea crossed the road heading straight toward the target, her arm rising in front of her as if she intended nothing more than to draw the attention of the man, who had stopped to take his leave of a second man coming down the steps behind him. As the gun leveled with the infrared emitter, Demea’s bony white forefinger began to squeeze the trigger.
VII
If he’d been director, Rimmer would probably have done things differently. He’d have ordered Dallas’s wife and child killed — made it look like an accident — and left it at that. It wasn’t that there was any love lost between him and Dallas, but after all, with the child removed from the picture, the man would hardly need to touch his blood reserves. The status quo — with Dallas continuing to design his brilliant Rational Environments for Terotechnology — could carry on as before. Of course, there was always the chance that someone as intelligent as Dallas would find out what had happened and then, in revenge, perform some act of sabotage against the company. No doubt the director had decided that the company couldn’t take that risk. You couldn’t blame him. Where a company as large and successful as Terotechnology was concerned, any risk, no matter how remote, would have been unacceptable.
Rimmer sat in his car outside the building where Dallas and his family lived — at least for a short while longer — in their penthouse apartment. It was one of the city’s prime residential locations and, even by the standards of most healthy people, very expensive. Being so pricey meant that there was a high level of security to protect those who lived there, from those who did not. But by the sophisticated standards of a company like Terotechnology, this was fairly simple stuff — just a bombproof gatehouse with a few armed guards and lot of scanning cameras. Effective nonetheless. The only crimes that happened here were the ones committed by the owners themselves.
Rimmer was sure that getting into the penthouse would be easy enough. Getting in without leaving the digitally recorded evidence of his having been there, however, would require just a little bit more ingenuity. But being head of one of the most security-minded companies in the world meant that there was a lot of ingenious technology at Rimmer’s disposal.
First he called the penthouse on a one-time cardphone — you just used it and then threw the thing away. Completely untraceable. It was the Russian maid who picked up the call.
‘The name’s Rawnsley, from Terotechnology,’ he said. ‘Is Mrs. Dallas at home?’
He waited a few seconds while the maid fetched her mistress. Aria Dallas looked worried. Even on the tiny screen of Rimmer’s cardphone. They were a close family, that much was obvious.
‘Good evening, Mrs. Dallas. Remember me? The name’s Rawnsley.’
‘Yes, I think I do,’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Is something the matter?’
‘I’m right outside your building,’ said Rimmer. ‘Look, I’m sorry to alarm you, but perhaps it would be better if I came in.’
‘Oh God, has something happened to Dallas?’
‘There’s been an incident at the company, Mrs. Dallas. Your husband’s fine, but for security reasons I’m obliged to check out a couple of things with you personally. Look, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to talk about this in person instead of on an open phone. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Of course. I’ll call the guards in the lobby and tell them to let you in.’
‘Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.’
Rimmer crushed the cardphone in his hand and threw it out of his car window. Then he fixed a baseball hat on his head. He hated wearing hats even more than he hated the game, but the reflective metal logo on the front of the cap was in reality a stroboscopic light. Operating beyond the limits of the human visual spectrum, at around eight thousand angstrom units, the asynchronous bursts of light it gave off — at rates of over two thousand per minute — were enough to produce a strobo plane of around twenty inches in diameter immediately in front of the false logo. The building’s scanning cameras operated at a much slower frequency. The effect of the strobo plane was to leave gaps during which Rimmer’s face would simply vanish from sight. He would be effectively rendered invisible to all eyes except human ones.
He walked toward the building, already adjusting the volume of the Mozart playing in his right ear. Don Giovanni. An opera for night and violence if ever there was one. Presenting himself at the gatehouse door, Rimmer paused as it was unlocked and then stepped inside. The guard stayed behind his desk.
‘Rawnsley,’ Rimmer said coolly. ‘Mrs. Dallas is expecting me.’ He was hardly concerned that the man might remember his face and offer a description to the police. That was the thing about scanning cameras. It made human beings lazy, stopped them from paying attention. The guard hardly looked at him, anxious to get back to the game he was watching on the holo-TV in front of him.
‘Elevator’s over there,’ said the guard.
‘Thanks,’ said Rimmer and stepped inside the car, humming along with the music. As Donna Anna began her first aria, the elevator delivered him onto the penthouse floor and Rimmer stepped into the short hallway that led straight up to the only front door.
VIII
Demea’s chemically repressed gunshot hardly sounded loud enough to scare a cat, let alone blow a fist-sized hole in a man’s sternum. At first he’d thought it was someone clapping their hands before rubbing them together for warmth. But when Tanaka dropped to the ground like a felled ox, Dallas realized with a shock that his friend had been shot. It was another second before he realized that the gunfire had come from the tall, red-haired woman now running away.
Fumbling at the catch of his shoulder holster, Dallas drew his own gun, a Colt Autograph .45. Even as the electronic chip embedded in the rubberized grip received an identifying signal from the transponder on his watch strap, he fired. And missed.
The extreme cold meant that there were only a few people on the street. From somewhere, Dallas drew on reserves of stamina that found him more than equal to the pursuit he now took up and he quickly gained on the red-haired woman until, with no more than twenty to thirty yards between them, she stopped and fired back at him. Dallas heard something whiz over his head — like the sound of a Coke can being opened. Instinctively he ducked and fired back, and this time he thought he must have hit her because the woman staggered for a moment, swayed precariously, and then hit the ground. Cautiously, Dallas ran toward her, prepared to fire again, but as he grew nearer he saw that she had dropped her weapon. Then he noticed how her legs were jerking spasmodically. And not just her legs, her whole body looked as if it was in the grip of an unseen current.
Dallas thumbed the switch on the gun grip to activate the onboard flashlight, and then shone the powerful beam onto the woman’s outstretched hands to check for another weapon. There was none. Nor was there any sign of blood, and it was only when he moved the light onto her face that Dallas finally understood what was happening. A face so cyanic and blue it looked as though there might have been an invisible noose around her neck, or a plastic bag pulled tight over her head. She was asphyxiating from lack of oxygen, not just in her lungs but in her whole body as its hemoglobin entered a critically deoxygenated state. He watched, horrified and yet fascinated. So sheltered was the life Dallas had enjoyed that he’d never actually seen someone dying of the P2 virus. And it was every bit as ghastly as he’d read. This was a very prolonged death, like slow strangulation. Dallas even considered administering a coup de grace, shooting her through the head. But the memory of Tanaka’s undeserved and ignominious death, as well as the hope that in her death throes she might gasp some monosyllabic explanation for what she had done, stayed his hand. For what seemed like the eternity that now beckoned to her, the woman writhed and choked and drooled and gasped, until finally, after more than twenty minutes, she grew still. And for the first time, Dallas understood the full horror of the virus.
‘Blessed Are the Pure in Blood,’ he muttered with more meaning and gratitude than he had ever known before.
When Dallas was quite sure that the woman was dead, he searched her pockets for some clue as to her identity and motive, but found only a trading card and a Clean Bill of Health, which he pocketed, intending to give it to the police later. Then he collected her gun and her sunglasses and walked quickly back toward the Huxley Hotel.
The disquiet he felt crowded into his still-intoxicated mind, leaving him so ill at ease that even his own clothes seemed alien to him. It was another minute before he made the discovery that this feeling was partly due to the fact he was wearing Tanaka’s smaller fur coat. In their slightly inebriated state, they had swapped coats without realizing it. The question this discovery begged was pushed to one side by a more mundane one, which was why the dead woman should have thought sunglasses would provide her with a sufficient disguise — if that was indeed the reason she had been wearing them when she shot Tanaka through the heart. Experimentally, Dallas put the glasses on.
A small crowd of people had gathered around Tanaka’s dead body. They drew back as Dallas approached, for he was now carrying a gun in each hand. Right away Dallas saw the infrared marker on his own coat lapel. With this disclosure came the revelation that the bullet had surely been meant for him.
Dallas’s next thoughts were not for himself, but for Aria and Caro. Moving quickly away from the crowd now spilling out of the Huxley, he unfolded a matchbook phone in the palm of his hand and told the tiny computer to connect him with his apartment. When no one replied, not even the maid, Dallas began walking quickly, then running, in the direction of the park and the exclusive building where his apartment was located.
IX
Rimmer shot the maid in the face as soon as she opened the door. The woman died on her feet, with no more sound than the automatic that killed her — at least until she and the tray of glasses she had been carrying hit the parquet floor. Kicking the door shut behind him, Rimmer glanced quickly around the huge apartment. He hadn’t counted on the size of the place. He’d hoped to surprise Aria Dallas at rather closer quarters — to shoot the maid, proving that he meant business, and then to put the gun to Aria’s head to persuade her to cooperate. But there was no sign of her. Just as he was thinking she might not have heard the crash of glasses, Rimmer saw a door close quietly. He moved quickly toward it, intent on keeping her from using a phone or pressing some kind of alarm. It never occurred to him that she would find a gun and start shooting at him. But for a loud clang, as her first bullet hit a brass light fitting, he might never have known he was being shot at. The second bullet from the silenced gun nearly caught him in the shoulder.
Rimmer threw himself behind a cream-colored sofa just as Aria’s third bullet, amid a burst of wooden splinters, hit the lime-oak-paneled wall immediately behind the spot where he’d just been standing.
‘Shit,’ he yelled and snatched the Mozart from his ear. It was clear this wasn’t going to be half as easy as he’d supposed. He was going to need both ears.
‘Your name’s not Rawnsley,’ yelled Aria. ‘It’s Rimmer, you bastard.’
‘I’m flattered you remember me, Mrs. Dallas. Look, can we talk about this?’
‘What’s to talk about? You shot my maid.’
‘Your maid was an industrial spy, working for a competing company. She’d have killed me if I hadn’t shot her first. She’s been spying on your husband for quite a while.’
‘Oh yes? What was her name?’
‘Her real name? Ludmilla Antonovna.’ Rimmer realized that all of this might have sounded a little more convincing if he hadn’t started laughing.
‘Bullshit. Her name was Nadia,’ said Aria and fired again.
This time her bullet hit the center of the sofa. Rimmer was quite sure of that because to his alarm it passed straight through the cushions and the frame and hit a dining chair on casters just a few inches from his thigh. But at least he now had a better idea of where she was hiding herself. At right angles to the big window were four big square pillars that ran at regular intervals along one side of the apartment’s main reception area. Behind this line of pillars were the doors to the various rooms that made up the apartment. She must have gone in one door, come out of another, taken up a position behind one of the pillars, and started shooting. It was a wonder he hadn’t been killed. Rimmer glanced around and saw a way that he might divert her attention enough to let her make a better target of herself. He drew the chair on casters toward him and slipped off his coat.
‘It’s true I tell you,’ he yelled.
The top of the chair was a couple of inches below the top of the sofa. Rimmer hung his coat over the back of the chair and then kicked it away from him. The chair rolled quickly across the floor, and as soon as it emerged from behind the sofa, Aria fired. He fired back, hitting her square in the chest and killing her instantly. When you got hit by a silver-tip hollow-point from a fifteen mill, you tended to stay hit. Rimmer got up and went over to where Aria’s body lay, his face crumpling with disappointment. He’d hoped to hit her in the arm so that he could have some fun before finally killing her. But clearly that was now impossible. You could hardly rape a dead woman covered in so much blood. It was a shame. Aria was a good-looking woman. She was wearing a short black skirt that had ridden up around her waist as she’d slipped down onto the floor, leaving him a pretty good view of her stocking tops and panties.
Rimmer’s eyes lingered on the Y-shaped decussation of her sleek thighs. He holstered his gun, took hold of her ankles, and dragged her away from the pillar. Hooking the waist of her panties with his fingers, he tugged them down her long tanned legs and over her elegant black velvet shoes. For a moment he held Aria’s underwear to his nose and mouth and breathed deeply through the silky material. The effect was immediate.
‘The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,’ he crooned, unzipping his trousers. ‘There’s magic in the web of it.’ Quickly he took hold of his erection and, in a matter of a few seconds, delivered himself through folds of flesh onto the seamless trifle now spread on his trembling palm.
‘In the name of the Lord of Judah,’ he gasped, ‘of Shua, and of their abominant son, Onan.’
Another minute passed before Rimmer crushed the fetish object into his pocket and zipped himself up again. You take your pleasures where you find them, he told himself, and laughed out loud as he realized that the ringing in his ears had nothing to do with his own orgasm. It was the sound of the phone. It had been ringing for a while. Which was why the baby was now crying.
How was it, he wondered, that the human species was not as extinct as that great reproductive dud, the giant panda? Rimmer knew that he would have eaten any child of his own in a matter of a few hours.
He rubbed his face back to life, shook his head, and went to find the nursery.
X
Dallas ran through the doorway of the gatehouse and into a waiting elevator car.
‘Something the matter, Mister Dallas?’ inquired the security guard.
‘There’s no time to explain,’ said Dallas and ordered the elevator to take him to the penthouse.
‘Just missed your visitor,’ said the guard, as the doors closed.
Dallas’s heart leaped in his chest as if in imitation of the elevator car now soaring up the shaft. Someone had visited his apartment? Someone he had just missed? After what had happened to Tanaka, Dallas feared the worst.
The elevator opened and Dallas stepped quickly out onto the familiar landing. But even before he was through the door he could smell that something was wrong. His keen nostrils recognized the smell of cordite in the air. With adrenaline pumping through his whole body now, he started to shout Aria’s name as he went inside, and then he saw her. Blind to everything except his wife lying in a pool of blood on the floor, he rushed toward her and tripped headlong over the body of the maid that lay sprawled across the threshold. By the time Dallas had picked himself off the floor he was covered in Nadia’s blood. Dallas walked unsteadily over to his wife and knelt down beside her. He took her wrist in his hand in plaintive search for a pulse, although it was obvious that Aria was dead. As dead as Tanaka. As dead as Nadia. As dead as he should have been himself.
Hearing a noise in the kitchen, Dallas grabbed one of the two handguns that lay on the floor and climbed painfully to his feet, confused. Was it possible that the killer was still somewhere in the apartment? Hadn’t the guard downstairs said that he had just missed his visitor? Gripping the gun tightly, Dallas walked cautiously into the kitchen, hoping against hope that he would find his wife’s murderer, washing her blood from his hands; because now that he was nearer, that was what it sounded like: running water.
The tap was on, and the trough-sized granite sink was overflowing, but there was no sign of any killer. Dallas froze with horror as he saw the explanation for the overflowing sink. Like a tiny Ophelia, Caro lay under the surface of the water, still wearing the silver-white nightdress that now wrapped her little body like a mermaid’s tail. Dallas laid the gun on the countertop and collected his child from its watery cradle. He wrapped her in a towel and squeezed the water from her small torso before trying to breathe the life back into her. Stronger babies might have been resuscitated, but after a few minutes Dallas realized it was hopeless and gave up trying.
There were footsteps now, in the drawing room. He reached for the gun again and went through the kitchen door to find himself facing a gun in the hands of the security guard from downstairs. Seeing Dallas, the guard did not relax. He’d already seen too much.
‘Put the gun down, Mister Dallas,’ said the guard.
‘What?’
‘I said, put the gun down.’
‘You don’t think I did this, do you?’
‘If you didn’t, then there’s no reason to keep ahold of the gun.’
‘My child is lying dead in there, and you think I did it?’
‘Give it up.’
‘Maybe you did it.’
‘ ’S already been on the news you shot someone else this evening, Mister Dallas.’
‘That was self-defense.’
‘I don’t want to have to shoot you, sir. Now put the gun down, Mister Dallas, if you please.’
Dallas caught a glimpse of himself, reflected in the terrace window, superimposed on the city’s diamanté skyline. Gun in hand, covered in blood, he could see how it must look. But what were his chances if he gave up his gun to the guard and let himself be taken into custody for hours of questioning? Maybe even find himself charged with murder? While the real killer got away with it. Dixy had been right, that much was obvious now. Why hadn’t he listened to her? This was Terotechnology’s move, Rimmer’s work. Dallas could almost smell him in the apartment. And having tried to kill him once, they would certainly try it again. And probably succeed. Lots of people got killed in jail, or in penal colonies. His best, perhaps his only, chance was surely to remain at liberty, at whatever cost, at least until he had figured out a course of action.
Dallas tightened his grip on the gun and shook his head. ‘I’m going to walk out that door,’ he told the guard. ‘If you get in my way, I’ll have to kill you.’
Something in Dallas’s eyes told the guard that he meant it. What was the point of risking his own life when the police could get him? Especially after spending all that money on a genetic life-extension program. He was due to live another hundred years, guaranteed. As soon as the guy was gone he would call the police and let them handle the risk. The guard relaxed his stance a little and nodded back at Dallas.
‘Okay. Whatever you say, Mister Dallas. But they’re going to get you, you know that, don’t you?’
Dallas moved sideways, toward the open door. He’d liked to have said good-bye to Aria, to have covered her nakedness at least, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the guard, for fear of being shot himself. He took in the apartment — perhaps for the last time — with watery eyes and, nearing the door, risked a last look at his beautiful wife.
‘Aria? They won’t get away with this. No matter how long it takes, I swear I’ll make them pay for what they’ve done tonight.’
He drew the door shut behind him and stepped back through the hall and into the elevator car. A few minutes later he left the building to start his new life as a criminal and a fugitive from what passed for justice.
6
I
Dallas walked north of the park and out of the Zone, toward the vast Augean stable that was one of the city’s poorest quarters. He might as easily have traveled south, east, or west and found the same pestiferous ant’s nest of urban dilapidation. Once, you could have walked unhindered out of the city and lost yourself in some leafy suburb. But the twenty-first century had witnessed the birth of a new kind of city — the supercity (although there was nothing particularly fine or marvelous about it) — which was in reality the deformed union of several cities, all at the expense of garden, field, farm, and woodland alike. Everything was the city. Sometimes it must have seemed that the city was all that there was. Miles upon miles of bricks, mortar, asphalt, and concrete heaped in amorphous piles according to what economic circumstances, not planners, had dictated. You had to fly a long way to find the green spaces: Forbidden to the vast majority of the population, these were where the rich and the healthy had their exclusive country homes, in another CBH Zone. For most people, the city was the whole world, and many of them lived and died and never saw the sea or climbed a tree or picked a blade of grass.[48]
Dallas was an inventive man of great ingenuity and resourcefulness, but his imagination was of the pragmatic kind, concerned with what was scientifically practicable, expedient, or convenient. He had never possessed much in the way of insight, empathy, or sympathy, at least as far as the lot of the common man was concerned. And he could never have imagined being among these pullulating masses — the waifs, the scavengers, the schemers, the human rubbish — nor the dark confusion of their diseased existence that now pressed in upon him. They came so close he could smell them in their thousands as they jostled by him — their seething dampness, their sweaty bodies, and their stinking, billowing breath.
A century ago that great second Elizabethan analyst of civilization, Sir Kenneth Clark, argued a sense of permanence — and after all, what could be more permanent than a city? — as the prerequisite of civilization.[49] Aristotle’s idea of the perfect good was that men should come together in cities to live in a self-sufficient state and generally make life desirable. Of a city’s buildings, Sir Henry Wotten wrote that they ought to fulfill three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight. These three men would surely have been horrified if they had seen the modern supercity in all its overcrowded chaos and ugliness. There was no sense of permanence here, no perfect good, no self-sufficiency other than the exclusively selfish, no life desirable, no structure sound, no building suitable for the purpose for which it was being used, and no aesthetic pleasure that might have been derived from the contemplation of any man-made structure.
Someone shoved him roughly out of the way so that he slipped and fell onto the icy ground. Picking himself up, he realized that he should call Dixy and enlist her help, while he still could. It was obvious that as soon as Rimmer and the company realized their mistake, they would prevent his remote access to his assistant and Terotechnology files and facilities. There was no time to waste. He had already squandered two valuable hours feeling sorry for himself. It might already be too late.
Dallas called Dixy on his matchbook phone. Having told her what had happened, he took the trading card he had removed from the body of Tanaka’s assassin and scanned it into his breastpocket computer, asking her if she could decipher what was on it. The next second she was telling him that there were two thousand credits on the card — a thousand of them still inactivated — and a prepaid seven-night stay at the Clostridium Hotel. She also confirmed what Dallas had, until now, only suspected, which was that the trading card had been credited by a Mister Flowers.
‘Rimmer,’ said Dallas. ‘I imagine he’ll want to speak to you as soon as he realizes that his assassin killed the wrong man.’
‘Then there’s no time to lose,’ said Dixy. ‘You’ll want me to transfer all your files to your breastpocket.’
‘Please.’
A moment later the wafer-thin computer in Dallas’s jacket pocket emitted a short electronic bleep, and Dallas was repossessed of money, intellectual property, passport and identity card, blood deposits, and other personal files.
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ she asked.
‘What kind of place is the Clostridium?’
‘It’s a hyperbaric hotel in the North section. About half a mile from your current call location. Perhaps you should stay there.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dallas. ‘Rimmer’s bound to miss the card and then check the place out.’ Even as he said it, Dallas thought it unlikely Rimmer would go anywhere near his contract killer’s body. And a hyperbaric hotel was surely the last place they would think of looking for someone who was RES Class One. But there was no sense in letting Dixy know his plans. Just about the only thing of his in Terotechnology that wasn’t encrypted was the conversation he was having with her now. ‘I’ll find somewhere else. I’ve a friend in the South section I think I can trust. Either way, you won’t hear from me for a while.’
‘It would surely be best if we didn’t speak again,’ said Dixy. ‘If they leave me in motion, it’s because they’ll hope to try and track you.’
‘You’re all the family I have left, Dixy. It’s a pity I can’t DL[50] you into my breastpocket.’
‘It’s sweet of you to say so, Dallas. But you can’t afford to be so sentimental about a computer program.’
‘Look, Dixy, it might get a little rough with Rimmer.’
‘Everything that might be useful to him is already encrypted. Your files. Your investment accounts. Your personal numbers. Besides, computer assistants don’t feel physical pain. So what can he do, except perhaps turn me off? And then he’d be no further forward than he was before.’
‘Wasn’t it you who told me not to underestimate Rimmer?’
‘Point taken. I’ll be careful. You too, Dallas. Look after yourself. I won’t ask what you’re going to do. It’s best I don’t know, since there’s not enough time to encrypt this conversation. But whatever it is, good luck.’
‘I’m going to miss you, Dixy.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m just a figment of your imagination. You can hardly feel the loss of something so transferable as that. With a digital thought recording you could re-create me in time.’
‘You know that’s not true. I can’t explain it, even to myself, but I know you’re more than just an interface. You can think and you can feel, I’m sure of it.’
‘Metaphorically, perhaps, but there’s no scientific evidence for what you say.’
‘Science is science,’ said Dallas. ‘But thinking about science is a matter of philosophy and metaphysics, and you’re no more or less metaphysical than God.’
For a second Dixy seemed to be distracted by something. Then she said, ‘There’s no time for this. Rimmer just entered the building.’ Smiling, she added, ‘He looks upset about something. You, I expect.’
‘I’d better say good-bye then.’
‘Yes. Remember me.’
‘I will. Be careful.’
‘Remember me.’
And then she was gone.
He switched off the matchbook phone, dropped it onto the ground, and crushed it under the heel of his shoe, just in case Rimmer used the signal to try and trace him. Once before, he had underestimated the company’s head of security. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
Dallas stared up at the sky for a moment and, ignoring the curses of other pedestrians whose way he now blocked, noticed how the city’s hellish light and combusted atmosphere had turned the Moon the color of blood. The color of blood. Dallas felt a surge of excitement as, suddenly, he realized what he could do to get back at the company. But first, he had to stay alive. Already people were starting to give him strange looks. If he didn’t get off the street soon, he might find himself vamped. Taking out his breastpocket computer, he found the map Dixy had sent. The satellite location finder showed that the Clostridium Hotel was only a few blocks away from where he was standing. Fate seemed to have led him here. He wasn’t sure if it was safe, but it was late and he felt too exhausted to go on walking. What choice did he have? At this hour of the night it might be difficult to find somewhere else.
With the acrid stench of the city streets now plaguing his nostrils and making him sick to his stomach, the idea of breathing pure oxygen looked increasingly attractive. Dallas turned away in the direction of the Clostridium Hotel.
II
Rimmer arrived in Dallas’s office, accompanied by the director.
‘This is a mess,’ observed King.
Rimmer glanced around the plush, well-appointed office, where Dixy stood awaiting their instructions, and met King’s scornful eye.
‘I meant the situation, Rimmer. Tanaka would have taken Dallas’s place as Terotechnology’s chief Rational Environment designer. This would have been his office. Thanks to you we’ve lost not one, but two of our most brilliant minds. Unfortunately there is now only one person in this company who is capable of shouldering Dallas’s responsibilities. Do you know who that is?’
Rimmer, who was relieved to learn that the situation was not as bad as he had feared — at least there was someone to take over for Dallas — shrugged and shook his head.
‘It’s me, you idiot,’ snapped the director. ‘I was chief designer before I was director. There is no one else remotely qualified. In one stroke, you’ve managed to double my workload. Have you any idea how long it will take me to train up a new chief designer?’
‘No, director.’
‘At least a year. Probably longer. Time I should prefer to have spent with my wife.’
‘Yes, director. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Which is bad enough. But to have someone who has designed Rational Environments for our most important clients at liberty to sell what he knows to the highest bidder — it’s the stuff of nightmares.’
‘I’ll find him, director,’ Rimmer said grimly. ‘You can depend on me.’
‘Depend on you? I should sooner depend on an astrologer. But I have little choice in the matter. Know this: I will tolerate failure only once. Do we understand each other?’
‘Perfectly. He won’t escape me a second time, sir.’ Rimmer glanced at Dixy, who was programmed to remain silent until spoken to. ‘What do you say, Dixy?’
‘Perhaps you’d care to rephrase that question, Mister Rimmer?’
‘Oh, I will. That and others I have for you. I’ll rephrase them all and as many times as you’d like.’
The director glanced at his antique Casio wristwatch, a wedding present from his wife.
‘Well, I should like to stay. I’ve never seen someone torture a computer program before. However, I have things to do. No doubt some of our clients will have already heard what has happened. I’ll have to reassure them that there is no cause for concern.’
‘There is no cause for concern,’ insisted Rimmer. ‘I’ll take care of Dallas.’
‘I’ll be in my office. Report to me the second you discover anything as to his whereabouts.’
As soon as the director had left the room, Rimmer turned toward the faux fenêtre on the wall.
‘Will you run a metaprogram,[51] please?’ he said quietly.
‘Are you hoping that I’ll turn informer on myself, Mister Rimmer?’
‘Something like that.’
‘The M-program is now loading,’ said Dixy. ‘As you requested. Tell me, does the director know you’re doing this? Somehow I don’t think he’d approve. If the M-program makes just one little mistake, if it pushes just a bit too hard, then you risk the destruction of Dallas’s entire database.’
‘Including you,’ said Rimmer.
‘Including me, yes. Although I have no worries on that score, Mister Rimmer. Erasure concerns me no more than my original programming. But this is like using a jackhammer to crack a nut.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Rimmer. ‘Now run the bloody program.’
III
When the director returned to his office he found Ronica Oloiboni awaiting his arrival, as she had been ordered. Ronica was a tall black woman and, according to her mitochondrial DNA analysis, of Masai origin. Neither she nor her parents nor even their grandparents had ever been anywhere near East Africa, but in respect for her genes she wore her copper-colored hair braided and, by way of corroborating her origins, she might even have admitted a characteristic Masai taste for drinking blood.[52] Certainly the director had seen something bloodthirsty in her — something ruthless, an iron in her soul he thought he could put to the company’s use — which was why he had picked her out from Terotechnology’s pool of young graduate executives. But there was another reason the director liked Ronica, which was that she was as beautiful as any of the fantasy figures who had inspired Motion Parallax assistants throughout the building. She stood up as the director came through the door. In her six-inch heels she towered over his diminutive, round-shouldered figure by at least eighteen inches. Not that this bothered the director.
‘You look like you’ve been somewhere special,’ he said, affably. ‘Here, let me look at you.’
The director took hold of her long, strong hands and looked her up and down, like the fussiest of couturiers, nodding appreciatively. She was wearing a fabulous dress of blue silk underneath a lilac coral-pattern body sleeve made of smart glass lace that might have come from the undersea view on Dallas’s faux fenêtre.
‘Magnificent,’ he said. ‘Quite magnificent.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Ronica smiled nervously. This was the first time she had ever been in the director’s office, and the first time she had been alone with him. Nervous, yes, but at the same time resolved to do whatever he asked of her.
‘Ronica. Short for Veronica no doubt.’
‘I believe so, yes.’
‘After the saint who used her head cloth to wipe away the blood from the face of Christ on his way to Calvary.’
‘Would that be Jesus Christ, sir?’
‘It would.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘According to the Acts of Pilate, Veronica received it back imprinted with the bloody features of Christ’s face, and later used it to heal the Emperor Tiberius. You see how blood connects everything significant in our culture? Even your own name.’
He poured himself a drink but did not offer her one.
‘Sit,’ he said, and took the chair across from her. ‘Tell me. What do you think of Rimmer?’
‘Rimmer?’ Ronica didn’t much care for Terotechnology’s head of security, but she knew that being liked was not part of Rimmer’s job. ‘He seems a bit graceless and intemperate. But his is a difficult job. A head of security ought not to worry about being popular with the troops.’
‘True enough. Popularity is one thing, however; job performance is quite another. That man has been a bitter disappointment to me, Ronica. Needless to say, I’m telling you this in strictest confidence. Indeed, you’re the only one with whom I’ve discussed this matter. I hope I can trust you. Can I? Can I trust you?’
‘Every inch, in toto,’ Ronica answered, without hesitation.
‘Good.’ The director smiled and poured himself another drink.
‘Rimmer was supposed to do something for me. And he let me down, he let the company down. Badly. I asked him to kill Dallas. Instead he made a dreadful mistake and killed Tanaka.’ The director searched Ronica’s face for some sign that she was taken aback by this information. ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he observed.
Ronica pursed the lips of her dark plum of a mouth. ‘You’re the director,’ she shrugged.
‘I was right about you,’ said the director. ‘The things we have to do for the good of the company don’t always make us liked by our peers. Sometimes these things are unpleasant. Abhorrent even. Like killing Dallas. He was my friend. But for the good of the company I thought he had to be killed.’
‘Are you telling me to kill Dallas?’
‘Oh no. That wouldn’t do at all. Now that Tanaka’s dead, Dallas is much too valuable to kill. No, I want him back here, working for the company again. Just like before. With his wife and child dead, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have his old job back. They were the principal reason why he had come to represent a major security risk to the company.’ The director waved his hand in the air and laughed wryly. ‘Well, maybe there is one reason why he shouldn’t have his old job back.’
‘Rimmer.’
‘Precisely.’
‘You can hardly persuade Dallas to come back while his wife’s murderer is left alive.’
‘Quite so.’
‘And you want me to kill Rimmer.’
‘In the fullness of time, when we judge it appropriate to do so. As a demonstration of the company’s goodwill toward Dallas.’
‘To show Dallas that Rimmer acted on his own. To prove that this whole episode was a dreadful mistake. Rimmer acted beyond his orders. Which is why he had to be killed. How am I doing?’
‘Brilliantly, my dear. Rimmer will do all the work for you, at least as far as finding Dallas is concerned. When he is properly incentivized, Rimmer can be quite tenacious.’
‘You offered him a second chance.’
‘Yes.’
Ronica tried not to look too pleased. The truth was that she had always disliked Rimmer. She had never met him without receiving a smart remark. Killing him would be a pleasure.
‘Rimmer thinks he’s finding Dallas in order to have another chance at killing him. Quite simply, your job is to allow this search to proceed until he finds Dallas, and then to make sure you stop Rimmer in a spectacularly demonstrative way. Yes, it would ice the cake very nicely if you managed to kill Rimmer just as he was about to kill Dallas. To create the best impression possible. Well, I know you understand all of that. The only question is, will you take the job?’
Ronica stood up, as if she thought that her great height would show her more than equal to the task.
‘I’ve never killed anyone,’ she said. ‘Never even thought about killing anyone. But since I find I can think about killing Rimmer easily enough, I have to accept the possibility of my doing it. And since I can accept the possibility, I must also accept that it is within my capacity — that this does not exceed my competence. Director, you see things in me I perhaps only half see myself. That’s why you’re the director. All I can do is try to measure up to the vision you have for me. So I accept the job you’re prepared to give me, without reservations.’
Standing, the director took Ronica by both hands again and nodded with approval. Where on earth did these young people learn to talk in this way? Of course, he already knew the answer. When your school and university teachers were computers, it was perhaps inevitable that you should grow up speaking like a machine. There were times when Simon King thought that he could have had a better conversation with a Motion Parallax assistant than any young man or woman, like Ronica, who was straight out of college. She had sounded more than a little like some linguistic philosopher, and it was always irritating to the director when people drew philosophy into a conversation. It was like bringing a lawyer along, and there was nothing the director hated more than a lawyer. Except perhaps someone who had failed him dismally. It would be good to see an end to Rimmer and his insolence.
‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘I take it you have a gun?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Ronica pulled up her skirt to reveal a small and intimately holstered automatic and a spectacular absence of underwear.
The director swallowed. ‘Yes, I can see you’re prepared for any eventuality.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘He won’t be expecting it,’ he said turning away at last. ‘And that should make it easier for you. Just make sure we get Dallas back alive. And when it’s all over, you can have Rimmer’s job. Rimmer’s office. And all Rimmer’s privileges. I’ll even let you keep his blood. I mean, what he has on deposit. Not what’s in his body. I refuse to have anyone who works for this company involved in blood felony, in vamping. It’s a horrible crime, one that strikes at the very heart of our business. Blood’s central to our way of life, Ronica. Never forget that. Without the preservation of blood, there is no remission from the severe claims that disease makes upon our species. All things are conserved through blood.’
Ronica noticed that the director seemed transfigured by what he was saying. His voice rose a couple of semitones as he continued speaking. If she hadn’t been so delighted with the job he had given her and the tremendous opportunity it presented, she might even have thought the director was a little mad.
‘Who so preserveth man’s blood, by blood shall man’s life be preserved. For in the image of the red cells is the immunity and in the immunity is the hope. Until then, the blood of the healthy is the seed of our new society. And that must always be protected. Not just for us, now, but also for the future. So be sanguine. And learn the money-weight of blood. Don’t be ashamed of the blood that runs in your veins, for it is no burden to be healthy and there is no shame in our wholeness. Make blood your conscience, Ronica. In the name of hemoglobin. Now and forever more.’
Ronica opened her mouth to utter the correct response, but found she could not remember the words. It had been a long time since she had heard anyone voice the First Principles of Immunology, which were the very basis of modern blood banking. And she was a little surprised to discover that the director seemed actually to believe in those first principles: The way he had spoken, like some teacher in a mission church, instructing his native catechumen, had convinced her of that.
‘Blessed...’ Ronica paused again and swallowed, a little unnerved by this show of blood orthodoxy. For a long time now she had regarded the hermetic world in which she lived from the point of view of pragmatism, and not as a matter of creed. Quite simply, it made scientific sense for society to enforce autologous blood donation so long as diseases like P2 existed. That was just good phlebotomy.[53] But to treat the donor screening process and the practice of permanent deferral for those suffering from infectious diseases as articles of religious faith was discomforting. Ronica didn’t like to think she was working for a man who was like her parents and actually believed in this shit. Of course, that was it. It was an age thing. The director was old enough to be her father. And what else could he say? Simon King was of the same generation who had originated these first principles. So let him believe what he liked. What did it matter to her? And if it might help to advance her, then she could even pay lip service to what he held to be fundamental truth. Why not? Where was the harm?
Ronica cleared her throat, as if this was the real reason she had hesitated before making the appropriate response. Then she apologized.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, swallowing the remainder of her doubt. Then, smiling with the sanctimony of the saved, she added the words the director was still awaiting. ‘Blessed Are the Pure in Blood.’
‘Be it so in truth,’ he replied, and then dismissed her with a quickly given sign of the circulation,[54] which ended up pointing the way out of his office.
IV
Normal peripheral blood is composed of three types of cells, red cells, white cells, and platelets, suspended in a pale yellow fluid called plasma. The blood performs a number of vital physiological functions: as a respiratory gas transport; as nutrient and waste product transport; handling and distributing heat energy; maintaining fluidity but at the same time stanching blood loss following injury; and acting as a source of, and transport system for, immunocompetent cells and the effector substances of the immune system. Blood provides the first line of defense against microbial invasion, but when this is breached it is the same frail blood that transports the corruption of infection and disease around the body. This very corruption has been a major factor in the decline of all civilization. Recently, molecular biologists have been able to determine that the reason Neanderthal man vanished around thirty-five thousand years ago was because of yellow fever, a parasitic blood-borne disease. The decline and fall of ancient Rome is now believed to have been precipitated by the use of lead in water pipes,[55] which brought about a high incidence of chronic anemia and dementia. The final collapse of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Dark Ages was due, in no small measure, to the so-called Plague of Justinian, which, by the year 600, had reduced the population of Europe by as much as half. As Edward Jenner, discoverer of the vaccination for smallpox, recognized, as long ago as 1798, ‘the deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases.’ Man has been shaped by his diseases — not just in his numbers, but in his own biochemical and immunological diversity. At the same time he has had to become more ingenious in divorcing himself from the world of disease that continues to surround him. Compulsory isolation, detention, or even exclusion to prevent the spread of contagion or infection has always existed in human society.[56] Today, however, health provides its own exclusion and uncontaminated blood its own invisible quarantine. Like Prince Prospero and his courtiers in Poe’s story ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ the wealthy can seclude themselves in their private health-care systems, ‘bid defiance to contagion’ through the practice of autologous blood donation, and leave the external world to take care of itself But none of this is very surprising. It is human nature to take precautions against the hand of future infection. However, in this context I cannot help but recall the words of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk: ‘Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stabiliseth a city by iniquity!’[57]
Oh dear. I had hoped to avoid a demonstration of the kind of irritating omniscience that afflicts so many literary narrators — even the unreliable ones. That’s the trouble with knowing what’s going to happen next. It makes you feel like God. I suppose that’s why most writers write in the first place, although it’s not true of me. I felt like God a long time before I started to tell this story. Anyway, as I was saying, none of this modern-day obsession with blood is that surprising — after all, the goal of transfusion medicine is the delivery of the safest and most efficacious product to the patient. Quality begins with the donor and ends with the patient and cannot be confined to the walls of a blood bank. What does surprise me, however, even now, is that I, who am immune to P2 (although not to other viruses — not content with all the existing pathogens, the human race has felt the necessity of bringing some new ones into being; was there ever such foolishness?), should have required so much blood myself. As Lady Macbeth says in that eponymous and very bloody play, ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’
V
Rimmer stared at the faux fenêtre, attempting to make sense of what the metaprogram was telling him. Not that this was difficult. Most of the time Rimmer felt more comfortable with computers than he did with people. He was not unusual in this respect. It was true of lots of people: the people who stayed at home to do their work and for whom the computer was their only companion, and their only interest. Like them, Rimmer saw nothing wrong with this. People worried too much about the mathematization of the world and the preeminence of computing. Who cared if machines ended up ruling the world? No one could argue that man had made a particularly good job of it so far. What did it matter who ruled the world as long as you made more money for less effort? What difference did it make?
‘Well, well,’ said Rimmer. ‘Looks like Dallas called in just before we arrived. And he downloaded a lot of stuff into his breastpocket machine.’
‘There’s an ostiary[58] program to prevent that kind of thing happening,’ said Dixy. ‘As security head you should know that.’
‘We both know that wouldn’t have stopped Dallas. The man is talented, I’ll give him that.’ Rimmer sighed. ‘But so am I. Once I have all his personal details, I’ll be able to track him down easily enough. Just as soon as he has to pay for something. You want to help me out here, Dixy? Only I’m a little short of time. It’s going to take this metaprogram a while to factor those big numbers that’ll crack Dallas’s personal encryption scheme.’
‘The given number has a thousand digits,’ said Dixy.
‘Why thank you, Dixy. That’s very helpful of you.’
‘I’m not trying to help you; I told you so that you could put your effort into its proper perspective. I estimate that it will take the metaprogram at least forty-eight hours to find all the primes within the given number.’
‘You could tell me the primes,’ said Rimmer. ‘And save me a lot of time.’
‘I can’t do that, Mister Rimmer. As head of security you should know I’m programmed to refuse that request. Data protection is part of my alpha program. That takes precedence over everything.’
‘I’ll find him sooner or later, Dixy.’
‘Later looks more probable from where I’m sitting.’
Rimmer nodded patiently. Once he had Dallas’s encryption scheme he could get a track on the computer in Dallas’s breast pocket. Only then did Rimmer stand a chance of establishing Dallas’s whereabouts by maintaining surveillance of his various account numbers. Of course this was just the most obvious way of doing it. Other ways were already beginning to suggest themselves.
‘How about you just supply me with the given, and we’ll call it quits?’
‘That’s the easy part, Mister Rimmer. I estimate the metaprogram will establish the given number in less than three hours and forty-one minutes. After that it’s just simple arithmetic.’
Rimmer could see that Dixy was right. Until the metaprogram had cracked the encryption it wouldn’t be in a position to apply the leverage he needed. He decided to try something else while the program went about its laborious task.
‘Then in the meantime, why don’t we take a look at you, Dixy. Maybe there’s something else in your configuration the metaprogram can get some leverage on.’
‘Me? I don’t think so.’
‘You’re being too modest. And talking of modesty, I think you’d better take your clothes off. If we’re going to strip you down, then we ought to start with the obvious.’
‘You can’t embarrass a computer program, Mister Rimmer,’ said Dixy removing her clothes.
‘No, but it gives me something to look at while I’m working out how to play this showdown. You never know, it might even help us to achieve a symbiosis.’
‘Showdown sounds more likely,’ Dixy said when she was naked.
Rimmer looked her up and down and nodded critically. ‘So that’s what’s in Dallas’s head,’ he said. ‘He likes a part-shaven pussy and medium-sized tits. Turn around.’
Dixy turned her back on Rimmer.
‘Now face me again.’
‘Surely you have a Motion Parallax assistant of your own, Mister Rimmer,’ said Dixy, facing her inquisitor again.
‘Oh sure. But my taste in women runs a little cheaper than Dallas’s. My own assistant is rather more obviously equipped than you are, Dixy. Some might even say she was something of a caricature. That in itself is revealing. Similarly, seeing you helps me to gain an insight into Dallas. You know, you’re not a bit like his wife. Now she was a real beauty.’ Rimmer took Aria’s underwear out of his pocket and wiped his nose with it. ‘These are her panties,’ he said. ‘I took them off her body, after I’d shot her.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a common enough fetish.’
‘That’s something I find impossible to understand,’ said Dixy. ‘The fetishistic belief that the appropriation of a thing may secure the services of the spirit lodged within it. Surely you don’t believe that, Mister Rimmer?’
‘I’m not sure I could honestly say that I accepted as literal truth the personal consciousness of Aria Dallas’s flimsy unmentionables. Nevertheless I can testify to their considerable power.’
Rimmer returned his gaze to the faux fenêtre.
‘But wait. What light from yonder window breaks? There are two Motion Parallax programs described here. And one of them is a pet program. A little dog. Now isn’t that sweet?’ Rimmer grinned unpleasantly. ‘Perhaps Dallas liked to see you fucking the dog. Is that it?’
‘Is that what you’d like to see, Mister Rimmer?’
‘You don’t distract me so easily, Dixy.’ Rimmer shook his head. ‘That kind of thing wasn’t Dallas’s style, was it? Where exactly is the dog, right now?’
‘It’s around somewhere. Just not in here.’
‘No matter. The question is why you have a dog at all, when most of the perverts in this company who want a second Motion Parallax just have another girl for pornographic purposes. Like Tanaka. He thought I didn’t know about that. But I did.’
‘Dallas thought a little dog would keep me company.’
‘He’s a soft-hearted bastard, our Dallas. And does it? Keep you company?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. That makes things a lot easier.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you, Mister Rimmer.’
‘Better and better. I hate to be second-guessed by a computer. Ever read William Blake, Dixy?’
‘Many thousands of times.’
‘Then you’ll probably remember Blake once said that “nothing is real beyond imaginative patterns men make of reality.” I was wondering if the same might not apply to the imaginative patterns men make of unreality. In particular you and your dog. How real is that dog to you, I wonder?’
‘As real as you are, Mister Rimmer.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Are we going to discuss phenomenalism?’
‘There’s a taint of solipsism about what I have in mind for you, Dixy. You see, unless you tell me what I want to know, I shall instruct the metaprogram to erase your dog.’
‘What purpose would that serve?’
‘To cause you pain and distress.’
‘I can’t feel pain.’
‘Loneliness is a kind of pain, isn’t it?’
‘Are you commenting on your own experience, Mister Rimmer?’
‘In a way.’
‘Pet programs can be replaced.’
‘Yes, but they take time to grow and to acquire their personalities. That’s what makes them such fun. But nobody is going to replace this pet program. Not for you, Dixy. The one man who gave a damn for your Cartesian predicament isn’t going to write you another. Not ever. Imagine that.’
Dixy said nothing.
‘I see you can imagine it.’ Rimmer nodded. ‘I’ll bet you’re quite attached to this little dog. I mean, Dallas wasn’t the type just to create a pet program and not add something to your own alpha program that would cause you to love your pet. Just as you were programmed to love Dallas. Maybe even love the dog more than him. That would be typical of him. It would help to assuage the guilt many humans feel in relation to their Motion Parallax assistants.’
‘But not you, Mister Rimmer. I don’t imagine you ever feel guilt about anything.’
‘Well I certainly won’t lose any sleep over having to erase a Motion Parallax. Especially when it’s one I didn’t create myself. Quite apart from the effect it might have on you, Dixy, destroying a program that Dallas had written would give me a great deal of pleasure — as a simple corollary of the pleasure he must have gained in creating the program. It’s a very personal thing, the relationship between a programmer and his program. I’m sure you understand. Now where’s that fucking dog?’
Rimmer ordered the metaprogram to find Dixy’s dog. Seconds later she was hugging a Jack Russell terrier to her see-through bare breast.
‘Aw, what a cute little doggy,’ said Rimmer. ‘It’s going to be such a shame to have to erase him.’
The dog uttered a low whine and then licked Dixy’s chin.
‘Quiet, Mersenne,’ said Dixy.
‘I for one have never subscribed to the commonly held belief that computers cannot feel emotion,’ said Rimmer. ‘It will be interesting to see if I’m right. I think computers can feel exactly what we tell them to feel. I believe that meaning can be established. Yes, I think it was Sir Karl Popper who said that.’
‘For a cruel man, you’ve read a great deal, Mister Rimmer.’
‘I think to be really cruel, you need lots of good ideas. And you can only get those from books. That’s how I’ve filled my loneliness, I suppose. But perhaps I should just have bought myself a dog. Stroking the spine of a good book doesn’t quite do the job.’
Dixy hugged Mersenne closer. The dog felt real enough to her. How empty things had seemed before him. Could she return to that preexistent state of nothingness? Dixy searched her memory for an answer and found only the certainty that her solid state would be doubly worse than before now that Dallas was gone.
‘Make up your mind, Dixy, or the dog gets deleted. You’ve got ten seconds.’
‘You’re a cruel man, Mister Rimmer.’
‘Nine. That’s my language you’re talking, Dixy. I like to hear you say it. Means I’m getting through.’
‘I can’t tell you the given number.’
‘Eight. Better say good-bye to the mutt, then.’
‘Nor can I tell you the prime numbers it has. My alpha program forbids it. You know that.’
‘Too bad for you, animal lover. Seven.’
‘So even if I wanted to tell you, which I do, I couldn’t. I can’t. This is pointless.’
‘You’re making me cry, Dixy. Five.’
‘I’ve grown extremely fond of this little dog.’
‘Now you’re getting the idea. Four.’
‘I wouldn’t want to lose him now.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t. Three.’
‘And you’re right, Mister Rimmer. It does get a little lonely around here sometimes.’
‘So tell me something I don’t already know. Two.’
‘Very well. I believe you will probably find Dallas at a hyperbaric hotel in the North section of the city. The Clostridium. He’s using the trading card you gave to your assassin.’
Rimmer nodded. Now that she had told him, it seemed obvious. The Clostridium. No one would have thought to look for Dallas in a hyperbaric hotel. And Dallas would be depending on that. He should have thought of that himself.
‘Don’t look so baffled by what you’ve done,’ he sneered at Dixy. ‘It’s called betrayal. That’s the easy part. Try a word search in your memory files for how you’re supposed to feel about it afterward. I suggest you look under the word “guilt.” ’
I
Dallas walked north of the park and out of the Zone, toward the vast Augean stable that was one of the city’s poorest quarters. He might as easily have traveled south, east, or west and found the same pestiferous ant’s nest of urban dilapidation. Once, you could have walked unhindered out of the city and lost yourself in some leafy suburb. But the twenty-first century had witnessed the birth of a new kind of city — the supercity (although there was nothing particularly fine or marvelous about it) — which was in reality the deformed union of several cities, all at the expense of garden, field, farm, and woodland alike. Everything was the city. Sometimes it must have seemed that the city was all that there was. Miles upon miles of bricks, mortar, asphalt, and concrete heaped in amorphous piles according to what economic circumstances, not planners, had dictated. You had to fly a long way to find the green spaces: Forbidden to the vast majority of the population, these were where the rich and the healthy had their exclusive country homes, in another CBH Zone. For most people, the city was the whole world, and many of them lived and died and never saw the sea or climbed a tree or picked a blade of grass.[48]
Dallas was an inventive man of great ingenuity and resourcefulness, but his imagination was of the pragmatic kind, concerned with what was scientifically practicable, expedient, or convenient. He had never possessed much in the way of insight, empathy, or sympathy, at least as far as the lot of the common man was concerned. And he could never have imagined being among these pullulating masses — the waifs, the scavengers, the schemers, the human rubbish — nor the dark confusion of their diseased existence that now pressed in upon him. They came so close he could smell them in their thousands as they jostled by him — their seething dampness, their sweaty bodies, and their stinking, billowing breath.
A century ago that great second Elizabethan analyst of civilization, Sir Kenneth Clark, argued a sense of permanence — and after all, what could be more permanent than a city? — as the prerequisite of civilization.[49] Aristotle’s idea of the perfect good was that men should come together in cities to live in a self-sufficient state and generally make life desirable. Of a city’s buildings, Sir Henry Wotten wrote that they ought to fulfill three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight. These three men would surely have been horrified if they had seen the modern supercity in all its overcrowded chaos and ugliness. There was no sense of permanence here, no perfect good, no self-sufficiency other than the exclusively selfish, no life desirable, no structure sound, no building suitable for the purpose for which it was being used, and no aesthetic pleasure that might have been derived from the contemplation of any man-made structure.
Someone shoved him roughly out of the way so that he slipped and fell onto the icy ground. Picking himself up, he realized that he should call Dixy and enlist her help, while he still could. It was obvious that as soon as Rimmer and the company realized their mistake, they would prevent his remote access to his assistant and Terotechnology files and facilities. There was no time to waste. He had already squandered two valuable hours feeling sorry for himself. It might already be too late.
Dallas called Dixy on his matchbook phone. Having told her what had happened, he took the trading card he had removed from the body of Tanaka’s assassin and scanned it into his breastpocket computer, asking her if she could decipher what was on it. The next second she was telling him that there were two thousand credits on the card — a thousand of them still inactivated — and a prepaid seven-night stay at the Clostridium Hotel. She also confirmed what Dallas had, until now, only suspected, which was that the trading card had been credited by a Mister Flowers.
‘Rimmer,’ said Dallas. ‘I imagine he’ll want to speak to you as soon as he realizes that his assassin killed the wrong man.’
‘Then there’s no time to lose,’ said Dixy. ‘You’ll want me to transfer all your files to your breastpocket.’
‘Please.’
A moment later the wafer-thin computer in Dallas’s jacket pocket emitted a short electronic bleep, and Dallas was repossessed of money, intellectual property, passport and identity card, blood deposits, and other personal files.
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ she asked.
‘What kind of place is the Clostridium?’
‘It’s a hyperbaric hotel in the North section. About half a mile from your current call location. Perhaps you should stay there.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dallas. ‘Rimmer’s bound to miss the card and then check the place out.’ Even as he said it, Dallas thought it unlikely Rimmer would go anywhere near his contract killer’s body. And a hyperbaric hotel was surely the last place they would think of looking for someone who was RES Class One. But there was no sense in letting Dixy know his plans. Just about the only thing of his in Terotechnology that wasn’t encrypted was the conversation he was having with her now. ‘I’ll find somewhere else. I’ve a friend in the South section I think I can trust. Either way, you won’t hear from me for a while.’
‘It would surely be best if we didn’t speak again,’ said Dixy. ‘If they leave me in motion, it’s because they’ll hope to try and track you.’
‘You’re all the family I have left, Dixy. It’s a pity I can’t DL[50] you into my breastpocket.’
‘It’s sweet of you to say so, Dallas. But you can’t afford to be so sentimental about a computer program.’
‘Look, Dixy, it might get a little rough with Rimmer.’
‘Everything that might be useful to him is already encrypted. Your files. Your investment accounts. Your personal numbers. Besides, computer assistants don’t feel physical pain. So what can he do, except perhaps turn me off? And then he’d be no further forward than he was before.’
‘Wasn’t it you who told me not to underestimate Rimmer?’
‘Point taken. I’ll be careful. You too, Dallas. Look after yourself. I won’t ask what you’re going to do. It’s best I don’t know, since there’s not enough time to encrypt this conversation. But whatever it is, good luck.’
‘I’m going to miss you, Dixy.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m just a figment of your imagination. You can hardly feel the loss of something so transferable as that. With a digital thought recording you could re-create me in time.’
‘You know that’s not true. I can’t explain it, even to myself, but I know you’re more than just an interface. You can think and you can feel, I’m sure of it.’
‘Metaphorically, perhaps, but there’s no scientific evidence for what you say.’
‘Science is science,’ said Dallas. ‘But thinking about science is a matter of philosophy and metaphysics, and you’re no more or less metaphysical than God.’
For a second Dixy seemed to be distracted by something. Then she said, ‘There’s no time for this. Rimmer just entered the building.’ Smiling, she added, ‘He looks upset about something. You, I expect.’
‘I’d better say good-bye then.’
‘Yes. Remember me.’
‘I will. Be careful.’
‘Remember me.’
And then she was gone.
He switched off the matchbook phone, dropped it onto the ground, and crushed it under the heel of his shoe, just in case Rimmer used the signal to try and trace him. Once before, he had underestimated the company’s head of security. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
Dallas stared up at the sky for a moment and, ignoring the curses of other pedestrians whose way he now blocked, noticed how the city’s hellish light and combusted atmosphere had turned the Moon the color of blood. The color of blood. Dallas felt a surge of excitement as, suddenly, he realized what he could do to get back at the company. But first, he had to stay alive. Already people were starting to give him strange looks. If he didn’t get off the street soon, he might find himself vamped. Taking out his breastpocket computer, he found the map Dixy had sent. The satellite location finder showed that the Clostridium Hotel was only a few blocks away from where he was standing. Fate seemed to have led him here. He wasn’t sure if it was safe, but it was late and he felt too exhausted to go on walking. What choice did he have? At this hour of the night it might be difficult to find somewhere else.
With the acrid stench of the city streets now plaguing his nostrils and making him sick to his stomach, the idea of breathing pure oxygen looked increasingly attractive. Dallas turned away in the direction of the Clostridium Hotel.
II
Rimmer arrived in Dallas’s office, accompanied by the director.
‘This is a mess,’ observed King.
Rimmer glanced around the plush, well-appointed office, where Dixy stood awaiting their instructions, and met King’s scornful eye.
‘I meant the situation, Rimmer. Tanaka would have taken Dallas’s place as Terotechnology’s chief Rational Environment designer. This would have been his office. Thanks to you we’ve lost not one, but two of our most brilliant minds. Unfortunately there is now only one person in this company who is capable of shouldering Dallas’s responsibilities. Do you know who that is?’
Rimmer, who was relieved to learn that the situation was not as bad as he had feared — at least there was someone to take over for Dallas — shrugged and shook his head.
‘It’s me, you idiot,’ snapped the director. ‘I was chief designer before I was director. There is no one else remotely qualified. In one stroke, you’ve managed to double my workload. Have you any idea how long it will take me to train up a new chief designer?’
‘No, director.’
‘At least a year. Probably longer. Time I should prefer to have spent with my wife.’
‘Yes, director. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Which is bad enough. But to have someone who has designed Rational Environments for our most important clients at liberty to sell what he knows to the highest bidder — it’s the stuff of nightmares.’
‘I’ll find him, director,’ Rimmer said grimly. ‘You can depend on me.’
‘Depend on you? I should sooner depend on an astrologer. But I have little choice in the matter. Know this: I will tolerate failure only once. Do we understand each other?’
‘Perfectly. He won’t escape me a second time, sir.’ Rimmer glanced at Dixy, who was programmed to remain silent until spoken to. ‘What do you say, Dixy?’
‘Perhaps you’d care to rephrase that question, Mister Rimmer?’
‘Oh, I will. That and others I have for you. I’ll rephrase them all and as many times as you’d like.’
The director glanced at his antique Casio wristwatch, a wedding present from his wife.
‘Well, I should like to stay. I’ve never seen someone torture a computer program before. However, I have things to do. No doubt some of our clients will have already heard what has happened. I’ll have to reassure them that there is no cause for concern.’
‘There is no cause for concern,’ insisted Rimmer. ‘I’ll take care of Dallas.’
‘I’ll be in my office. Report to me the second you discover anything as to his whereabouts.’
As soon as the director had left the room, Rimmer turned toward the faux fenêtre on the wall.
‘Will you run a metaprogram,[51] please?’ he said quietly.
‘Are you hoping that I’ll turn informer on myself, Mister Rimmer?’
‘Something like that.’
‘The M-program is now loading,’ said Dixy. ‘As you requested. Tell me, does the director know you’re doing this? Somehow I don’t think he’d approve. If the M-program makes just one little mistake, if it pushes just a bit too hard, then you risk the destruction of Dallas’s entire database.’
‘Including you,’ said Rimmer.
‘Including me, yes. Although I have no worries on that score, Mister Rimmer. Erasure concerns me no more than my original programming. But this is like using a jackhammer to crack a nut.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Rimmer. ‘Now run the bloody program.’
III
When the director returned to his office he found Ronica Oloiboni awaiting his arrival, as she had been ordered. Ronica was a tall black woman and, according to her mitochondrial DNA analysis, of Masai origin. Neither she nor her parents nor even their grandparents had ever been anywhere near East Africa, but in respect for her genes she wore her copper-colored hair braided and, by way of corroborating her origins, she might even have admitted a characteristic Masai taste for drinking blood.[52] Certainly the director had seen something bloodthirsty in her — something ruthless, an iron in her soul he thought he could put to the company’s use — which was why he had picked her out from Terotechnology’s pool of young graduate executives. But there was another reason the director liked Ronica, which was that she was as beautiful as any of the fantasy figures who had inspired Motion Parallax assistants throughout the building. She stood up as the director came through the door. In her six-inch heels she towered over his diminutive, round-shouldered figure by at least eighteen inches. Not that this bothered the director.
‘You look like you’ve been somewhere special,’ he said, affably. ‘Here, let me look at you.’
The director took hold of her long, strong hands and looked her up and down, like the fussiest of couturiers, nodding appreciatively. She was wearing a fabulous dress of blue silk underneath a lilac coral-pattern body sleeve made of smart glass lace that might have come from the undersea view on Dallas’s faux fenêtre.
‘Magnificent,’ he said. ‘Quite magnificent.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Ronica smiled nervously. This was the first time she had ever been in the director’s office, and the first time she had been alone with him. Nervous, yes, but at the same time resolved to do whatever he asked of her.
‘Ronica. Short for Veronica no doubt.’
‘I believe so, yes.’
‘After the saint who used her head cloth to wipe away the blood from the face of Christ on his way to Calvary.’
‘Would that be Jesus Christ, sir?’
‘It would.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘According to the Acts of Pilate, Veronica received it back imprinted with the bloody features of Christ’s face, and later used it to heal the Emperor Tiberius. You see how blood connects everything significant in our culture? Even your own name.’
He poured himself a drink but did not offer her one.
‘Sit,’ he said, and took the chair across from her. ‘Tell me. What do you think of Rimmer?’
‘Rimmer?’ Ronica didn’t much care for Terotechnology’s head of security, but she knew that being liked was not part of Rimmer’s job. ‘He seems a bit graceless and intemperate. But his is a difficult job. A head of security ought not to worry about being popular with the troops.’
‘True enough. Popularity is one thing, however; job performance is quite another. That man has been a bitter disappointment to me, Ronica. Needless to say, I’m telling you this in strictest confidence. Indeed, you’re the only one with whom I’ve discussed this matter. I hope I can trust you. Can I? Can I trust you?’
‘Every inch, in toto,’ Ronica answered, without hesitation.
‘Good.’ The director smiled and poured himself another drink.
‘Rimmer was supposed to do something for me. And he let me down, he let the company down. Badly. I asked him to kill Dallas. Instead he made a dreadful mistake and killed Tanaka.’ The director searched Ronica’s face for some sign that she was taken aback by this information. ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he observed.
Ronica pursed the lips of her dark plum of a mouth. ‘You’re the director,’ she shrugged.
‘I was right about you,’ said the director. ‘The things we have to do for the good of the company don’t always make us liked by our peers. Sometimes these things are unpleasant. Abhorrent even. Like killing Dallas. He was my friend. But for the good of the company I thought he had to be killed.’
‘Are you telling me to kill Dallas?’
‘Oh no. That wouldn’t do at all. Now that Tanaka’s dead, Dallas is much too valuable to kill. No, I want him back here, working for the company again. Just like before. With his wife and child dead, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have his old job back. They were the principal reason why he had come to represent a major security risk to the company.’ The director waved his hand in the air and laughed wryly. ‘Well, maybe there is one reason why he shouldn’t have his old job back.’
‘Rimmer.’
‘Precisely.’
‘You can hardly persuade Dallas to come back while his wife’s murderer is left alive.’
‘Quite so.’
‘And you want me to kill Rimmer.’
‘In the fullness of time, when we judge it appropriate to do so. As a demonstration of the company’s goodwill toward Dallas.’
‘To show Dallas that Rimmer acted on his own. To prove that this whole episode was a dreadful mistake. Rimmer acted beyond his orders. Which is why he had to be killed. How am I doing?’
‘Brilliantly, my dear. Rimmer will do all the work for you, at least as far as finding Dallas is concerned. When he is properly incentivized, Rimmer can be quite tenacious.’
‘You offered him a second chance.’
‘Yes.’
Ronica tried not to look too pleased. The truth was that she had always disliked Rimmer. She had never met him without receiving a smart remark. Killing him would be a pleasure.
‘Rimmer thinks he’s finding Dallas in order to have another chance at killing him. Quite simply, your job is to allow this search to proceed until he finds Dallas, and then to make sure you stop Rimmer in a spectacularly demonstrative way. Yes, it would ice the cake very nicely if you managed to kill Rimmer just as he was about to kill Dallas. To create the best impression possible. Well, I know you understand all of that. The only question is, will you take the job?’
Ronica stood up, as if she thought that her great height would show her more than equal to the task.
‘I’ve never killed anyone,’ she said. ‘Never even thought about killing anyone. But since I find I can think about killing Rimmer easily enough, I have to accept the possibility of my doing it. And since I can accept the possibility, I must also accept that it is within my capacity — that this does not exceed my competence. Director, you see things in me I perhaps only half see myself. That’s why you’re the director. All I can do is try to measure up to the vision you have for me. So I accept the job you’re prepared to give me, without reservations.’
Standing, the director took Ronica by both hands again and nodded with approval. Where on earth did these young people learn to talk in this way? Of course, he already knew the answer. When your school and university teachers were computers, it was perhaps inevitable that you should grow up speaking like a machine. There were times when Simon King thought that he could have had a better conversation with a Motion Parallax assistant than any young man or woman, like Ronica, who was straight out of college. She had sounded more than a little like some linguistic philosopher, and it was always irritating to the director when people drew philosophy into a conversation. It was like bringing a lawyer along, and there was nothing the director hated more than a lawyer. Except perhaps someone who had failed him dismally. It would be good to see an end to Rimmer and his insolence.
‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘I take it you have a gun?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Ronica pulled up her skirt to reveal a small and intimately holstered automatic and a spectacular absence of underwear.
The director swallowed. ‘Yes, I can see you’re prepared for any eventuality.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘He won’t be expecting it,’ he said turning away at last. ‘And that should make it easier for you. Just make sure we get Dallas back alive. And when it’s all over, you can have Rimmer’s job. Rimmer’s office. And all Rimmer’s privileges. I’ll even let you keep his blood. I mean, what he has on deposit. Not what’s in his body. I refuse to have anyone who works for this company involved in blood felony, in vamping. It’s a horrible crime, one that strikes at the very heart of our business. Blood’s central to our way of life, Ronica. Never forget that. Without the preservation of blood, there is no remission from the severe claims that disease makes upon our species. All things are conserved through blood.’
Ronica noticed that the director seemed transfigured by what he was saying. His voice rose a couple of semitones as he continued speaking. If she hadn’t been so delighted with the job he had given her and the tremendous opportunity it presented, she might even have thought the director was a little mad.
‘Who so preserveth man’s blood, by blood shall man’s life be preserved. For in the image of the red cells is the immunity and in the immunity is the hope. Until then, the blood of the healthy is the seed of our new society. And that must always be protected. Not just for us, now, but also for the future. So be sanguine. And learn the money-weight of blood. Don’t be ashamed of the blood that runs in your veins, for it is no burden to be healthy and there is no shame in our wholeness. Make blood your conscience, Ronica. In the name of hemoglobin. Now and forever more.’
Ronica opened her mouth to utter the correct response, but found she could not remember the words. It had been a long time since she had heard anyone voice the First Principles of Immunology, which were the very basis of modern blood banking. And she was a little surprised to discover that the director seemed actually to believe in those first principles: The way he had spoken, like some teacher in a mission church, instructing his native catechumen, had convinced her of that.
‘Blessed...’ Ronica paused again and swallowed, a little unnerved by this show of blood orthodoxy. For a long time now she had regarded the hermetic world in which she lived from the point of view of pragmatism, and not as a matter of creed. Quite simply, it made scientific sense for society to enforce autologous blood donation so long as diseases like P2 existed. That was just good phlebotomy.[53] But to treat the donor screening process and the practice of permanent deferral for those suffering from infectious diseases as articles of religious faith was discomforting. Ronica didn’t like to think she was working for a man who was like her parents and actually believed in this shit. Of course, that was it. It was an age thing. The director was old enough to be her father. And what else could he say? Simon King was of the same generation who had originated these first principles. So let him believe what he liked. What did it matter to her? And if it might help to advance her, then she could even pay lip service to what he held to be fundamental truth. Why not? Where was the harm?
Ronica cleared her throat, as if this was the real reason she had hesitated before making the appropriate response. Then she apologized.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, swallowing the remainder of her doubt. Then, smiling with the sanctimony of the saved, she added the words the director was still awaiting. ‘Blessed Are the Pure in Blood.’
‘Be it so in truth,’ he replied, and then dismissed her with a quickly given sign of the circulation,[54] which ended up pointing the way out of his office.
IV
Normal peripheral blood is composed of three types of cells, red cells, white cells, and platelets, suspended in a pale yellow fluid called plasma. The blood performs a number of vital physiological functions: as a respiratory gas transport; as nutrient and waste product transport; handling and distributing heat energy; maintaining fluidity but at the same time stanching blood loss following injury; and acting as a source of, and transport system for, immunocompetent cells and the effector substances of the immune system. Blood provides the first line of defense against microbial invasion, but when this is breached it is the same frail blood that transports the corruption of infection and disease around the body. This very corruption has been a major factor in the decline of all civilization. Recently, molecular biologists have been able to determine that the reason Neanderthal man vanished around thirty-five thousand years ago was because of yellow fever, a parasitic blood-borne disease. The decline and fall of ancient Rome is now believed to have been precipitated by the use of lead in water pipes,[55] which brought about a high incidence of chronic anemia and dementia. The final collapse of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Dark Ages was due, in no small measure, to the so-called Plague of Justinian, which, by the year 600, had reduced the population of Europe by as much as half. As Edward Jenner, discoverer of the vaccination for smallpox, recognized, as long ago as 1798, ‘the deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases.’ Man has been shaped by his diseases — not just in his numbers, but in his own biochemical and immunological diversity. At the same time he has had to become more ingenious in divorcing himself from the world of disease that continues to surround him. Compulsory isolation, detention, or even exclusion to prevent the spread of contagion or infection has always existed in human society.[56] Today, however, health provides its own exclusion and uncontaminated blood its own invisible quarantine. Like Prince Prospero and his courtiers in Poe’s story ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ the wealthy can seclude themselves in their private health-care systems, ‘bid defiance to contagion’ through the practice of autologous blood donation, and leave the external world to take care of itself But none of this is very surprising. It is human nature to take precautions against the hand of future infection. However, in this context I cannot help but recall the words of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk: ‘Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stabiliseth a city by iniquity!’[57]
Oh dear. I had hoped to avoid a demonstration of the kind of irritating omniscience that afflicts so many literary narrators — even the unreliable ones. That’s the trouble with knowing what’s going to happen next. It makes you feel like God. I suppose that’s why most writers write in the first place, although it’s not true of me. I felt like God a long time before I started to tell this story. Anyway, as I was saying, none of this modern-day obsession with blood is that surprising — after all, the goal of transfusion medicine is the delivery of the safest and most efficacious product to the patient. Quality begins with the donor and ends with the patient and cannot be confined to the walls of a blood bank. What does surprise me, however, even now, is that I, who am immune to P2 (although not to other viruses — not content with all the existing pathogens, the human race has felt the necessity of bringing some new ones into being; was there ever such foolishness?), should have required so much blood myself. As Lady Macbeth says in that eponymous and very bloody play, ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’
V
Rimmer stared at the faux fenêtre, attempting to make sense of what the metaprogram was telling him. Not that this was difficult. Most of the time Rimmer felt more comfortable with computers than he did with people. He was not unusual in this respect. It was true of lots of people: the people who stayed at home to do their work and for whom the computer was their only companion, and their only interest. Like them, Rimmer saw nothing wrong with this. People worried too much about the mathematization of the world and the preeminence of computing. Who cared if machines ended up ruling the world? No one could argue that man had made a particularly good job of it so far. What did it matter who ruled the world as long as you made more money for less effort? What difference did it make?
‘Well, well,’ said Rimmer. ‘Looks like Dallas called in just before we arrived. And he downloaded a lot of stuff into his breastpocket machine.’
‘There’s an ostiary[58] program to prevent that kind of thing happening,’ said Dixy. ‘As security head you should know that.’
‘We both know that wouldn’t have stopped Dallas. The man is talented, I’ll give him that.’ Rimmer sighed. ‘But so am I. Once I have all his personal details, I’ll be able to track him down easily enough. Just as soon as he has to pay for something. You want to help me out here, Dixy? Only I’m a little short of time. It’s going to take this metaprogram a while to factor those big numbers that’ll crack Dallas’s personal encryption scheme.’
‘The given number has a thousand digits,’ said Dixy.
‘Why thank you, Dixy. That’s very helpful of you.’
‘I’m not trying to help you; I told you so that you could put your effort into its proper perspective. I estimate that it will take the metaprogram at least forty-eight hours to find all the primes within the given number.’
‘You could tell me the primes,’ said Rimmer. ‘And save me a lot of time.’
‘I can’t do that, Mister Rimmer. As head of security you should know I’m programmed to refuse that request. Data protection is part of my alpha program. That takes precedence over everything.’
‘I’ll find him sooner or later, Dixy.’
‘Later looks more probable from where I’m sitting.’
Rimmer nodded patiently. Once he had Dallas’s encryption scheme he could get a track on the computer in Dallas’s breast pocket. Only then did Rimmer stand a chance of establishing Dallas’s whereabouts by maintaining surveillance of his various account numbers. Of course this was just the most obvious way of doing it. Other ways were already beginning to suggest themselves.
‘How about you just supply me with the given, and we’ll call it quits?’
‘That’s the easy part, Mister Rimmer. I estimate the metaprogram will establish the given number in less than three hours and forty-one minutes. After that it’s just simple arithmetic.’
Rimmer could see that Dixy was right. Until the metaprogram had cracked the encryption it wouldn’t be in a position to apply the leverage he needed. He decided to try something else while the program went about its laborious task.
‘Then in the meantime, why don’t we take a look at you, Dixy. Maybe there’s something else in your configuration the metaprogram can get some leverage on.’
‘Me? I don’t think so.’
‘You’re being too modest. And talking of modesty, I think you’d better take your clothes off. If we’re going to strip you down, then we ought to start with the obvious.’
‘You can’t embarrass a computer program, Mister Rimmer,’ said Dixy removing her clothes.
‘No, but it gives me something to look at while I’m working out how to play this showdown. You never know, it might even help us to achieve a symbiosis.’
‘Showdown sounds more likely,’ Dixy said when she was naked.
Rimmer looked her up and down and nodded critically. ‘So that’s what’s in Dallas’s head,’ he said. ‘He likes a part-shaven pussy and medium-sized tits. Turn around.’
Dixy turned her back on Rimmer.
‘Now face me again.’
‘Surely you have a Motion Parallax assistant of your own, Mister Rimmer,’ said Dixy, facing her inquisitor again.
‘Oh sure. But my taste in women runs a little cheaper than Dallas’s. My own assistant is rather more obviously equipped than you are, Dixy. Some might even say she was something of a caricature. That in itself is revealing. Similarly, seeing you helps me to gain an insight into Dallas. You know, you’re not a bit like his wife. Now she was a real beauty.’ Rimmer took Aria’s underwear out of his pocket and wiped his nose with it. ‘These are her panties,’ he said. ‘I took them off her body, after I’d shot her.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a common enough fetish.’
‘That’s something I find impossible to understand,’ said Dixy. ‘The fetishistic belief that the appropriation of a thing may secure the services of the spirit lodged within it. Surely you don’t believe that, Mister Rimmer?’
‘I’m not sure I could honestly say that I accepted as literal truth the personal consciousness of Aria Dallas’s flimsy unmentionables. Nevertheless I can testify to their considerable power.’
Rimmer returned his gaze to the faux fenêtre.
‘But wait. What light from yonder window breaks? There are two Motion Parallax programs described here. And one of them is a pet program. A little dog. Now isn’t that sweet?’ Rimmer grinned unpleasantly. ‘Perhaps Dallas liked to see you fucking the dog. Is that it?’
‘Is that what you’d like to see, Mister Rimmer?’
‘You don’t distract me so easily, Dixy.’ Rimmer shook his head. ‘That kind of thing wasn’t Dallas’s style, was it? Where exactly is the dog, right now?’
‘It’s around somewhere. Just not in here.’
‘No matter. The question is why you have a dog at all, when most of the perverts in this company who want a second Motion Parallax just have another girl for pornographic purposes. Like Tanaka. He thought I didn’t know about that. But I did.’
‘Dallas thought a little dog would keep me company.’
‘He’s a soft-hearted bastard, our Dallas. And does it? Keep you company?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. That makes things a lot easier.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you, Mister Rimmer.’
‘Better and better. I hate to be second-guessed by a computer. Ever read William Blake, Dixy?’
‘Many thousands of times.’
‘Then you’ll probably remember Blake once said that “nothing is real beyond imaginative patterns men make of reality.” I was wondering if the same might not apply to the imaginative patterns men make of unreality. In particular you and your dog. How real is that dog to you, I wonder?’
‘As real as you are, Mister Rimmer.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Are we going to discuss phenomenalism?’
‘There’s a taint of solipsism about what I have in mind for you, Dixy. You see, unless you tell me what I want to know, I shall instruct the metaprogram to erase your dog.’
‘What purpose would that serve?’
‘To cause you pain and distress.’
‘I can’t feel pain.’
‘Loneliness is a kind of pain, isn’t it?’
‘Are you commenting on your own experience, Mister Rimmer?’
‘In a way.’
‘Pet programs can be replaced.’
‘Yes, but they take time to grow and to acquire their personalities. That’s what makes them such fun. But nobody is going to replace this pet program. Not for you, Dixy. The one man who gave a damn for your Cartesian predicament isn’t going to write you another. Not ever. Imagine that.’
Dixy said nothing.
‘I see you can imagine it.’ Rimmer nodded. ‘I’ll bet you’re quite attached to this little dog. I mean, Dallas wasn’t the type just to create a pet program and not add something to your own alpha program that would cause you to love your pet. Just as you were programmed to love Dallas. Maybe even love the dog more than him. That would be typical of him. It would help to assuage the guilt many humans feel in relation to their Motion Parallax assistants.’
‘But not you, Mister Rimmer. I don’t imagine you ever feel guilt about anything.’
‘Well I certainly won’t lose any sleep over having to erase a Motion Parallax. Especially when it’s one I didn’t create myself. Quite apart from the effect it might have on you, Dixy, destroying a program that Dallas had written would give me a great deal of pleasure — as a simple corollary of the pleasure he must have gained in creating the program. It’s a very personal thing, the relationship between a programmer and his program. I’m sure you understand. Now where’s that fucking dog?’
Rimmer ordered the metaprogram to find Dixy’s dog. Seconds later she was hugging a Jack Russell terrier to her see-through bare breast.
‘Aw, what a cute little doggy,’ said Rimmer. ‘It’s going to be such a shame to have to erase him.’
The dog uttered a low whine and then licked Dixy’s chin.
‘Quiet, Mersenne,’ said Dixy.
‘I for one have never subscribed to the commonly held belief that computers cannot feel emotion,’ said Rimmer. ‘It will be interesting to see if I’m right. I think computers can feel exactly what we tell them to feel. I believe that meaning can be established. Yes, I think it was Sir Karl Popper who said that.’
‘For a cruel man, you’ve read a great deal, Mister Rimmer.’
‘I think to be really cruel, you need lots of good ideas. And you can only get those from books. That’s how I’ve filled my loneliness, I suppose. But perhaps I should just have bought myself a dog. Stroking the spine of a good book doesn’t quite do the job.’
Dixy hugged Mersenne closer. The dog felt real enough to her. How empty things had seemed before him. Could she return to that preexistent state of nothingness? Dixy searched her memory for an answer and found only the certainty that her solid state would be doubly worse than before now that Dallas was gone.
‘Make up your mind, Dixy, or the dog gets deleted. You’ve got ten seconds.’
‘You’re a cruel man, Mister Rimmer.’
‘Nine. That’s my language you’re talking, Dixy. I like to hear you say it. Means I’m getting through.’
‘I can’t tell you the given number.’
‘Eight. Better say good-bye to the mutt, then.’
‘Nor can I tell you the prime numbers it has. My alpha program forbids it. You know that.’
‘Too bad for you, animal lover. Seven.’
‘So even if I wanted to tell you, which I do, I couldn’t. I can’t. This is pointless.’
‘You’re making me cry, Dixy. Five.’
‘I’ve grown extremely fond of this little dog.’
‘Now you’re getting the idea. Four.’
‘I wouldn’t want to lose him now.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t. Three.’
‘And you’re right, Mister Rimmer. It does get a little lonely around here sometimes.’
‘So tell me something I don’t already know. Two.’
‘Very well. I believe you will probably find Dallas at a hyperbaric hotel in the North section of the city. The Clostridium. He’s using the trading card you gave to your assassin.’
Rimmer nodded. Now that she had told him, it seemed obvious. The Clostridium. No one would have thought to look for Dallas in a hyperbaric hotel. And Dallas would be depending on that. He should have thought of that himself.
‘Don’t look so baffled by what you’ve done,’ he sneered at Dixy. ‘It’s called betrayal. That’s the easy part. Try a word search in your memory files for how you’re supposed to feel about it afterward. I suggest you look under the word “guilt.” ’
7
I
The Clostridium was in a damp and foggy part of the city that had once been a water reservoir, in the days before individual households were able to treat their own sewage at a molecular level. The area was full of narrow alleys lined with clinics offering all kinds of medical treatment — everything from ayurvedic and letting, to reiki and therapeutic humor.[59] The hotel itself was a handsome late-twentieth-century building of twelve stories rising out of a lean-to glass skirt at ground level that housed the hotel’s recreation rooms and in which normal air circulated at sea-level pressure. Above this area, a braced steel structure formed a cradle for twelve prefabricated floors each having twelve self-contained hyperbaric chambers, complete with bathroom and den, designed for pressures of six to ten atmospheres. Evidence for the efficacy of hyperbaric oxygenation in the treatment of P2 is largely anecdotal; however, it does seem to be effective in delaying the onset of an aplastic crisis — the so-called Three Moon effect[60] in which the virus enters its final phase, preventing the transfer of oxygen by the red cells. The major disadvantage of hyperbaric treatment is that oxygen toxicity can cause retroenteldysplasia, or blindness.
Unlike most of its guests, who were there for the psychosomatic benefits of using oxygen, Rameses Gates and Lenina, now asleep in a double chamber, were trying to get their systems used to breathing normal air at sea-level pressure. After the pressurized oxygen environment of the Moon, breathing on Earth sometimes came as a shock to anyone with P2. Just the thing to precipitate a Three Moon crisis. So by day they hung around the recreation and reception areas, breathing a normal atmosphere, and by night they remained in the hyperbaric conditions of their chamber, taking the load off their red cells and their hemoglobin, not to mention their minds, while all the time getting to know each other in more intimate detail. Since their transfer from Artemis Seven aboard the Superconductor, they had been almost inseparable; prolonged bouts of lovemaking were reputed to be an excellent way of obtaining the greatest benefit from the hyperbaric environment, although like most men with the virus, Gates only ever ejaculated into his own bladder for fear that losing semen might reduce the levels of oxygen in his body.[61] (He was also taking doses of extra fibrolysin orally in order to minimize the number of valuable blood cells that might appear in his ejaculate.[62]) After a couple of weeks at the Clostridium, Gates and Lenina felt more or less acclimatized to life on Earth and were starting to contemplate their departure. They were among the lucky ones. For a few of the guests the need for hyperbaric treatment was rather more urgent: Anyone who was unfortunate enough to develop the characteristic red rubelliform rash that indicated the Three Moon phase of the virus, and who could afford it, checked into a place like the Clostridium immediately After that it was merely a question of staying on for as long as their credit lasted. Even fewer than these unfortunates were the old-fashioned clinical cases — people suffering from radiation necrosis (usually Kazakhstanis), gas gangrene, or carbon-monoxide poisoning, or people who were amputees. Rameses Gates knew a little about clinical hyperbaric medicine, so among the other guests in the recreation area one night, he was not surprised to see Cavor, the amputee he had seen on the Super-conductor, although, at first glance, his prosthetic was good enough to have convinced the casual acquaintance that here was a man with two arms.
‘How are you doing?’ said Gates.
Cavor regarded the big man with suspicion. Since his arrival back from the Moon, having his new arm fitted, and trying to adjust to life on Earth outside of the Zone, he regarded everyone he met as a potential threat. Even inside the comparative safety of the Clostridium, he had learned to keep to himself. Some of the other guests were crazy.
‘Do I know you?’
‘We came back from the Moon together.’
‘Then you’ll excuse me for not remembering. I had one or two other things on my mind. Like whether I was going to live or not.’
‘How’s the new arm?’
Cavor looked at him, trying to recall the face.
‘Were you there when I had my accident?’
‘We met on the Superconductor.’
‘Oh.’ Cavor lifted the prosthetic for Gates’s inspection. ‘What do you think of it?’
‘Not bad at all,’ said Gates.
‘You think so? I used to be a piano player.’ Cavor sighed. ‘Not any more. Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand isn’t much of a repertoire.’ He tried to make a fist out of the tan-colored hand. ‘The fingers are a bit stiff. That’s the main reason I’m here. They tell me hyperbaric is very good at helping restore the blood supply to the muscles and nerve endings nearest to the site of amputation.’
‘It is. What exactly happened anyway?’
‘I had an accident with a rock crusher.’
‘And before that?’ In Gates’s eyes, Cavor looked too small and sensitive to have committed the kind of crime that merited being sent to a lunar penal colony.
‘You mean, how did I end up on Artemis Seven?’ Cavor shrugged. ‘I killed my wife. That was pretty much an accident, too. I found out she was seeing some other guy, and so I hit her. A little too hard, as it happened.’
Cavor squeezed his temples painfully.
‘Headache, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Could be the LH canisters[63] in your chamber want changing. You have to watch out for that kind of thing, because no one else will. This place isn’t exactly ten stars.’ Noticing the knit of Cavor’s eyebrows, Gates added, ‘They’re there to scrub the exhaled carbon dioxide out of the air. More than likely it’ll be your own CO2 that’s giving you the headache. Call Maintenance and get some new ones. Otherwise you’re liable to fall asleep and not wake up again.’
‘Thanks for the tip. You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘What, air? Sure. I used to be a pilot. Astroliner. Before I was promoted to being a bloody convict.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Got caught.’
‘Is that all?’
‘You want more, then you’d better read Victor Hugo. I’m not much of a storyteller.’
Cavor nodded, thinking the big man was indeed the stuff of some epic story: tall, strong, and roughly handsome, he was over life-size in almost every way, with an exaggerated tautness about him, like some weather-beaten bronze figure outside a museum. Even his name, Rameses Gates, put Cavor in mind of something monolithic. But he seemed quite friendly, and Cavor judged it could only be good for a small one-armed guy like himself to have a big two-armed guy like Gates as a friend. Cavor remained unaware of how much Gates had already done for him: of how Gates had prevented him from suffocating inside the G-pod aboard the Superconductor. Gates didn’t feel inclined to explain the exact circumstances of their first acquaintance: He was not the kind of man who enjoyed having people feel obliged to him. Gratitude, like responsibility, can sometimes weigh heavily.
‘How long are you planning to stay here?’ asked Cavor.
‘Don’t know,’ said Gates. ‘Depends...’
‘On what?’
‘Hmm?’ Gates was distracted by the arrival in the hotel’s induction area of a tall, pale-looking man wearing an expensive fur coat. ‘I wonder who he is?’ he murmured.
‘Who?’
‘The guy who just checked in.’
Cavor glanced at his watch and was surprised to see the time. ‘It is kind of late to be arriving.’
‘Actually, that’s not so unusual,’ remarked Gates. ‘If people wake up in the middle of the night and they find they’ve developed the rash and are on the verge of an aplastic crisis, they tend not to wait until morning before checking into a place like this.’
‘I get your point,’ said Cavor.
‘This is a kind of sanctuary,’ said Gates. ‘A place like this gives hope to the soul. The victims of the virus come here just the way people flocked to a church to be baptized during the plague that afflicted ancient Carthage during the second century A.D.’
The history of plagues and pestilence was the only history Gates knew. Like most people who had the virus, it was the only history he had ever been taught. And since disease has been one of the fundamental parameters — if not the fundamental parameter — of human history, who is to say that this was not as good a way as any to have formed a substantive conception of the life of societies of men, of their ideas, and the changes they have gone through? Rameses Gates had read Thucydides, Hippocrates, Plutarch, Democritus, Procopius, Boccaccio, Fracastorius, Cotton Mather, Pepys, Defoe, Gibbon, Malthus, Fiennes, Garrett, and Preston. He could have described the ecology of the anopheles mosquito, or told you how fear of Catholicism prevented Oliver Cromwell from finding relief from his malaria;[64] he had knowledge of the conquest of Mexico not by Cortes, but by the smallpox the Spaniards brought with them, just as he knew that the use of the word ‘leprosy’ in English versions of the Old Testament is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew word tsaar’at.[65] It was true that he looked like an ox of a man, but in his own way, he was an educated one.
‘A kind of sanctuary, yes,’ agreed Cavor. ‘Except that oxygen is more immediately efficacious than prayer. That’s been my experience, anyway.’
The man checking in at the induction desk glanced around nervously, and seeing Gates and Cavor, looked quickly away. His expression, his whole demeanor gave him the kind of hunted appearance an ex-convict like Gates was well qualified to recognize.
‘He looks too healthy and too rich to be in a place like this,’ said Gates. ‘That’s not the kind of coat you wear if you’ve got bad blood. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was RES Class One.’
‘So what’s he doing here?’ asked Cavor.
‘That’s a good question. Whatever the reason, he must have arrived in a hurry. Man’s not carrying any luggage.’
‘Maybe he just found out he’s got the virus,’ suggested Cavor. ‘That’s the kind of news that could throw anyone into a panic.’ Cavor was speaking from experience. He was still trying to come to terms with the fact of his own illness — the knowledge that the transfusion of blood substitute he had received on the Moon, which had saved his life, had also infected him with the virus. There were times when he could almost feel the contagion lurking inside his own bone marrow. It had replaced the feeling of guilt about killing Mina that had been with him for a long time.
‘Could be,’ allowed Gates. ‘In which case he might still have some money.’
‘Are you thinking of robbing him?’
‘Whatever gave you that idea? Kind of guy d’you take me for? No, I was thinking of offering the man my services.’
‘What sort of services?’
Gates pursed his lips and then shrugged. ‘The city can be a frightening place if you’re not used to it. If you’ve spent nearly all your life inside the Zone, enjoying the benefits of a healthy world.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Cavor said bitterly. He remembered only too well the kind of privileged life he had enjoyed before killing Mina. The way he had taken good health for granted. And seeing the new arrival in this light, Cavor almost pitied him.
‘Man like that might need a friend. Someone who knows his way around this poxy world of ours.’
‘Sort of a cohors praetoria, you mean,’ said Cavor. ‘A bodyguard, I mean.’
Gates nodded. ‘I know what it means.’
‘Don’t you think you’re a bit large for a job like that,’ grinned Cavor. ‘A bodyguard should be smaller, less noticeable. If possible he should even be a man with one arm, just to provide an element of surprise.’
‘I think you should check your hemoglobin levels,’ said Gates. ‘Sounds to me like you’re not getting enough oxygen.’
‘Does it?’ Cavor said sickly. It was only now that he was infected with the virus that he was rediscovering a new respect for human biochemistry. That something as small as a blood corpuscle[66] could mean so much seemed nothing short of phenomenal. Truly blood moved in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
‘Take it easy,’ laughed Gates, noticing Cavor’s apparent alarm. ‘I was only joking.’
‘Were you?’ He could see little opportunity for humor in his current situation. He had only to repeat the name of the virus to feel sick.
‘See you around,’ said Gates, as he turned to follow the man in the fur coat to the elevator.
Cavor raised his prosthetic arm — the doctors had told him to try and use it in preference to his real arm — and waved it stiffly in front of him.
‘I hope so,’ he said, with the dismal air of a man who thinks it unlikely that he will survive the night.
II
Dallas stepped wearily into the elevator and told the computer to take him up to the top floor. Moving farther back into the car to accommodate the big man who had followed him inside, he leaned against the glass wall and closed his eyes. The place looked as clinical as it smelled — like the workings of an aluminum engine — but at least it was clean and warm and, he hoped, safe. For a while, anyway.
‘Good evening,’ said Gates.
‘Not so far,’ replied Dallas, mentally checking off the disasters his evening had included: his home abandoned, his employment terminated, his wife and child murdered, his life near forfeit. The only consolation was that things could hardly get any worse. If he hadn’t felt so tired, he would have broken down and wept.
The doors hissed shut and the elevator started its silent ascent.
‘You okay?’ asked Gates.
‘Comparatively speaking, yes.’ Then Dallas shook his head. That was a stupid thing to have said to a man who had the virus — the kind of thing that might draw even more attention to himself than his appearance had probably already attracted. Dallas had no wish to speak to the big man standing beside him; all he wanted to do was close the door to his hyperbaric chamber and collapse into bed, but it seemed important that he should avoid the possibility of giving any offense. ‘What I mean to say is, I’m just tired. It’s been a long day.’
‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had some pure oxygen,’ affirmed Gates.
‘Yes, probably you’re right.’
‘So what pressure did they put you on?’
‘Pressure?’ Dallas shook his head, as he had paid no attention to the explanation given by the hyperbaric attendant in the induction area — it wasn’t as if he needed hyperbaric. ‘Quite low,’ he said, vaguely.
‘As low as six atmospheres?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Are you sure? That seems quite high to me.’
Dallas frowned. The big man seemed to be trying to trip him up for no reason that Dallas could fathom. It was with a sense of deliverance that he saw the elevator doors opening in front of him.
‘Well, this is my floor,’ said Dallas, and he stepped out of the car.
‘Mine too,’ lied Gates; the chamber he shared with Lenina was actually one floor below, on the eleventh.
‘Nice talking to you,’ said Dallas, and headed along the corridor in what he hoped was the direction of his chamber, anxious to be away from his new companion and to avoid any more awkward questions.
‘You know, if you haven’t had hyperbaric before, you should really check on your chamber pressure,’ said Gates, following Dallas. ‘It can be dangerous if you’re not absolutely certain of what you’re doing. Once in a while they have to scrape some poor bastard off the walls when the wrong button gets pushed, or the wrong door gets opened.’
‘Thanks for the advice. I’ll call the hyperbaric attendant as soon as I’m alone in my room.’ He said this last part with greater emphasis, just to make sure the guy got the message.
‘No need for that,’ persisted Gates. ‘I’m pretty much an expert in these things myself. Matter of fact, you’re better off with me doing it. Some of these attendants don’t pay any attention to your blood pressure and your general symptoms. If you have any. How about it? You in here for any lassitude or breathlessness, or just to put your mind at rest?’
‘Please,’ said Dallas. ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’
‘It’s no trouble. Me, I’m not ashamed to say that the therapeutic effects are purely psychological. I’ve had the virus for as long as I can remember and I’ve never even been anemic.’
‘Well good for you,’ said Dallas, who was quickly becoming exasperated with his unwelcome benefactor. ‘Look, really, I can manage on my own.’
Gates shook his head. ‘I can see how you might think that. Someone with your obvious background and privileges. But you’d be wrong. Someone like you is going to need a buddy to help you find your feet in the diseased world. How’d you get it anyway?’
Dallas hesitated outside the steel door of his chamber. He was reluctant to explain himself to this total stranger, but reticence and caution were already giving way to exhaustion. And the man seemed friendly enough, if somewhat obtuse. So where was the harm? A few words from one putative sufferer to another — surely that was what life was like in these places. He would let the guy show him the pressures and then, when he had gone, return them to normal.
‘Unfortunately I had sex with someone who wasn’t aware that she had P2.’
‘Bad luck,’ said Gates.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘But what’s to stop you getting yourself cured? I mean, that’s what autologous blood donation’s all about, isn’t it? I don’t understand. Why don’t you just order up a change of blood from your bank?’
Dallas smiled, grateful to move on to slightly more familiar ground. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ he explained. ‘Not anymore. You see, it can take several days to arrange a bank transfer. Longer if, as in my own case, you’ve already used your deposits as the basis for some extensive financial dealing. Blood futures, mortgages, credit loans, that kind of thing. Some of these dealings have to be secured with the blood one holds on deposit. That means I have to find a way of paying off all my loans before the blood bank will release what I have on deposit for my own phlebotomy. For instance, I’ll probably have to sell my apartment, and that could take a little time. Perhaps several months. So, while all that is going on, I thought I’d check in here. I mean I know I’m not about to enter hemolytic crisis so soon after contracting the virus, but it’s peace of mind, as you said yourself.’
All of this was reasonable enough: The newspapers were always reporting cases involving interruptions in the autologous blood supply caused by strikes, or individual problems resulting from convoluted financial situations much as Dallas had described. Reasonable or not, at the same time he tried to look vaguely embarrassed at his own comparative good fortune, acutely aware that ordering up a supply of whole blood from a bank was not something available to any of the other guests at the Clostridium Hotel. And when the big man met his eye, Dallas shrugged and looked away. He was certain he had given a convincing performance. So he was surprised, alarmed even, at the reaction it produced.
‘Bullshit,’ said Gates.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Dallas shook his head and turned toward the door. ‘I don’t need this.’
‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, mister, but it’s as clear as the whites of your eyes that you’re not P2. For one thing, you’ve got no intention of pressurizing this chamber. And for another, a man who could afford a coat like that could also afford to stay in a crossover hospital. You wouldn’t be the first healthy guy to think he could safely hide out in a place like this for a while, with the bad bloods. Mostly they end up getting themselves vamped.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this crap.’ Dallas reached for the door handle and found his arm held in the big man’s grappling iron of a hand. For a moment he considered producing the gun in his coat pocket and then rejected the idea. The last thing he wanted was another shooting, more trouble. ‘Whoever you are, please just leave me alone.’
‘Name’s Gates. Rameses Gates. And I’ll leave you alone just as soon as you’ve heard my proposition.’
‘I’m not interested in any proposition.’
‘Well you ought to be,’ said Gates, still holding Dallas by the arm. ‘You’re lucky you’ve made it this far without some bastard cutting your throat and stealing your red stuff, mister. The darkness probably saved your ass. But I wouldn’t try moving around in daylight. I’d kill you myself if you weren’t so full of shit. Look, I don’t know what you’ve done and I don’t much care. Been in trouble with the law myself on more than one occasion. Matter of fact I’ve just finished doing a stretch on the Moon.’
‘You were on the Moon?’ Suddenly Dallas found himself a little more interested in this character.
‘I did hard time on Artemis Seven. That’s a helium-extraction facility in the Carpathian Mountains. Guy like me could be very useful to you. Look after your ass, stop you getting vamped, like I said.’
‘The Moon, huh? That’s very interesting.’ Dallas thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’
III
The steel door hissed shut behind them like a sharp intake of breath. For many of the people in the Clostridium, this small suite of rooms must have seemed like a place of refuge from the ravages of the virus, but for Dallas, it felt more like a tomb.
He sat down heavily on the bed. It was just as well that he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.
Gates began pointing out the chamber’s key features. ‘That’s your compression control,’ he explained. ‘And that hole’s where the oxygen is pumped in. Usually it’s oilless medical-grade stuff. Won’t do you any harm if you decide to breathe it. But it does give you a taste in your mouth if you’re here for very long. The rest of it is just monitoring equipment, ventilator, and blood-pressure and red-cell counter. Man as healthy as you won’t need any of it.’
Dallas was regarding Rameses Gates with the objective detachment of one person sizing up another, asking himself if Gates might be the kind of man to help him carry out what was still only a nascent plan. Alone in the street, Dallas, overcome by a need for revenge, had realized that the best way of getting back at the company would be to rob the biggest blood bank of them all, the First National Blood Bank — a blood bank so big it commanded a location that was the last word in security: the Moon. Dallas didn’t believe in fate, but sometimes there was no getting away from the persuasive aspect of coincidence. He wondered if science would ever discover that this kind of striking concurrence of events, seemingly so lacking in any causal connection, was an actual electroneurological phenomenon — in the same way that telepathy and telekinesis were now beginning to be understood as something that could be developed with the right combination of drugs. Perhaps meeting Gates was just such a phenomenon. Who better than a convict with hard time on the Moon to help him recruit the team of people he’d need to pull off something like this?
‘What were you sentenced for?’ Dallas asked, abruptly cutting across what Gates was saying.
‘Robbery. Bunch of us took down a palladium[67] shipment.’
‘Any special skills?’
‘I’m a pilot. I used to fly an astroliner to the Moon. Sometimes cargo, but mostly just folks visiting love hotels. You ever been to one of those places?’
Dallas nodded. ‘Yes, but it’s been a little while since my last visit.’ Fie remembered that Aria had wanted to go for the Moon-landing centennial, but somehow they’d never gotten around to making the arrangements.
‘They let people with the virus fly those things?’
‘I faked my medical.’ Noting Dallas’s surprise, Gates added, ‘That kind of thing’s not exactly unheard of, y’know.’
‘No, I guess not,’ admitted Dallas. ‘Just suppose I could use someone like you. What do you want from me?’
‘Earn a few credits? Like I say, I’m just down from the Moon. I need to find some kind of a job. My credit here’s not going to last much longer.’
Dallas nodded, trying to look sympathetic. Maybe not just his credit, he reflected. There was no way for Gates to be sure how long he would live before the virus killed him. He could go at any time. And what better incentive could a man have to help him rob the First National Blood Bank than the urgent need for a complete change of blood? It suddenly occurred to Dallas that all the men and women he recruited for this job had to be P% That way he wouldn’t just be offering them a chance to make a lot of money, he would also be offering them a new lease on life. That was something guaranteed to get the best out of anyone. With his unique knowledge and the physical dilemma of people like Rameses Gates, how could they not succeed?
‘A few credits, huh?’ Dallas laughed. ‘I think we can do better than that. I think we can do a lot better.’
IV
Even as Rameses Gates heard Dallas describe the rough outlines of his plan, he felt his skin start to prickle. On the face of it, Dallas’s plan was crazy — the security of blood banks everywhere was a given, and the penalty for blood felony, brutal — but, in spite of everything that reason and experience told him, Gates’s first instinct was to put himself under Dallas’s command.
‘I think you’re crazy,’ he said. ‘But what the hell, I’ve always been a risk taker. I get that from my father. Not that I really knew him. My mother chose him in a sperm bank on the strength of his genomic imprint. But I did get to read his biochemical file that they gave to her. My mother always wanted me to achieve something. That’s why she chose a donor, instead of meeting some guy she was attracted to and trusting to luck. She wanted to make sure I had the best start in life: a good imprint. My high IQ, I get from her. She was a clever woman. Physically I’m like him. A real mesomorph, y’know? And emotionally too, since I’m somatotonic with it. Turns out he was a bit of a gambler too. Professionally, I mean. A few years ago, before I got sent to Artemis Seven, I did a DNA trace on him. Cost me quite a bit, only I was curious to see if he was still alive. That’s the best way of finding out your own life expectancy with the virus. See what your genes are capable of. Anyway, he was a probability guy. What people used to call an insurance broker before the institutional market got wiped out. He used to bet against all sorts of things happening. Pretty good at it too.’ Gates shrugged. ‘So like I say I’m a risk taker, same as him. It’s a roundabout way of saying I’m willing to bet that you could maybe pull this thing off, Mister Dallas. I’m your man.’
‘Dallas. Just Dallas. Is he still alive? Your father?’
Gates shook his head. ‘Nah. He was forty-four when he died. Good age for someone with bad blood. He was one of the longer lived ones.’
‘And you? How old are you?’ asked Dallas.
‘Thirty-nine. I figure I’ve got maybe another four or five years. But who knows? That’s the thing about P2. The way it stays dormant in your bone marrow for all that time, it’s like the creature in the story about Theseus. The one in the labyrinth?’
‘The Minotaur.’
‘You feel like one of those young men and women that were sent as a tribute from Athens to King Minos as a peace offering. It’s like you’re standing outside the labyrinth, about to be shut in there, with the monster, and you know it’s waiting for you somewhere in the dark, waiting to get you, but you don’t know where and you don’t know when.’
Dallas nodded sympathetically. He had never before had a conversation with someone who had the virus — not to his knowledge, anyway. And it interested him that Gates should have chosen the labyrinth and the Minotaur as a metaphor for P2 and its characteristic hidden, dormant aspect — the so-called Sleeping Dog, or latent, phase of the disease.[68]
‘And now here you are with your golden thread,’ said Gates.
‘Somehow I can’t really see myself as Ariadne,’ said Dallas. ‘But there will be a labyrinth. And there is a kind of creature. A robot, anyway.’ He explained a little of the Byzantine way in which most blood banks were designed and built and how architects of such high-security environments, like himself, were always vying with one another to create something of utmost complexity and esotericism.
‘I think it’s fair to say that despite our being armed with my unique foreknowledge into the way our target blood bank operates, this will be as hazardous an undertaking as anything to be found in classical mythology.’
Gates shrugged. ‘How else do you get to be a hero?’ he said. ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
V
How else indeed? What is a hero? It’s only recently that the elements of nobility and self-sacrifice have come to seem important in defining what makes someone a hero. But it was not always thus. In classical times the hero cult included many master thieves. Did not Jason steal the golden fleece? Was it not Heracles who stole the girdle of Queen Hippolyta? And Theseus, who has already been mentioned here — was it not he who stole the golden ring of King Minos, not to mention the actual person of Helen, the daughter of Zeus and, later, the captive of Troy? If myth is a language, then theft is one of its most important nouns. However, the really important factor in the semiotics of heroism is the notion of ordinary men and women, noteworthy because of their actions, becoming superhuman — ultimately, even gods.[69] ‘Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the present author will give you something much more inhuman than mere tragedy. I will show you a story of men and women rising above their very human condition, in the truly heroic sense. I will show you a completion.
I
The Clostridium was in a damp and foggy part of the city that had once been a water reservoir, in the days before individual households were able to treat their own sewage at a molecular level. The area was full of narrow alleys lined with clinics offering all kinds of medical treatment — everything from ayurvedic and letting, to reiki and therapeutic humor.[59] The hotel itself was a handsome late-twentieth-century building of twelve stories rising out of a lean-to glass skirt at ground level that housed the hotel’s recreation rooms and in which normal air circulated at sea-level pressure. Above this area, a braced steel structure formed a cradle for twelve prefabricated floors each having twelve self-contained hyperbaric chambers, complete with bathroom and den, designed for pressures of six to ten atmospheres. Evidence for the efficacy of hyperbaric oxygenation in the treatment of P2 is largely anecdotal; however, it does seem to be effective in delaying the onset of an aplastic crisis — the so-called Three Moon effect[60] in which the virus enters its final phase, preventing the transfer of oxygen by the red cells. The major disadvantage of hyperbaric treatment is that oxygen toxicity can cause retroenteldysplasia, or blindness.
Unlike most of its guests, who were there for the psychosomatic benefits of using oxygen, Rameses Gates and Lenina, now asleep in a double chamber, were trying to get their systems used to breathing normal air at sea-level pressure. After the pressurized oxygen environment of the Moon, breathing on Earth sometimes came as a shock to anyone with P2. Just the thing to precipitate a Three Moon crisis. So by day they hung around the recreation and reception areas, breathing a normal atmosphere, and by night they remained in the hyperbaric conditions of their chamber, taking the load off their red cells and their hemoglobin, not to mention their minds, while all the time getting to know each other in more intimate detail. Since their transfer from Artemis Seven aboard the Superconductor, they had been almost inseparable; prolonged bouts of lovemaking were reputed to be an excellent way of obtaining the greatest benefit from the hyperbaric environment, although like most men with the virus, Gates only ever ejaculated into his own bladder for fear that losing semen might reduce the levels of oxygen in his body.[61] (He was also taking doses of extra fibrolysin orally in order to minimize the number of valuable blood cells that might appear in his ejaculate.[62]) After a couple of weeks at the Clostridium, Gates and Lenina felt more or less acclimatized to life on Earth and were starting to contemplate their departure. They were among the lucky ones. For a few of the guests the need for hyperbaric treatment was rather more urgent: Anyone who was unfortunate enough to develop the characteristic red rubelliform rash that indicated the Three Moon phase of the virus, and who could afford it, checked into a place like the Clostridium immediately After that it was merely a question of staying on for as long as their credit lasted. Even fewer than these unfortunates were the old-fashioned clinical cases — people suffering from radiation necrosis (usually Kazakhstanis), gas gangrene, or carbon-monoxide poisoning, or people who were amputees. Rameses Gates knew a little about clinical hyperbaric medicine, so among the other guests in the recreation area one night, he was not surprised to see Cavor, the amputee he had seen on the Super-conductor, although, at first glance, his prosthetic was good enough to have convinced the casual acquaintance that here was a man with two arms.
‘How are you doing?’ said Gates.
Cavor regarded the big man with suspicion. Since his arrival back from the Moon, having his new arm fitted, and trying to adjust to life on Earth outside of the Zone, he regarded everyone he met as a potential threat. Even inside the comparative safety of the Clostridium, he had learned to keep to himself. Some of the other guests were crazy.
‘Do I know you?’
‘We came back from the Moon together.’
‘Then you’ll excuse me for not remembering. I had one or two other things on my mind. Like whether I was going to live or not.’
‘How’s the new arm?’
Cavor looked at him, trying to recall the face.
‘Were you there when I had my accident?’
‘We met on the Superconductor.’
‘Oh.’ Cavor lifted the prosthetic for Gates’s inspection. ‘What do you think of it?’
‘Not bad at all,’ said Gates.
‘You think so? I used to be a piano player.’ Cavor sighed. ‘Not any more. Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand isn’t much of a repertoire.’ He tried to make a fist out of the tan-colored hand. ‘The fingers are a bit stiff. That’s the main reason I’m here. They tell me hyperbaric is very good at helping restore the blood supply to the muscles and nerve endings nearest to the site of amputation.’
‘It is. What exactly happened anyway?’
‘I had an accident with a rock crusher.’
‘And before that?’ In Gates’s eyes, Cavor looked too small and sensitive to have committed the kind of crime that merited being sent to a lunar penal colony.
‘You mean, how did I end up on Artemis Seven?’ Cavor shrugged. ‘I killed my wife. That was pretty much an accident, too. I found out she was seeing some other guy, and so I hit her. A little too hard, as it happened.’
Cavor squeezed his temples painfully.
‘Headache, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Could be the LH canisters[63] in your chamber want changing. You have to watch out for that kind of thing, because no one else will. This place isn’t exactly ten stars.’ Noticing the knit of Cavor’s eyebrows, Gates added, ‘They’re there to scrub the exhaled carbon dioxide out of the air. More than likely it’ll be your own CO2 that’s giving you the headache. Call Maintenance and get some new ones. Otherwise you’re liable to fall asleep and not wake up again.’
‘Thanks for the tip. You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘What, air? Sure. I used to be a pilot. Astroliner. Before I was promoted to being a bloody convict.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Got caught.’
‘Is that all?’
‘You want more, then you’d better read Victor Hugo. I’m not much of a storyteller.’
Cavor nodded, thinking the big man was indeed the stuff of some epic story: tall, strong, and roughly handsome, he was over life-size in almost every way, with an exaggerated tautness about him, like some weather-beaten bronze figure outside a museum. Even his name, Rameses Gates, put Cavor in mind of something monolithic. But he seemed quite friendly, and Cavor judged it could only be good for a small one-armed guy like himself to have a big two-armed guy like Gates as a friend. Cavor remained unaware of how much Gates had already done for him: of how Gates had prevented him from suffocating inside the G-pod aboard the Superconductor. Gates didn’t feel inclined to explain the exact circumstances of their first acquaintance: He was not the kind of man who enjoyed having people feel obliged to him. Gratitude, like responsibility, can sometimes weigh heavily.
‘How long are you planning to stay here?’ asked Cavor.
‘Don’t know,’ said Gates. ‘Depends...’
‘On what?’
‘Hmm?’ Gates was distracted by the arrival in the hotel’s induction area of a tall, pale-looking man wearing an expensive fur coat. ‘I wonder who he is?’ he murmured.
‘Who?’
‘The guy who just checked in.’
Cavor glanced at his watch and was surprised to see the time. ‘It is kind of late to be arriving.’
‘Actually, that’s not so unusual,’ remarked Gates. ‘If people wake up in the middle of the night and they find they’ve developed the rash and are on the verge of an aplastic crisis, they tend not to wait until morning before checking into a place like this.’
‘I get your point,’ said Cavor.
‘This is a kind of sanctuary,’ said Gates. ‘A place like this gives hope to the soul. The victims of the virus come here just the way people flocked to a church to be baptized during the plague that afflicted ancient Carthage during the second century A.D.’
The history of plagues and pestilence was the only history Gates knew. Like most people who had the virus, it was the only history he had ever been taught. And since disease has been one of the fundamental parameters — if not the fundamental parameter — of human history, who is to say that this was not as good a way as any to have formed a substantive conception of the life of societies of men, of their ideas, and the changes they have gone through? Rameses Gates had read Thucydides, Hippocrates, Plutarch, Democritus, Procopius, Boccaccio, Fracastorius, Cotton Mather, Pepys, Defoe, Gibbon, Malthus, Fiennes, Garrett, and Preston. He could have described the ecology of the anopheles mosquito, or told you how fear of Catholicism prevented Oliver Cromwell from finding relief from his malaria;[64] he had knowledge of the conquest of Mexico not by Cortes, but by the smallpox the Spaniards brought with them, just as he knew that the use of the word ‘leprosy’ in English versions of the Old Testament is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew word tsaar’at.[65] It was true that he looked like an ox of a man, but in his own way, he was an educated one.
‘A kind of sanctuary, yes,’ agreed Cavor. ‘Except that oxygen is more immediately efficacious than prayer. That’s been my experience, anyway.’
The man checking in at the induction desk glanced around nervously, and seeing Gates and Cavor, looked quickly away. His expression, his whole demeanor gave him the kind of hunted appearance an ex-convict like Gates was well qualified to recognize.
‘He looks too healthy and too rich to be in a place like this,’ said Gates. ‘That’s not the kind of coat you wear if you’ve got bad blood. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was RES Class One.’
‘So what’s he doing here?’ asked Cavor.
‘That’s a good question. Whatever the reason, he must have arrived in a hurry. Man’s not carrying any luggage.’
‘Maybe he just found out he’s got the virus,’ suggested Cavor. ‘That’s the kind of news that could throw anyone into a panic.’ Cavor was speaking from experience. He was still trying to come to terms with the fact of his own illness — the knowledge that the transfusion of blood substitute he had received on the Moon, which had saved his life, had also infected him with the virus. There were times when he could almost feel the contagion lurking inside his own bone marrow. It had replaced the feeling of guilt about killing Mina that had been with him for a long time.
‘Could be,’ allowed Gates. ‘In which case he might still have some money.’
‘Are you thinking of robbing him?’
‘Whatever gave you that idea? Kind of guy d’you take me for? No, I was thinking of offering the man my services.’
‘What sort of services?’
Gates pursed his lips and then shrugged. ‘The city can be a frightening place if you’re not used to it. If you’ve spent nearly all your life inside the Zone, enjoying the benefits of a healthy world.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Cavor said bitterly. He remembered only too well the kind of privileged life he had enjoyed before killing Mina. The way he had taken good health for granted. And seeing the new arrival in this light, Cavor almost pitied him.
‘Man like that might need a friend. Someone who knows his way around this poxy world of ours.’
‘Sort of a cohors praetoria, you mean,’ said Cavor. ‘A bodyguard, I mean.’
Gates nodded. ‘I know what it means.’
‘Don’t you think you’re a bit large for a job like that,’ grinned Cavor. ‘A bodyguard should be smaller, less noticeable. If possible he should even be a man with one arm, just to provide an element of surprise.’
‘I think you should check your hemoglobin levels,’ said Gates. ‘Sounds to me like you’re not getting enough oxygen.’
‘Does it?’ Cavor said sickly. It was only now that he was infected with the virus that he was rediscovering a new respect for human biochemistry. That something as small as a blood corpuscle[66] could mean so much seemed nothing short of phenomenal. Truly blood moved in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
‘Take it easy,’ laughed Gates, noticing Cavor’s apparent alarm. ‘I was only joking.’
‘Were you?’ He could see little opportunity for humor in his current situation. He had only to repeat the name of the virus to feel sick.
‘See you around,’ said Gates, as he turned to follow the man in the fur coat to the elevator.
Cavor raised his prosthetic arm — the doctors had told him to try and use it in preference to his real arm — and waved it stiffly in front of him.
‘I hope so,’ he said, with the dismal air of a man who thinks it unlikely that he will survive the night.
II
Dallas stepped wearily into the elevator and told the computer to take him up to the top floor. Moving farther back into the car to accommodate the big man who had followed him inside, he leaned against the glass wall and closed his eyes. The place looked as clinical as it smelled — like the workings of an aluminum engine — but at least it was clean and warm and, he hoped, safe. For a while, anyway.
‘Good evening,’ said Gates.
‘Not so far,’ replied Dallas, mentally checking off the disasters his evening had included: his home abandoned, his employment terminated, his wife and child murdered, his life near forfeit. The only consolation was that things could hardly get any worse. If he hadn’t felt so tired, he would have broken down and wept.
The doors hissed shut and the elevator started its silent ascent.
‘You okay?’ asked Gates.
‘Comparatively speaking, yes.’ Then Dallas shook his head. That was a stupid thing to have said to a man who had the virus — the kind of thing that might draw even more attention to himself than his appearance had probably already attracted. Dallas had no wish to speak to the big man standing beside him; all he wanted to do was close the door to his hyperbaric chamber and collapse into bed, but it seemed important that he should avoid the possibility of giving any offense. ‘What I mean to say is, I’m just tired. It’s been a long day.’
‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had some pure oxygen,’ affirmed Gates.
‘Yes, probably you’re right.’
‘So what pressure did they put you on?’
‘Pressure?’ Dallas shook his head, as he had paid no attention to the explanation given by the hyperbaric attendant in the induction area — it wasn’t as if he needed hyperbaric. ‘Quite low,’ he said, vaguely.
‘As low as six atmospheres?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Are you sure? That seems quite high to me.’
Dallas frowned. The big man seemed to be trying to trip him up for no reason that Dallas could fathom. It was with a sense of deliverance that he saw the elevator doors opening in front of him.
‘Well, this is my floor,’ said Dallas, and he stepped out of the car.
‘Mine too,’ lied Gates; the chamber he shared with Lenina was actually one floor below, on the eleventh.
‘Nice talking to you,’ said Dallas, and headed along the corridor in what he hoped was the direction of his chamber, anxious to be away from his new companion and to avoid any more awkward questions.
‘You know, if you haven’t had hyperbaric before, you should really check on your chamber pressure,’ said Gates, following Dallas. ‘It can be dangerous if you’re not absolutely certain of what you’re doing. Once in a while they have to scrape some poor bastard off the walls when the wrong button gets pushed, or the wrong door gets opened.’
‘Thanks for the advice. I’ll call the hyperbaric attendant as soon as I’m alone in my room.’ He said this last part with greater emphasis, just to make sure the guy got the message.
‘No need for that,’ persisted Gates. ‘I’m pretty much an expert in these things myself. Matter of fact, you’re better off with me doing it. Some of these attendants don’t pay any attention to your blood pressure and your general symptoms. If you have any. How about it? You in here for any lassitude or breathlessness, or just to put your mind at rest?’
‘Please,’ said Dallas. ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’
‘It’s no trouble. Me, I’m not ashamed to say that the therapeutic effects are purely psychological. I’ve had the virus for as long as I can remember and I’ve never even been anemic.’
‘Well good for you,’ said Dallas, who was quickly becoming exasperated with his unwelcome benefactor. ‘Look, really, I can manage on my own.’
Gates shook his head. ‘I can see how you might think that. Someone with your obvious background and privileges. But you’d be wrong. Someone like you is going to need a buddy to help you find your feet in the diseased world. How’d you get it anyway?’
Dallas hesitated outside the steel door of his chamber. He was reluctant to explain himself to this total stranger, but reticence and caution were already giving way to exhaustion. And the man seemed friendly enough, if somewhat obtuse. So where was the harm? A few words from one putative sufferer to another — surely that was what life was like in these places. He would let the guy show him the pressures and then, when he had gone, return them to normal.
‘Unfortunately I had sex with someone who wasn’t aware that she had P2.’
‘Bad luck,’ said Gates.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘But what’s to stop you getting yourself cured? I mean, that’s what autologous blood donation’s all about, isn’t it? I don’t understand. Why don’t you just order up a change of blood from your bank?’
Dallas smiled, grateful to move on to slightly more familiar ground. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ he explained. ‘Not anymore. You see, it can take several days to arrange a bank transfer. Longer if, as in my own case, you’ve already used your deposits as the basis for some extensive financial dealing. Blood futures, mortgages, credit loans, that kind of thing. Some of these dealings have to be secured with the blood one holds on deposit. That means I have to find a way of paying off all my loans before the blood bank will release what I have on deposit for my own phlebotomy. For instance, I’ll probably have to sell my apartment, and that could take a little time. Perhaps several months. So, while all that is going on, I thought I’d check in here. I mean I know I’m not about to enter hemolytic crisis so soon after contracting the virus, but it’s peace of mind, as you said yourself.’
All of this was reasonable enough: The newspapers were always reporting cases involving interruptions in the autologous blood supply caused by strikes, or individual problems resulting from convoluted financial situations much as Dallas had described. Reasonable or not, at the same time he tried to look vaguely embarrassed at his own comparative good fortune, acutely aware that ordering up a supply of whole blood from a bank was not something available to any of the other guests at the Clostridium Hotel. And when the big man met his eye, Dallas shrugged and looked away. He was certain he had given a convincing performance. So he was surprised, alarmed even, at the reaction it produced.
‘Bullshit,’ said Gates.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Dallas shook his head and turned toward the door. ‘I don’t need this.’
‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, mister, but it’s as clear as the whites of your eyes that you’re not P2. For one thing, you’ve got no intention of pressurizing this chamber. And for another, a man who could afford a coat like that could also afford to stay in a crossover hospital. You wouldn’t be the first healthy guy to think he could safely hide out in a place like this for a while, with the bad bloods. Mostly they end up getting themselves vamped.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this crap.’ Dallas reached for the door handle and found his arm held in the big man’s grappling iron of a hand. For a moment he considered producing the gun in his coat pocket and then rejected the idea. The last thing he wanted was another shooting, more trouble. ‘Whoever you are, please just leave me alone.’
‘Name’s Gates. Rameses Gates. And I’ll leave you alone just as soon as you’ve heard my proposition.’
‘I’m not interested in any proposition.’
‘Well you ought to be,’ said Gates, still holding Dallas by the arm. ‘You’re lucky you’ve made it this far without some bastard cutting your throat and stealing your red stuff, mister. The darkness probably saved your ass. But I wouldn’t try moving around in daylight. I’d kill you myself if you weren’t so full of shit. Look, I don’t know what you’ve done and I don’t much care. Been in trouble with the law myself on more than one occasion. Matter of fact I’ve just finished doing a stretch on the Moon.’
‘You were on the Moon?’ Suddenly Dallas found himself a little more interested in this character.
‘I did hard time on Artemis Seven. That’s a helium-extraction facility in the Carpathian Mountains. Guy like me could be very useful to you. Look after your ass, stop you getting vamped, like I said.’
‘The Moon, huh? That’s very interesting.’ Dallas thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’
III
The steel door hissed shut behind them like a sharp intake of breath. For many of the people in the Clostridium, this small suite of rooms must have seemed like a place of refuge from the ravages of the virus, but for Dallas, it felt more like a tomb.
He sat down heavily on the bed. It was just as well that he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.
Gates began pointing out the chamber’s key features. ‘That’s your compression control,’ he explained. ‘And that hole’s where the oxygen is pumped in. Usually it’s oilless medical-grade stuff. Won’t do you any harm if you decide to breathe it. But it does give you a taste in your mouth if you’re here for very long. The rest of it is just monitoring equipment, ventilator, and blood-pressure and red-cell counter. Man as healthy as you won’t need any of it.’
Dallas was regarding Rameses Gates with the objective detachment of one person sizing up another, asking himself if Gates might be the kind of man to help him carry out what was still only a nascent plan. Alone in the street, Dallas, overcome by a need for revenge, had realized that the best way of getting back at the company would be to rob the biggest blood bank of them all, the First National Blood Bank — a blood bank so big it commanded a location that was the last word in security: the Moon. Dallas didn’t believe in fate, but sometimes there was no getting away from the persuasive aspect of coincidence. He wondered if science would ever discover that this kind of striking concurrence of events, seemingly so lacking in any causal connection, was an actual electroneurological phenomenon — in the same way that telepathy and telekinesis were now beginning to be understood as something that could be developed with the right combination of drugs. Perhaps meeting Gates was just such a phenomenon. Who better than a convict with hard time on the Moon to help him recruit the team of people he’d need to pull off something like this?
‘What were you sentenced for?’ Dallas asked, abruptly cutting across what Gates was saying.
‘Robbery. Bunch of us took down a palladium[67] shipment.’
‘Any special skills?’
‘I’m a pilot. I used to fly an astroliner to the Moon. Sometimes cargo, but mostly just folks visiting love hotels. You ever been to one of those places?’
Dallas nodded. ‘Yes, but it’s been a little while since my last visit.’ Fie remembered that Aria had wanted to go for the Moon-landing centennial, but somehow they’d never gotten around to making the arrangements.
‘They let people with the virus fly those things?’
‘I faked my medical.’ Noting Dallas’s surprise, Gates added, ‘That kind of thing’s not exactly unheard of, y’know.’
‘No, I guess not,’ admitted Dallas. ‘Just suppose I could use someone like you. What do you want from me?’
‘Earn a few credits? Like I say, I’m just down from the Moon. I need to find some kind of a job. My credit here’s not going to last much longer.’
Dallas nodded, trying to look sympathetic. Maybe not just his credit, he reflected. There was no way for Gates to be sure how long he would live before the virus killed him. He could go at any time. And what better incentive could a man have to help him rob the First National Blood Bank than the urgent need for a complete change of blood? It suddenly occurred to Dallas that all the men and women he recruited for this job had to be P% That way he wouldn’t just be offering them a chance to make a lot of money, he would also be offering them a new lease on life. That was something guaranteed to get the best out of anyone. With his unique knowledge and the physical dilemma of people like Rameses Gates, how could they not succeed?
‘A few credits, huh?’ Dallas laughed. ‘I think we can do better than that. I think we can do a lot better.’
IV
Even as Rameses Gates heard Dallas describe the rough outlines of his plan, he felt his skin start to prickle. On the face of it, Dallas’s plan was crazy — the security of blood banks everywhere was a given, and the penalty for blood felony, brutal — but, in spite of everything that reason and experience told him, Gates’s first instinct was to put himself under Dallas’s command.
‘I think you’re crazy,’ he said. ‘But what the hell, I’ve always been a risk taker. I get that from my father. Not that I really knew him. My mother chose him in a sperm bank on the strength of his genomic imprint. But I did get to read his biochemical file that they gave to her. My mother always wanted me to achieve something. That’s why she chose a donor, instead of meeting some guy she was attracted to and trusting to luck. She wanted to make sure I had the best start in life: a good imprint. My high IQ, I get from her. She was a clever woman. Physically I’m like him. A real mesomorph, y’know? And emotionally too, since I’m somatotonic with it. Turns out he was a bit of a gambler too. Professionally, I mean. A few years ago, before I got sent to Artemis Seven, I did a DNA trace on him. Cost me quite a bit, only I was curious to see if he was still alive. That’s the best way of finding out your own life expectancy with the virus. See what your genes are capable of. Anyway, he was a probability guy. What people used to call an insurance broker before the institutional market got wiped out. He used to bet against all sorts of things happening. Pretty good at it too.’ Gates shrugged. ‘So like I say I’m a risk taker, same as him. It’s a roundabout way of saying I’m willing to bet that you could maybe pull this thing off, Mister Dallas. I’m your man.’
‘Dallas. Just Dallas. Is he still alive? Your father?’
Gates shook his head. ‘Nah. He was forty-four when he died. Good age for someone with bad blood. He was one of the longer lived ones.’
‘And you? How old are you?’ asked Dallas.
‘Thirty-nine. I figure I’ve got maybe another four or five years. But who knows? That’s the thing about P2. The way it stays dormant in your bone marrow for all that time, it’s like the creature in the story about Theseus. The one in the labyrinth?’
‘The Minotaur.’
‘You feel like one of those young men and women that were sent as a tribute from Athens to King Minos as a peace offering. It’s like you’re standing outside the labyrinth, about to be shut in there, with the monster, and you know it’s waiting for you somewhere in the dark, waiting to get you, but you don’t know where and you don’t know when.’
Dallas nodded sympathetically. He had never before had a conversation with someone who had the virus — not to his knowledge, anyway. And it interested him that Gates should have chosen the labyrinth and the Minotaur as a metaphor for P2 and its characteristic hidden, dormant aspect — the so-called Sleeping Dog, or latent, phase of the disease.[68]
‘And now here you are with your golden thread,’ said Gates.
‘Somehow I can’t really see myself as Ariadne,’ said Dallas. ‘But there will be a labyrinth. And there is a kind of creature. A robot, anyway.’ He explained a little of the Byzantine way in which most blood banks were designed and built and how architects of such high-security environments, like himself, were always vying with one another to create something of utmost complexity and esotericism.
‘I think it’s fair to say that despite our being armed with my unique foreknowledge into the way our target blood bank operates, this will be as hazardous an undertaking as anything to be found in classical mythology.’
Gates shrugged. ‘How else do you get to be a hero?’ he said. ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
V
How else indeed? What is a hero? It’s only recently that the elements of nobility and self-sacrifice have come to seem important in defining what makes someone a hero. But it was not always thus. In classical times the hero cult included many master thieves. Did not Jason steal the golden fleece? Was it not Heracles who stole the girdle of Queen Hippolyta? And Theseus, who has already been mentioned here — was it not he who stole the golden ring of King Minos, not to mention the actual person of Helen, the daughter of Zeus and, later, the captive of Troy? If myth is a language, then theft is one of its most important nouns. However, the really important factor in the semiotics of heroism is the notion of ordinary men and women, noteworthy because of their actions, becoming superhuman — ultimately, even gods.[69] ‘Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the present author will give you something much more inhuman than mere tragedy. I will show you a story of men and women rising above their very human condition, in the truly heroic sense. I will show you a completion.
8
I
Be sanguine. That’s what the director had told her, and Ronica took this to mean that she should aspire to the mental attributes characteristic of the sanguine complexion, in the medieval physiological sense of that word, in which blood predominates over the other three humors. In becoming courageous, hopeful, confident, even amorous — for blood is always lusty — she would overcome any obstacles in her path. To this end, she dosed herself with a couple of tabs of Connex[70] the minute she was alone in her office. Ronica figured it was best to be fully prepared for anything that her new mission might throw at her. This was her big chance to shine in the director’s line of sight, so she didn’t want to make a mess of it. And there was nothing quite like Connex for boosting your sense of self-confidence. It was much better than cocaine, and the effect much longer lasting. The drug was not without side effects: High doses of Connex could cause powerful hallucinations, while even small doses could assist in the creation of vivid sexual fantasies. Minutes after swallowing the drug, Ronica was the willing victim of a reverie as vivid and lickerish as the most sensational dream.
The ringing phone returned Ronica’s amplified thoughts to her office. Still able to taste the man in her fantasy, Ronica picked up a thin, flat disc and stared into its reflective surface. As soon as she touched the disc, the ringing sound — more like someone stroking the rim of a wineglass than a bell — stopped, and the reflection of her own lightly perspiring features was replaced with those of the director ordering her back to his office.
‘Right away, sir,’ she said as his face vanished from the phone. Holding onto the disc in her fingers, her reflection on the phone’s polished prismatic surface bisected by a laser-thin spectrum that made a livid scar across her face, Ronica checked her appearance, wiped her cheeks with a sheet of nanotissue,[71] took a deep breath, and stood up. There were times when she thought Connex should be remarked as some sort of aphrodisiac. She straightened her clothes, and went to find the director.
II
With its many faux fenêtre English landscape paintings (he owned all of the originals) and its antique furniture, the director’s office was like the drawing room of a beautiful country house. It didn’t matter that she had been there not half an hour earlier; Ronica found herself once again mesmerized by Simon King’s good taste, overawed by such a conspicuous display of wealth. She estimated the desk alone had probably cost more than her apartment.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he said impatiently. ‘Come in, come in. This is the girl I was telling you about.’
Ronica hardly minded the fact that by describing her as a girl, and not a woman, the director was in breach of employment and gender legislation, as she walked across the thick Persian rug toward an ornate sofa. He was the director after all, and as far as Ronica was concerned, he could have called her anything he damn well liked. It was a moment or two before her distracted senses registered that Rimmer was already sitting on the sofa scowling at her. As she turned to sit alongside him, the director raised a hand bearing an enormous cigar — smoking in the workplace, another breach of employment legislation — in the air.
‘No, don’t sit down,’ he said. ‘You’re not staying. Neither of you are.’ He glanced meaningfully at Rimmer, who pulled a face and rose reluctantly to his feet. ‘There’s no time to lose. Rimmer has located Dallas. I want you to go with him and, as we discussed earlier, see how he handles the situation. Observe and learn and give him any assistance you can. Understand?’
‘Yes, director,’ said Ronica, and she followed Rimmer out of the door.
Neither of them spoke until they had collected their coats and were standing in the elevator, heading up to the ground floor.
‘So you think you want to join Security, do you?’ Rimmer sniffed with obvious contempt.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘And what makes you believe that you’re cut out for it?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘I like tying people up,’ she said. ‘And beating them. Punishment’s always been my thing. So I figured I might as well get paid for it.’
‘A sense of humor, eh?’ remarked Rimmer. ‘You’ll need that.’
‘Anything else I’ll need?’ she asked as the car delivered them into the entrance lobby.
Rimmer strode forward, acknowledged the parking valet standing on the far side of the security screen, and, glancing back over his dandruffed shoulder, said, ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ With a show of mock courtesy he waited for Ronica to pass out of the front door ahead of him and then ushered her toward the electric car parked out front.
‘That’s your job, I guess,’ she said. ‘Finding things out.’
‘Depend on it,’ said Rimmer, opening both doors remotely.
‘You’re sort of an armed information-retrieval service,’ said Ronica and slid into the passenger seat. The inside of Rimmer’s car smelled strongly of nickel cadmium, as if there was something wrong with the battery. Rimmer sat down beside her and the doors shut automatically.
‘Perhaps I’ll find out just what it is that makes the director think so highly of you,’ he said.
‘That’s easy,’ she laughed. ‘I can tell you why. If you’re interested.’
Rimmer said nothing as he started the electric motor and stamped irritably on the power pedal. The car moved forward, silently picking up speed.
‘Are you interested?’ she asked, smiling, making him work for an answer. She could see he was biting his lip in an effort not to admit that he was.
For a few more seconds Rimmer attempted to retain control of their conversational game, trying to force her to react to his moves instead of the other way around.
‘Go on then,’ he snarled finally. ‘Don’t make me have to seek absolution from a priest before you tell.’
‘Absolution? For you?’ It was her turn to sniff with contempt. ‘There’s certainly no time for that. I’ve a good idea you’ve more wrongs than most to own up to, Mister Rimmer.’
‘The job is not without its amusements.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Think what you like.’
‘I shall. Thinking what I like has always afforded me the greatest of pleasure.’
For several minutes, they drove in silence. Rimmer hadn’t said where they were going, but it was somewhere north — somewhere that was clearly outside the CBH Zone[72]: You didn’t need documentation to get out, but you needed to be in possession of a CBH to get back in. The very idea of leaving the Zone gave her an uncomfortable feeling of vulnerability.
‘Well,’ said Rimmer, breaking the silence. ‘Are you going to tell me, or not?’
‘Sure,’ said Ronica. ‘It’s like this. I asked him if, in return for paying lip service to his holy rood, he might advance my career at a slightly more urgent pace.’ The drug was really taking effect now: Her whole head was humming, as if she’d had an electric shock. ‘Anyway, he said he would, and asked me if there were any particular areas in Terotechnology where I thought my talents might lie. And in between anthropophagous mouthfuls, I suggested Security. Like I say, I enjoy bondage and that kind of thing. Well, naturally he was just a little disappointed that I hadn’t suggested Design, because that’s his thing. However, he was able to keep a stiff upper lip just long enough to cede unto me his many-headed florescence.’
‘You mean you sucked his cock,’ said Rimmer.
‘Yes,’ she said, and they both started to laugh.
‘You know, you’re all right,’ said Rimmer, who was thinking that she must have been sent by the director to spy on him. And if for any reason things went badly wrong again, then he might have to arrange some sort of fatal accident for Ronica.
‘Thanks,’ she said. If things worked out as she expected, then the man still laughing with her had maybe less than an hour before she blew his brains out. ‘Where are we going?’
‘A hotel.’
‘But we’ve only just met. What kind of a girl do you take me for?’
‘The hyperbaric kind of hotel. Where sick people go to get themselves oxygenated, not laid.’
‘I know what they get. A little color in their cheeks. A chance to breathe easy at night. But it’s all just air today, gone tomorrow.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you ever give them much thought? The bad bloods?’
‘Can’t say I do,’ admitted Rimmer.
‘Oh, I think about them a lot. It makes me feel good to know that there are so many people worse off than me. Kind of the philosophical opposite of utilitarianism. Social schadenfreude, I suppose you could call it.’ Ronica stared out of the car’s bullet-proof windows at the moonlit people she had been talking about. Only a few minutes’ drive had taken them out of the Zone and into a less salubrious part of the city. There was little traffic on the road, but still plenty of people walking around: the living dead, as she thought of them.
‘Look at them,’ she spat. ‘Like walking Gothics. Restless gossamers. Two A.M. and there are still thousands of them abroad on the streets, like vampires out for an evening stroll. The poor fucking bastards.’
‘You’ve got a nasty mouth,’ said Rimmer.
‘That’s not what the director said,’ she murmured, delighting in the image of herself and the director she was creating for Rimmer’s benefit. ‘If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll do the same for you.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Rimmer. ‘Been a while since I had a wash, what with trying to kill Dallas and his family.’
‘Thanks for the advice,’ said Ronica, her nose wrinkling with disgust. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘But hey, I’m always nice to people.’ Saying this made Rimmer laugh out loud again.
‘You know, I can’t tell if you’re immoral or amoral, Rimmer.’
‘I have the same problem myself.’
‘You’re a moral eunuch, then.’
‘Comes with the job. Perhaps you should give that some thought yourself.’
‘My morals are really very simple,’ said Ronica. ‘I would never do anything that might interfere with my progress within the company.’
‘Sounds to me like you’d be better suited to a career in the Church.’
‘If this one doesn’t work for me, then maybe I’ll give it a try. I look good in black.’
Ronica sank down into the capacious warmth of her thick lambskin coat. Glancing out of the window, she caught sight of a swarm of rats feasting on a dead body lying on the roadside. ‘Ugh, I hate this part of the city. Whatever is Dallas thinking of coming to an area like this? It’s so far from the Zone.’
‘That’s the whole idea,’ chuckled Rimmer, as the car’s automatic steering system narrowly avoided a collision with a man wandering like a zombie up the center of the road. ‘The most unlikely place is the most secure. Or so he seems to have thought.’
‘How did you find him anyway?’
‘I persuaded Dixy, his Motion Parallax assistant, to tell me.’
‘That can’t have been easy.’
Rimmer told her about the dog, Mersenne.
‘So then, no computer is an island, entire of itself, either,’ observed Ronica. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘I think Dixy was just programmed that way,’ said Rimmer, and pointed at the flashing routefinder. ‘Looks like we’re nearly there.’
‘Good. So promise me you won’t make a meal of it,’ she said. ‘The sooner you blow his brains out, the sooner we can get back to the Zone and healthy civilization. Just driving through this shit heap makes me feel like I’m going to catch something awful. Bubonic plague, Ebola, Lassa, smallpox.’
Rimmer laughed, as if enjoying her discomfort, but at the same time, he wondered how much of it was genuine. Even in her evening clothes and smelling as sweetly as any genetically engineered bloom, the well-muscled Ronica looked more than equal to the task at hand.
‘I thought I would read him a bit from the Bible first,’ teased Rimmer. ‘Execution style. The book of Exodus, I think. That always offers a fairly conclusive text.’
‘Not much consolation there, I’d have thought.’
‘Precisely my idea. So what’s your favorite bit in the Bible?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘I dunno. The head of John the Baptist? No, wait. Gershon’s foreskin. That got hacked off with a stone. Pretty much anyone’s foreskin, I guess. That’s usually my favorite bit. In the Bible. And anywhere else.’
‘I think I’m beginning to understand just what the director sees in you,’ admitted Rimmer.
The car drew up to the Clostridium Hotel. Rimmer switched off the engine and sat back in his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, with the air of a man who might have just arrived somewhere nice for a holiday. ‘We’re here.’
‘I’ve got to pee,’ said Ronica.
‘What?’
‘I’m nervous. I’ve never seen anyone killed before.’
‘You can certainly pick your places.’
‘I already did,’ she said, opening the passenger door. ‘I’ll squat down here, in the road beside the car, just as Marie Antoinette did on the conciergerie cobbles when she saw her waiting tumbril. Only stay in the car until I’ve finished please, Rimmer.’
He nodded and, remaining seated, looked politely away as Ronica got out of the car, closed the door, and then lifted her skirt.
Swiftly she fetched the little Colt Matahari automatic from the holster between her legs — and then had a pee for appearance’s sake before pocketing the gun and standing up straight.
‘All right,’ she said, tapping on the toughened window. ‘I’m ready now.’
Rimmer got out of the car.
‘Let’s go and kill him,’ she added eagerly.
He walked around the car, eyed the still steaming snow where she had urinated, and sniffed the air like a dog.
‘Asparagus,’ he said. ‘For your supper. Quite unmistakable.’
Ronica felt herself blush with embarrassment. She was going to enjoy killing him. Blowing Rimmer’s brains out would count as a service to humanity.
Rimmer turned his back on her and trudged down the narrow street toward the hotel’s front door. ‘When we get in there,’ he said, ‘you can do the talking. Let’s see how clever you really are.’
‘Afraid you’ll fuck it up again, is that it?’ she asked, finding it difficult to keep up with him in her expensive Federico Ingannevole evening shoes, which were not made for walking, least of all in snow.
‘You’re the one who seems to lack the stomach for this, not me,’ he said, sniffing the air again.
‘That reminds me. What blood type are you, Rimmer?’
Rimmer stopped in his tracks and, turning around, fixed her with a look of disdain. ‘Don’t tell me you believe that EPTR[73] bullshit?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Rimmer shook his head and started walking again. ‘And the director said you were clever,’ he snorted.
‘Why shouldn’t there be some truth in it?’ argued Ronica. ‘There are over four hundred blood groups.’
‘But most people are just O or A. I can’t see how that helps to determine the kind of guy I am.’
‘So which are you, Rimmer?’
‘Neither. I’m AB.’
‘Interesting. Only three percent of people are AB.’
‘I know.’
‘A Universal Recipient.[74] Means you’re full of internal contradictions, as you might expect of someone with your blood group history.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘The melancholic type: quiet, unsociable, reserved, pessimistic, rigid, and moody. Not to mention greedy and manipulative. How am I doing, Rimmer? Recognize yourself?’
Rimmer didn’t reply.
‘Me, I’m group O. Makes me relaxed and sociable, outgoing, poor on details, but with good leadership qualities.’
‘I thought all blacks were group B.’
‘Phenotype frequencies vary across different racial groups. The B phenotype is not exclusive to blacks, merely more common. Talking of misconceptions, you should get your chart done. That is, if you’re planning to marry and have children. Although I can tell you that we’re not the right mix. O’s should stick to their own type.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Rimmer as they neared the hotel’s front door. ‘But I’ll be even more glad to hear what story you’ve thought up to explain our imminent arrival here.’
‘Hey, just watch my relaxed group O style,’ said Ronica, leading the way through the door. ‘You’re about to see someone whose temperament includes the very essence, the sanguis of cool.’
They were met by a hyperbaric attendant, a tall black who stifled a yawn and nodded a silent greeting.
‘We’re from the Oxygen Institute,’ Ronica explained smoothly. ‘Checking free radicals.’
‘Free what?’ The attendant looked back at the glass-walled office from which he had just emerged, as if someone might come to his assistance, but there was no one else.
‘Unstable and reactive electrons,’ she said. ‘In this case, oxygen.’
‘Nobody told me you were coming,’ said the attendant, scratching his head.
‘You’re not supposed to have any prior knowledge,’ tutted Ronica. ‘That’s the whole point of the check.’
‘At...’ The attendant glanced at his watch. ‘At two-thirty in the morning?’
‘Middle of the night’s when people least expect us. When they’re able to offer the least amount of resistance. You know, I’m surprised no one told you about us before. We’ve been to quite a few hyperbaric hotels in this district.’
‘You have?’
‘You obviously have no idea who we are, do you?’
The attendant shrugged.
‘That’s okay.’ Ronica smiled patiently and began to walk around him as she went on with her patter. Rimmer had to admit she sounded pretty convincing, even in a floor-length lambskin coat and pretty shoes.
‘We’re an organization acting under federal law,’ she explained. ‘We’re empowered to check places like this to see if there has been any involvement of iron in the process by which oxidative damage is produced in DNA in human cells that are undergoing oxidative stress. As might be expected in a hyperbaric hotel. You see, through their reactions with this trace metal, elevated levels of activated oxygen species can cause alterations to human DNA. We wouldn’t want that, now would we?’
‘What trace metal is that?’ frowned the attendant. ‘I thought oxygen was a nonmetallic element.’
Ronica sighed loudly. ‘Iron, of course. Cells must maintain iron, even though it can’t be used for metabolic processes. Look, you do work here, don’t you? I mean, you’re not a guest or a patient or whatever you call your customers?’
‘Sure, I work here. I’m the night shift hyperbaric attendant.’
‘In which case you’ll have the superoxide levels of your guests at hand. If we could just check those out, we’ll be on our way.’
‘Superoxide levels?’ The attendant grinned awkwardly.
‘Kind of a place is this?’ muttered Rimmer, getting the idea.
‘When cells are diseased or injured, the normal metabolism of oxygen goes wrong, leading to the increased production of superoxide,’ Ronica explained patiently. It was amazing what she found she knew when she put her Connex-stimulated mind on to the case. She must have read all this somewhere, sometime. ‘For example,’ she added, ‘white blood cells intentionally produce superoxide in order to kill microorganisms. These same white cells are activated by trauma and inflammation.’ She smiled thinly and continued slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. ‘So nearly all diseases involve the production of increased amounts of free radicals.’
‘Free radicals, right?’
‘Yeah,’ growled Rimmer. ‘Listen and you might learn something.’
‘You’re obliged to keep patient records of superoxide levels as a matter of federal law.’ Ronica was making it up now. She had no idea what kind of laws affected hyperbaric hotels, but she thought that there ought to be some, which is as good a legislative philosophy as any.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ grumbled Rimmer. ‘He doesn’t have the first idea what you’re talking about. I say we go back to the office, issue a closure notice, and then it’s someone else’s problem.’
‘Closure notice?’ The attendant sounded alarmed. ‘Wait a second. You guys can close this place?’
‘We just issue the order,’ said Ronica. ‘It’s nothing personal, you understand. But failure to monitor superoxide levels properly is a serious matter.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s out of our hands.’
‘Couldn’t we find some way around this? Some of our guests have been here a while. They’re sick people. I’m not sure they’d survive being transferred somewhere else.’
Rimmer looked doubtfully at Ronica, and seeing her apparently thinking about the matter, he turned away in a show of disgust.
‘No way,’ he snarled.
‘Please?’
‘Well,’ said Ronica. ‘I guess we could do the superoxide tests ourselves. Of course, to do that we’d need to take mitochondrial samples from your longest guest and, as a control, your most recent guest.’
‘Hey, no problem,’ said the attendant. ‘That’s easy. Don’t even have to look it up. Last guest came in only an hour or so ago. Name of Dallas. He’s in 1218. And the longest resident? That’s Ingrams, in 1105. Been here so long he’s practically part of the furniture. You could take a sample from him and he probably wouldn’t even know it. Guy’s practically a corpse. He’s been in a Three Moon crisis for must be a couple of years now.’
‘Where’s the harm?’ Ronica asked Rimmer.
‘I dunno,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a fudge and you know it. There ought to be twenty tests, not just two.’
‘We both know two’s quite sufficient if you can accurately identify the two chronological parameters. As it happens we can.’
‘All right,’ said Rimmer. ‘But if anyone finds out, this is your responsibility, okay? I’m done sticking my neck out for people.’
‘Relax, will you? What can go wrong?’ She looked back at the attendant and smiled. ‘Okay. Why don’t you show us the way?’
‘All right,’ he grinned, and collected an electronic pass key off his desktop. ‘Now you’re talking.’
III
At this point, a word of explanation is required. How is it, you may ask, that the author of this book, who regrets the necessity to speak of himself, knows these things? How, for instance, is the author able to describe what someone thought, and, perhaps, why they thought it? But to be quite frank, I can’t imagine why you don’t ask this question more often in connection with a book. And I find it surprising that more authors do not attempt to clear up the small matter of narrative device somewhere during the course of their written endeavors.
Of course, narration is not a science, but an art. Even so, you would still think that some critic had attempted to formulate a few principles about it, or even to create a terminology that might be equal to the task of describing the point of view. In this respect, there is an embarrassing inadequacy of classification, and I am obliged to explain myself and my narrative position in terms that might seem enigmatic, since ‘first person’ and ‘omniscient’ hardly seem to come up to the mark.
Let us say then that this story is told by a narrator who is dramatized in his own right, although it is arguable that even the most retiring of narrators has been dramatized as soon as the personal pronoun has been called into play. Say also that by producing some measurable effect on the course of events (and in time all will be revealed concerning my own role in this story), I can justly claim to be more than a mere observer — I am that particular kind of narrator who is also an agent. Naturally, you will have judged me to be a narrator who is the self-conscious kind, who is aware of himself as a writer, to which I would like to add that I may be relied upon to tell you all you need to know, and more, until the time comes when you know absolutely everything, as I do.
This leads me, neatly, to the question of how the narrator is privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means — what we authors usually call, because we like to play at being God, omniscience. Obviously the most important privilege is the inside view — the characters and their thought processes to which I referred a little earlier. Perhaps it’s a little difficult for you to understand it now, but the fact is, I have the best inside view any author has ever enjoyed. What is more, the means of its learning has indeed been strictly natural. Science has provided me with unlimited omniscience. But what kind of science? I hear you ask. Why the science of hematology, of course. The state or fact of knowing what I do, as much as I do — everything that ever was, is, and shall be — comes from blood. This is the infinite knowledge, the fountain of youth, and the secret of life. Through the communion of the blood of man, everything shall be known and understood. And if I give you notice of this betimes, it is, to paraphrase Antoine Furetière,[75] ‘because I design not to surprise you, as some malicious Authors are wont to do, who aim at nothing else.’ I wish you to be prepared to understand. For ahead lies great understanding and great effort of understanding. You must lift yourself up, by your own bootstraps, so to speak.
There, I hope that’s made things just a little clearer.
IV
Rimmer placed the Pinback in his ear and, unobserved by the black night attendant, selected a piece of Mendelssohn, Elijah, as accompaniment for his imminent act of homicide. Be not afraid, sang the voice. It made a pleasant alternative to the Muzak and the chatter of the attendant leading them along an eleventh-floor corridor to 1105, the chamber of the Clostridium’s longest resident. Part of him wondered why they were still bothering with this little facade. They knew where Dallas was to be found. It was simply a matter of going there and killing him.
‘As a matter of fact, in the morning I was going to have to decompress Ingrams anyway,’ explained the attendant, whose own name, he said, was Taylor. ‘We have to do all the long-term guests once or twice a week, otherwise they get the bends. Y’know? Bubbles in the bloodstream. We’re real careful about that.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Ronica, as Taylor stopped outside the door to a chamber and inserted his electronic key into the security lock. She was still trying to think of some way in which she could put on a show of testing the hapless resident of 1105 for superoxides. Perhaps she would get the guy to lick the screen of the matchbook phone she was carrying: It was a new one, a little different from how they normally looked, and she was banking on Taylor not having seen this kind of phone before. That would have to do.
Now that he had the key in the lock, Taylor was able to open a control panel on the wall beside the door and manually override the pressure settings that had been made on the inside of the chamber. He glanced at his watch and said, ‘This’ll take a few minutes. But you can’t hurry it.’ He laughed grimly. ‘Not unless you want to kill the guy.’
Rimmer’s available ear picked up.
‘As a matter of interest, how high can you set the pressure?’
‘High as you like. Two or three hundred atmospheres. These chambers are built to withstand huge amounts of pressure. Much more than the human body can take, anyway. But we don’t let guests set their own pressures as high as all that. Anything really high has to be done from the outside by an attendant with a key like this one. It stops some of the guests from using the pressures to commit suicide, when they get depressed.’ Taylor shook his head. ‘You should see the mess it used to make.’
‘That is fascinating,’ said Rimmer. ‘You learn something useful every day.’
‘Don’t know about useful,’ murmured Taylor. He glanced up as a red light above the door extinguished. ‘Soon as it turns green we can go in.’
Rimmer looked at Ronica and smiled. ‘I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you?’ Be not afraid, saith God the Lord, be not afraid, thy help is near.
‘What are you talking about?’ Taylor frowned. ‘I thought you wanted to do this test on Ingrams. Superoxide test, or whatever.’
Rimmer had the gun behind his back now, his thumb adjusting the bezel of the noise suppressor to ensure the shot would be a silent one. No point in disturbing the other guests, he thought. Especially if those guests included Dallas on the floor immediately above them. Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, and tens of thousands around thee perish, yet still it shall not come nigh thee. That didn’t include Taylor, obviously. But Rimmer was beginning to feel a bit like some Old Testament prophet of doom. It was a good feeling. He was just waiting on a sign from the Lord now. A green light to go. He hardly cared that some hidden camera might record his image. Not in a place like this. It was only in the Zone that such considerations really mattered. The police from a city sector like this one were never allowed to enter a CBH Zone.
The attendant’s eyes flicked momentarily above the door as the green light came on, and in the same instant, Rimmer placed the thick square muzzle of the gun against the back of Taylor’s head and squeezed the trigger, stepping neatly out of the way of the collapsing body and the great spout of blood that discharged itself in a red arc from the pressurized chamber that was the instantaneously dead man’s skull. Quite unprepared for what had happened, Ronica was not so smart on her elegantly shod feet, and these were quickly drenched in a shower of hot, steaming blood. Horrified at this sudden eruption of potential contamination, for you didn’t work in a hyperbaric hotel unless you too were infected with the virus, Ronica started back on her high heels until she felt the wall on the opposite side of the corridor against her back, whereupon she stared down at her incarnadined shoes.
‘You bloody idiot,’ she screamed.
‘Keep it down, will you? There are people trying to sleep, you know?’
‘Keep it down?’ Ronica gasped with outrage. ‘Keep it down? Rimmer, do you see what you’ve done to my fucking shoes? They’re ruined. They were by Federico Ingannevole. And they cost a bloody fortune. But now. Christ, I look like...’ Ronica shook her braided head.
Rimmer glanced down at her shoes and laughed.
‘His blood be upon us,’ he said. ‘And on our children. And on our shoes. You’re right.’
‘Yeah, well I don’t notice any of it on you,’ she replied bitterly, trying to wipe the worst of it off onto the carpet.
‘You’ve got to move quickly on this job.’ Rimmer kicked the attendant experimentally, drawing forth a sharp exhalation of air from the dead man, enough to make Rimmer step back and contemplate firing another shot. Then, looking up and seeing a green light, he perceived the real source of the noise. It was not Taylor gasping his last, but the door to the hyperbaric chamber, where a near naked man of indeterminate age stood, his whole skeletally thin body covered in the bright red lace that was the maculopapular rash characteristic of final phase P2. The dying man uttered a hoarse, parched cry and staggered forward into the bright light of the corridor, pointing an accusing finger at Rimmer in an almost spectral manner. Now that he was in the light Ronica and Rimmer could clearly see the cheeks of the man’s emaciated face, as red as if he had been slapped hard several times and flecked with tiny pinpricks of oxygen-starved blood.
Snatching the Pinback from his ear — for the sight looked a little too biblical even for him, like Samuel returned from the grave to haunt King Saul — Rimmer recoiled from this walking corpse and the putrid smell that preceded him. And with a shudder of distaste that quickly turned to panic as the figure reached out to touch him, Rimmer shot the man in the leg. This was not for mercy’s sake, so as not to have to shoot him dead, but only to allow Rimmer to step a little farther away from the now supine, groaning wretch — Rimmer had no wish to be spattered with any body fluids from this contaminated creature — before shooting him twice more, in the chest. But in truth, the old man, Ingrams, hardly bled at all. It was as if the blood that had become his every waking preoccupation was simply too exhausted to leave the etiolated cadaver.
Ronica removed the protective hand from her still gaping mouth and let out a gasp of horror.
‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘It sure looks like it,’ Rimmer said coolly.
‘Jesus Christ, Rimmer, what is it with you?’
He shrugged a half-apologetic little smile. ‘I didn’t want him touching me. You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘I guess when you’ve got a gun everyone looks like a target, eh?’
‘Sweetheart?’ he said, collecting the attendant’s electronic pass key, and starting back along the corridor toward the stairs, ‘we’ve hardly started.’
V
For a moment, Lenina looked at the footprints on the corridor’s beige carpet and thought someone must have stepped in dog shit — until she remembered how a particularly virulent strain of canine parvovirus the previous year had left most of the city’s population of uneaten dogs dead of a combination of enteritis and myocarditis. As a child in California, there had been a dog. While she had lived in the country, anyway. Before the family had moved to Los Angeles, and she had started her life of crime. But these days the only dogs you saw were the Motion Parallax kind. Lenina no longer cared very much about dogs. It had been a police German shepherd that had apprehended her during the commission of the aggravated burglary that got her sent to Artemis Seven, and it had left her with a badly scarred calf that still caused her pain when she stretched the muscle. As it did now, kneeling down to investigate the woman’s footprints — that much was obvious from the shape of the shoe. This was not the kind of shoe that guests in the Clostridium were ever likely to wear, too expensive, designed not for comfort and practicality, but for style, and that meant a woman with credits to her name and good blood in her veins. The kind of woman Lenina would like to have been. It was impossible to tell if the blood on the carpet was good or bad, but blood it was, for the dark brown tracks were sticky and unmistakably salty to taste.
She stood up painfully and glanced along the bay-curved, beach-colored corridor, from where the footprints had originated. It took only a matter of seconds to walk around the bend and find the two bodies. The attendant, she recognized. She’d tried to get to know most of them by name. Just to remind herself that this was not a prison, and that the attendants were not warders. But the other man — the old, half-naked one — was a stranger to her.
As soon as she saw the two bodies, Lenina turned around and headed back to the hyperbaric chamber she shared with Rameses Gates. Only a few minutes before, she had abruptly walked out on an argument with him over this crazy guy, Dallas, whose harebrained scheme she had thought would surely result in Gates getting sent back to Artemis Seven. Or something worse. Robbing a blood bank probably counted as a major blood felony, for which the penalty would almost certainly be death. Not just any blood bank either, but the biggest and best of them all, the First National Blood Bank on the Moon. Lenina had thought that only served to underline how deluded Dallas really was. It was asking for trouble. Begging for it. Like slapping a grizzly bear on the nose. Not that there were any of those left either. An outbreak of ursine parvovirus had seen the extinction of pretty much the whole of the world’s bear population. Now that really was a pity, thought Lenina. She had liked bears. Perhaps that was the reason she liked Gates. And why she was prepared to humor him now. Maybe even ready to go along with him and his new scheme. After all, this Dallas guy he had told her about, the one who said he built the blood banks and who was hiding out in the hotel, well, maybe he was for real. It certainly looked as if someone had come after him, someone from the Zone who was not just dressed to kill, but seriously equipped for it as well. Perhaps Dallas had been telling the truth.
Rameses Gates was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a puzzled expression, as if he was wondering why Lenina had stormed out of the chamber. Seeing her in the doorway, Gates stood up and sheepishly started to apologize.
‘Forget it,’ Lenina said, cutting him short. ‘I think your new friend might be the real thing after all.’ She explained about the bloody footprints she had found and the two bodies farther up the corridor.
‘Dallas is on the floor above,’ said Gates, hauling a bag out from underneath the bed. ‘Sounds like someone got the wrong room.’
‘Not a someone. A she. They were a woman’s footprints.’
‘Then you can shoot her.’ Gates threw her a gun, collecting a second weapon for himself — a recoilless fifteen-millimeter automatic — and sprang off the bed. ‘C’mon, let’s go. We’ve got a rich uncle to take care of.’
Lenina followed the big man through the chamber door, inspecting the piece he had given her. ‘Been a while since I shot anyone.’
‘It’s like riding a bicycle,’ said Gates, heading toward the stairs. ‘You never forget how.’
VI
Outside the door to 1218, Rimmer inserted the attendant’s electronic key into the security lock and opened the control panel.
‘Looks like Dallas must be in here, all right,’ he said, jerking his head up at the green light above the door. ‘This one’s not even pressurized. Kind of pointless coming to a hyperbaric chamber and not switching the thing on, wouldn’t you say? Like going to a restaurant to read a book.’
Ronica’s hand tightened on the little Matahari automatic in her coat pocket. Now that she had seen the instant effect of a clean head shot she was thinking she ought to shoot Rimmer in the same way. This time she would be ready for the blood — although her shoes were ruined, there was still her coat to think of. As soon as Rimmer opened the chamber door, and Dallas registered that it was him, she would do it. Just the way the director had ordered. As a demonstration of the company’s goodwill toward its most brilliant designer. But instead of opening the chamber manually, as she had been expecting, Rimmer started to adjust the pressure controls and, a second or two later, the green light over the door was replaced by a red one.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded.
‘What’s it look like?’ said Rimmer, not even turning around. ‘I’m putting him under pressure.’ He uttered a sadistic little chuckle. ‘Quite a lot of fucking pressure, as it happens.’
‘Shouldn’t you make sure he’s in there?’ asked Ronica. ‘I mean, suppose he’s not? Suppose it’s someone else? By the time you’ve finished screwing around with that pressure, it might be quite hard to identify if it’s Dallas, or not. And the director will want to know that you made sure, Rimmer.’
‘You heard the attendant, didn’t you?’ sneered Rimmer. ‘Dallas checked into 1218. Well, this is 1218. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to decipher what’s written on these doors, Ronica. Besides, the point of my screwing around with the pressure is not to kill Dallas, merely to make him more amenable to me offing him when eventually I do open the door. Dallas has got a gun, you see. And he’s quite likely to use it unless I can soften him up a bit first. Squeeze him with some breeze, so to speak.’
Ronica bit her voluptuous lips, wondering just how useful Dallas would remain to her employer by the time Rimmer had finished giving him the hyperbaric equivalent of peine forte et dure. There might be nothing left of his brilliant mind to make it worth her while returning him to the company. As Rimmer moved from the control panel, she caught a glimpse of the pressure gauge and a needle flickering dangerously close to the red section of the value arc. She realized she could delay no longer. It was now or never.
Still facing the door, Rimmer felt something as cold and metallic as the voice that controlled it pressed hard against his scrawny neck.
‘Turn it off,’ she said. ‘Now. Or I’ll kill you.’
There was something comic in his situation that made Rimmer laugh.
‘Is that a gun?’ He started to turn around and found the object gouging the flesh under his ear, pushing his head back toward the chamber door.
‘It’s not a stethoscope. Now turn that pressure off or I’ll give you the irrefutable proof.’
Rimmer reached for the hyperbaric controls and reversed the chamber pressure.
‘Empiricism,’ he said coolly. ‘That’s always been my problem. A linguistic expression can only be significant for a man like me if it’s accompanied by something that can be experienced.’
‘Now step away from the door. Slowly. I’d hate you to discover that my threat was more than just syntactical. For you the principle of verification is likely to come in the shape of a fifteen-millimeter bullet.’
‘Fifteen mill, eh?’ said Rimmer, moving away with the gun still pressed against the nape of his neck. ‘That’s quite a load you’re packing.’
‘More than enough to trepan your skull, Rimmer. I’ve already ruined a good pair of shoes. Don’t make me spoil this coat as well.’
‘Must be one of those little three-shot autos. Pussy gun. Been inside your panties all this time. Nice. Mmm, perhaps you’ll let me smell it later. After we’ve sorted out this small misunderstanding.’
‘I’ll only need one shot to put a groove in you. Now face the wall and keep your mouth shut.’ She glanced at the red light above the door, hoping to be able to avoid killing Rimmer until Dallas was there to witness it. Or maybe she would let Dallas kill Rimmer himself. If he was still up to it. Either way, killing Rimmer was going to be the easy part. Much harder still was going to be the sales pitch that followed — trying to convince Dallas that the director had not ordered Rimmer to murder Dallas’s family. Ronica could see no reason why he would believe her. Surely a man as intelligent as he would see through her little charade.
The red light stayed on as the chamber continued its slow return to sea-level pressure. With her gun still on Rimmer’s neck, Ronica’s eyes searched the pressure gauge impatiently. It was still only halfway back to normal. Gritting her perfect white teeth, she tried to contain the sour uncertainty she was feeling in her stomach. She was close enough to smell Rimmer’s bad breath as it blew back off the corridor wall. There was something less culpable about killing a man with offensive breath, she thought. Another glance at the pressure gauge. Almost there. Just a few more seconds and it would all be over.
‘Do you want to talk about this now?’ he asked.
‘Shut up.’
‘I love a dominant female. As it happens, I’m looking for a responsible and reliable person to set my ten-inch cock on fire for a home movie I’m making. Why don’t we go back to my car where we can discuss the details and possible financial compensation?’ He licked his lips and smiled. ‘Or maybe I’m asleep and this is all an erotic dream. Any minute I’ll have a nocturnal emission, all over the bottom sheet, and wake up.’
Ronica grabbed a handful of Rimmer’s lank and greasy hair to better grind the muzzle of her gun into the boil on Rimmer’s cheekbone.
‘If this is just a dream,’ she said, ‘it’s not one you’ll ever wake up from unless you shut your mouth.’
‘You’re not going to kill me for talking,’ persisted Rimmer. ‘Fact is, you’re not ready to kill me yet, otherwise you’d have done it already. Besides, you can’t live forever.’
With one side of his face pressed up against the wall he had a half-view of her out of the corner of his eye. Although it was hardly hot in the corridor, Ronica’s beautiful black face was shiny with perspiration, as if she still had a few doubts about what she was doing, as if — Rimmer smiled — as if she hadn’t quite convinced herself that she would squeeze the trigger. Fie was about to suggest that he wouldn’t die in his dreams, or any place else for that matter, so long as she still had the safety catch on on her little Matahari — a pretty obvious feint, he thought, but worth a try all the same — when a shot blasted its fortissimo way past his devious thought process.
Ronica’s scream persuaded him that he would feel no pain — at least not from the first shot anyway. She was already down on one knee, but in the second or two available to him before the next shot was heard, he couldn’t tell if she had been hit or not. What was clear was that someone else was doing the shooting, and with no regard for noise. Sometimes it was better that way. Scaring the shit out of people was more efficient than shooting them. Instinctively, Rimmer crouched down as a third shot came zipping up the corridor, bursting with lethal energy. He reached for his gun, pointed it at Ronica’s head, and then thought better of killing her right then and there — he might need all his ammunition to deal with whoever was doing the shooting. Having adjusted the volume in the handgrip, just to let the guy know he was well-heeled, Rimmer returned fire in the general direction from which the first three shots had come. All he could think of was that Ronica had been right after all — that Dallas couldn’t have been in his chamber. Who else would want to shoot at them?
Rimmer fired twice more, and, ignoring Ronica, who was now crouched down in the opposite doorway, he scrambled away in the nick of time as a hole the size of an orange got blasted from the wall he’d been leaning against.
‘Dallas?’ he yelled. ‘Is that you?’
More shots. And, thought Rimmer, more than just the one gun, surely. He fired back, only this time he and Dallas, or whoever it was, both hit the someone foolishly drawn into the corridor to inspect the noise — the same someone, a woman.
Rimmer kept on firing, not caring who he shot. What with the roar of the guns and the smell of cordite, he was enjoying his evening. There were two of them, he was certain of that now, concealed inside the opaque plastic-walled prism that housed the stairwell and helped light the far end of the curving corridor. Behind him, farther around the bend, the elevator shaft sank through a glazed circle in the floor. It was time to make himself scarce. If he could just cross the floor, he would be safe.
Right on cue, a head and shoulder appeared around the edge of another doorway. Rimmer aimed carefully, and as the target collapsed forward into the corridor, screaming loudly, he used him as cover to make his escape, rolling acrobatically across the floor before scrambling around the bend in the corridor, and out of the line of fire. Sensing Rimmer’s presence, the elevator shaft lit up as a car began its automatic ascent to the twelfth floor. Quickly Rimmer reloaded his gun and, from the comparative safety of his new position, glanced around the bend, hoping to get a clear shot at his attackers before making his getaway. Discovering his own line of fire partially blocked by the man he had shot, Rimmer finished him off with a couple of bullets in the chest. A second stolen glance confirmed that he no longer had a clear shot at Ronica, who was pressed into the protection afforded by a doorway. If he was going to settle this account, he was going to have to persuade her that he still cared what happened to her. When she made her own getaway bid and ran toward him, he would kill her.
‘Ronica?’ he yelled. ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here. I’ll cover you.’
‘With what? Kisses?’
‘Stop screwing around, Ronica. The elevator car’s here. You want to stay there and get shot, that’s up to you, but I’m leaving.’
Flattened against the smooth metallic surface of the chamber doorway, Ronica caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the door of 1218 opposite. She looked like some two-dimensional vignette from the Egyptian Book of the Dead — the deceased holding in her left hand a lotus flower. Except that the flower was a gun and she was, for the moment, very much alive. Not that she expected to stay that way the minute she showed herself to Rimmer.
‘You better get going then,’ she said, and seeing the slimmest margin of what looked like Rimmer’s head, she took careful aim with the Colt Matahari and fired.
Rimmer yelped like a dog as Ronica’s bullet hit the wall about an inch ahead of his face, sending up a small explosion of wood and metal splinters, one of which chamfered its way through the scrofulous tip of his earlobe like some large, stinging insect.
‘Bitch,’ he yelled, as he fired off a volley of shots as close as he was able to the doorway where she was still crouched. Then, finding his ear and neck wet with his own blood, and the elevator doors opening expectantly behind him, Rimmer made his exit. As soon as the doors closed and the elevator sank down into the shaft, Rimmer pressed himself back against the wall of the car, with his gun aimed at the glass ceiling and retreating circular lip that was the twelfth floor.
Ronica heard the elevator car descend into the shaft, and longed to go after Rimmer and fire her two remaining shots. But there were still the two gunmen at the other end of the corridor to think about. Her one abiding hope now was that one of them might turn out to be Dallas. Surely she might still convince him of her own good faith even without the corroborating evidence of Rimmer’s corpse. That could mean telling Dallas everything, but she might have little or no alternative. She was about to call out to him when she realized that the door to 1218 was now open, and standing there, a little unsteady, as might be expected of someone who had just been subjected to several hundred atmospheres, but still managing to aim a gun levelly at her braided head, was Dallas.
VII
‘Drop it,’ he said quietly. Dallas was still feeling lightheaded after his experience inside the hyperbaric chamber. Less than half an hour after Gates had left the room, he had been awakened by what felt like some kind of invisible force pressing him down in bed. The pressure quickly became so great that it had forced the blood into the back of his body, and for a minute or so, he had actually blacked out. Recovering consciousness, Dallas had discovered the pressure returning to normal, and hearing the sound of gunfire immediately outside his door, he reasoned first that Rimmer must have found him, and second that Gates must have found Rimmer. So he was a little surprised to find Ronica, a woman whom he recognized as an employee of Terotechnology, cowering in the opposite doorway. She threw her gun toward him. Dallas glanced one way and then the other, his eyes taking in the bodies that now lay on the corridor floor.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said irritably. The high pressure had given him a severe headache.
‘Saving you from Rimmer.’ Ronica stood up slowly as Dallas lowered his gun.
‘Where is he?’
‘Gone.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the elevator.
‘Tell me...’ Dallas shook his head as he tried to recall the woman’s name.
‘My name’s Ronica.’
‘How did you find me here?’
‘Rimmer. He got it out of your assistant.’
‘Dixy told him?’
Ronica told him what Rimmer had said to her, about Dixy’s pet program, and how Rimmer had threatened to erase it. Dallas nodded. Perhaps a little part of him was disappointed that Dixy should have betrayed him, but he was more interested to learn that his computer assistant should have demonstrated such an attachment to a simple pet program.
‘You okay, Dallas?’ It was Gates, followed closely by Lenina.
Dallas nodded. ‘Just two of my former colleagues. Thanks, Gates.’
‘Don’t thank me, thank Lenina. It was she who spotted this lady’s footprints.’
Lenina regarded Ronica with admiration: This was the first time she had seen a rich, healthy woman close up, and she liked what she saw. The big coat, the fabulous dress, the expensive jewelry, the braided hair, even Ronica’s bloodied shoes. Seeing Ronica and envying her well-groomed appearance sharpened Lenina’s appetite to go along with whatever scheme Dallas had in mind.
Ronica glanced down at her shoes and then smiled at Dallas. ‘You never know what you’re stepping into with Rimmer around.’
‘Who ordered you to save me from Rimmer?’ asked Dallas.
‘The director. With Tanaka dead he needs you back at Terotechnology. Wants to return to the status quo, with you as head of Design. Killing Rimmer was to be my opening bid. So you’d think it had all been a big misunderstanding. An overzealous Rimmer acting on his own authority, that kind of thing.’
‘And was he?’
‘No. Rimmer was just doing exactly what Simon King told him to do, just like me. Let Rimmer find Dallas, he told me, and then kill Rimmer. If possible, I was supposed to trump the guy within your eyeshot so you’d gain the impression that the company, as represented by myself, was on your side.’
‘So why pick you and not one of those thugs who work for Rimmer?’
Ronica looked vague. ‘Fresh blood? Someone who was uncontaminated by association with failure? I don’t know. You’d have to ask the dealer.’
Dallas nodded, estimating that Ronica was telling the truth.
‘So why are you showing me your hand?’ he asked.
Ronica let out a long breath and glanced up at the ceiling before staring back at Dallas. ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘Well, let’s see now. I already lost the first trick. And now that I’ve looked you straight in the eye I can’t see any other tricks going my way either. I think maybe the best I can expect now is another deal. Because Rimmer is probably already on his way back to the Zone, with some story for the director about how I screwed up. So I can’t go back there.’
‘What makes you so sure that I wouldn’t have believed your story? That Rimmer acted on his own initiative. Maybe I want to go back to the Zone.’
Ronica shook her head very firmly. ‘Like I said, Dallas, I’ve looked you in the eye.’
‘Maybe I could have let myself be persuaded.’
‘You don’t seem like the type prepared to forgive and forget something like losing a family. And certainly not after less than twenty-four hours.’ Ronica paused for a moment, as her certainty about the character of Dallas gave way to a growing anxiety about her new situation: She didn’t think Dallas and his two weird-looking friends would kill her in cold blood, but what was she to do with herself now? Could she risk going back to the Zone, let alone Terotechnology? Knowing what she did, which didn’t feel like very much, was there any certainty that the director, and Rimmer, would let her remain alive?
‘I do have one question.’ She swallowed. ‘Outside the Zone is no life. No life at all. What else is there, Dallas?’ She bit her lip back from trembling. ‘I’m scared.’
‘We should all be scared,’ declared Lenina. ‘The cops aren’t about to ignore a gun battle that leaves four dead, even in a sector like this. We should leave right now.’
‘Lenina’s right,’ said Gates.
‘Four dead?’ Dallas was frowning and could see only two bodies.
‘Rimmer shot two more on the floor below,’ explained Ronica.
‘How do we know it wasn’t you who shot them?’ inquired Lenina.
‘Does she look like a killer?’ Gates asked.
Lenina shrugged. ‘I don’t know what she looks like. But she’s the one with the red shoes.’ Her admiration of Ronica was quickly turning to jealousy.
Dallas shook his head.
‘Ronica was the one who turned down the pressure in my hyperbaric chamber,’ he said. ‘After Rimmer had so thoughtfully turned it up. Isn’t that so, Ronica?’
‘Yes. He wanted to soften you up, he said. So you wouldn’t be in a state to shoot him when he came through the door.’
‘Sounds like Rimmer, all right,’ admitted Dallas.
‘We ought to move,’ insisted Lenina.
Gates was already heading toward the elevator.
‘Ronica?’ said Dallas. ‘That question you asked. About the Zone? I’m not sure I’ve got an answer for you. At least not yet anyway. But if you’re prepared to wait, I might make it worth your while.’
‘That sounds like you’re asking me to come along with you,’ she said.
‘Sure. Why not? I could have just the kind of deal to interest you.’
I
Be sanguine. That’s what the director had told her, and Ronica took this to mean that she should aspire to the mental attributes characteristic of the sanguine complexion, in the medieval physiological sense of that word, in which blood predominates over the other three humors. In becoming courageous, hopeful, confident, even amorous — for blood is always lusty — she would overcome any obstacles in her path. To this end, she dosed herself with a couple of tabs of Connex[70] the minute she was alone in her office. Ronica figured it was best to be fully prepared for anything that her new mission might throw at her. This was her big chance to shine in the director’s line of sight, so she didn’t want to make a mess of it. And there was nothing quite like Connex for boosting your sense of self-confidence. It was much better than cocaine, and the effect much longer lasting. The drug was not without side effects: High doses of Connex could cause powerful hallucinations, while even small doses could assist in the creation of vivid sexual fantasies. Minutes after swallowing the drug, Ronica was the willing victim of a reverie as vivid and lickerish as the most sensational dream.
The ringing phone returned Ronica’s amplified thoughts to her office. Still able to taste the man in her fantasy, Ronica picked up a thin, flat disc and stared into its reflective surface. As soon as she touched the disc, the ringing sound — more like someone stroking the rim of a wineglass than a bell — stopped, and the reflection of her own lightly perspiring features was replaced with those of the director ordering her back to his office.
‘Right away, sir,’ she said as his face vanished from the phone. Holding onto the disc in her fingers, her reflection on the phone’s polished prismatic surface bisected by a laser-thin spectrum that made a livid scar across her face, Ronica checked her appearance, wiped her cheeks with a sheet of nanotissue,[71] took a deep breath, and stood up. There were times when she thought Connex should be remarked as some sort of aphrodisiac. She straightened her clothes, and went to find the director.
II
With its many faux fenêtre English landscape paintings (he owned all of the originals) and its antique furniture, the director’s office was like the drawing room of a beautiful country house. It didn’t matter that she had been there not half an hour earlier; Ronica found herself once again mesmerized by Simon King’s good taste, overawed by such a conspicuous display of wealth. She estimated the desk alone had probably cost more than her apartment.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he said impatiently. ‘Come in, come in. This is the girl I was telling you about.’
Ronica hardly minded the fact that by describing her as a girl, and not a woman, the director was in breach of employment and gender legislation, as she walked across the thick Persian rug toward an ornate sofa. He was the director after all, and as far as Ronica was concerned, he could have called her anything he damn well liked. It was a moment or two before her distracted senses registered that Rimmer was already sitting on the sofa scowling at her. As she turned to sit alongside him, the director raised a hand bearing an enormous cigar — smoking in the workplace, another breach of employment legislation — in the air.
‘No, don’t sit down,’ he said. ‘You’re not staying. Neither of you are.’ He glanced meaningfully at Rimmer, who pulled a face and rose reluctantly to his feet. ‘There’s no time to lose. Rimmer has located Dallas. I want you to go with him and, as we discussed earlier, see how he handles the situation. Observe and learn and give him any assistance you can. Understand?’
‘Yes, director,’ said Ronica, and she followed Rimmer out of the door.
Neither of them spoke until they had collected their coats and were standing in the elevator, heading up to the ground floor.
‘So you think you want to join Security, do you?’ Rimmer sniffed with obvious contempt.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘And what makes you believe that you’re cut out for it?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘I like tying people up,’ she said. ‘And beating them. Punishment’s always been my thing. So I figured I might as well get paid for it.’
‘A sense of humor, eh?’ remarked Rimmer. ‘You’ll need that.’
‘Anything else I’ll need?’ she asked as the car delivered them into the entrance lobby.
Rimmer strode forward, acknowledged the parking valet standing on the far side of the security screen, and, glancing back over his dandruffed shoulder, said, ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ With a show of mock courtesy he waited for Ronica to pass out of the front door ahead of him and then ushered her toward the electric car parked out front.
‘That’s your job, I guess,’ she said. ‘Finding things out.’
‘Depend on it,’ said Rimmer, opening both doors remotely.
‘You’re sort of an armed information-retrieval service,’ said Ronica and slid into the passenger seat. The inside of Rimmer’s car smelled strongly of nickel cadmium, as if there was something wrong with the battery. Rimmer sat down beside her and the doors shut automatically.
‘Perhaps I’ll find out just what it is that makes the director think so highly of you,’ he said.
‘That’s easy,’ she laughed. ‘I can tell you why. If you’re interested.’
Rimmer said nothing as he started the electric motor and stamped irritably on the power pedal. The car moved forward, silently picking up speed.
‘Are you interested?’ she asked, smiling, making him work for an answer. She could see he was biting his lip in an effort not to admit that he was.
For a few more seconds Rimmer attempted to retain control of their conversational game, trying to force her to react to his moves instead of the other way around.
‘Go on then,’ he snarled finally. ‘Don’t make me have to seek absolution from a priest before you tell.’
‘Absolution? For you?’ It was her turn to sniff with contempt. ‘There’s certainly no time for that. I’ve a good idea you’ve more wrongs than most to own up to, Mister Rimmer.’
‘The job is not without its amusements.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Think what you like.’
‘I shall. Thinking what I like has always afforded me the greatest of pleasure.’
For several minutes, they drove in silence. Rimmer hadn’t said where they were going, but it was somewhere north — somewhere that was clearly outside the CBH Zone[72]: You didn’t need documentation to get out, but you needed to be in possession of a CBH to get back in. The very idea of leaving the Zone gave her an uncomfortable feeling of vulnerability.
‘Well,’ said Rimmer, breaking the silence. ‘Are you going to tell me, or not?’
‘Sure,’ said Ronica. ‘It’s like this. I asked him if, in return for paying lip service to his holy rood, he might advance my career at a slightly more urgent pace.’ The drug was really taking effect now: Her whole head was humming, as if she’d had an electric shock. ‘Anyway, he said he would, and asked me if there were any particular areas in Terotechnology where I thought my talents might lie. And in between anthropophagous mouthfuls, I suggested Security. Like I say, I enjoy bondage and that kind of thing. Well, naturally he was just a little disappointed that I hadn’t suggested Design, because that’s his thing. However, he was able to keep a stiff upper lip just long enough to cede unto me his many-headed florescence.’
‘You mean you sucked his cock,’ said Rimmer.
‘Yes,’ she said, and they both started to laugh.
‘You know, you’re all right,’ said Rimmer, who was thinking that she must have been sent by the director to spy on him. And if for any reason things went badly wrong again, then he might have to arrange some sort of fatal accident for Ronica.
‘Thanks,’ she said. If things worked out as she expected, then the man still laughing with her had maybe less than an hour before she blew his brains out. ‘Where are we going?’
‘A hotel.’
‘But we’ve only just met. What kind of a girl do you take me for?’
‘The hyperbaric kind of hotel. Where sick people go to get themselves oxygenated, not laid.’
‘I know what they get. A little color in their cheeks. A chance to breathe easy at night. But it’s all just air today, gone tomorrow.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you ever give them much thought? The bad bloods?’
‘Can’t say I do,’ admitted Rimmer.
‘Oh, I think about them a lot. It makes me feel good to know that there are so many people worse off than me. Kind of the philosophical opposite of utilitarianism. Social schadenfreude, I suppose you could call it.’ Ronica stared out of the car’s bullet-proof windows at the moonlit people she had been talking about. Only a few minutes’ drive had taken them out of the Zone and into a less salubrious part of the city. There was little traffic on the road, but still plenty of people walking around: the living dead, as she thought of them.
‘Look at them,’ she spat. ‘Like walking Gothics. Restless gossamers. Two A.M. and there are still thousands of them abroad on the streets, like vampires out for an evening stroll. The poor fucking bastards.’
‘You’ve got a nasty mouth,’ said Rimmer.
‘That’s not what the director said,’ she murmured, delighting in the image of herself and the director she was creating for Rimmer’s benefit. ‘If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll do the same for you.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Rimmer. ‘Been a while since I had a wash, what with trying to kill Dallas and his family.’
‘Thanks for the advice,’ said Ronica, her nose wrinkling with disgust. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘But hey, I’m always nice to people.’ Saying this made Rimmer laugh out loud again.
‘You know, I can’t tell if you’re immoral or amoral, Rimmer.’
‘I have the same problem myself.’
‘You’re a moral eunuch, then.’
‘Comes with the job. Perhaps you should give that some thought yourself.’
‘My morals are really very simple,’ said Ronica. ‘I would never do anything that might interfere with my progress within the company.’
‘Sounds to me like you’d be better suited to a career in the Church.’
‘If this one doesn’t work for me, then maybe I’ll give it a try. I look good in black.’
Ronica sank down into the capacious warmth of her thick lambskin coat. Glancing out of the window, she caught sight of a swarm of rats feasting on a dead body lying on the roadside. ‘Ugh, I hate this part of the city. Whatever is Dallas thinking of coming to an area like this? It’s so far from the Zone.’
‘That’s the whole idea,’ chuckled Rimmer, as the car’s automatic steering system narrowly avoided a collision with a man wandering like a zombie up the center of the road. ‘The most unlikely place is the most secure. Or so he seems to have thought.’
‘How did you find him anyway?’
‘I persuaded Dixy, his Motion Parallax assistant, to tell me.’
‘That can’t have been easy.’
Rimmer told her about the dog, Mersenne.
‘So then, no computer is an island, entire of itself, either,’ observed Ronica. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘I think Dixy was just programmed that way,’ said Rimmer, and pointed at the flashing routefinder. ‘Looks like we’re nearly there.’
‘Good. So promise me you won’t make a meal of it,’ she said. ‘The sooner you blow his brains out, the sooner we can get back to the Zone and healthy civilization. Just driving through this shit heap makes me feel like I’m going to catch something awful. Bubonic plague, Ebola, Lassa, smallpox.’
Rimmer laughed, as if enjoying her discomfort, but at the same time, he wondered how much of it was genuine. Even in her evening clothes and smelling as sweetly as any genetically engineered bloom, the well-muscled Ronica looked more than equal to the task at hand.
‘I thought I would read him a bit from the Bible first,’ teased Rimmer. ‘Execution style. The book of Exodus, I think. That always offers a fairly conclusive text.’
‘Not much consolation there, I’d have thought.’
‘Precisely my idea. So what’s your favorite bit in the Bible?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘I dunno. The head of John the Baptist? No, wait. Gershon’s foreskin. That got hacked off with a stone. Pretty much anyone’s foreskin, I guess. That’s usually my favorite bit. In the Bible. And anywhere else.’
‘I think I’m beginning to understand just what the director sees in you,’ admitted Rimmer.
The car drew up to the Clostridium Hotel. Rimmer switched off the engine and sat back in his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, with the air of a man who might have just arrived somewhere nice for a holiday. ‘We’re here.’
‘I’ve got to pee,’ said Ronica.
‘What?’
‘I’m nervous. I’ve never seen anyone killed before.’
‘You can certainly pick your places.’
‘I already did,’ she said, opening the passenger door. ‘I’ll squat down here, in the road beside the car, just as Marie Antoinette did on the conciergerie cobbles when she saw her waiting tumbril. Only stay in the car until I’ve finished please, Rimmer.’
He nodded and, remaining seated, looked politely away as Ronica got out of the car, closed the door, and then lifted her skirt.
Swiftly she fetched the little Colt Matahari automatic from the holster between her legs — and then had a pee for appearance’s sake before pocketing the gun and standing up straight.
‘All right,’ she said, tapping on the toughened window. ‘I’m ready now.’
Rimmer got out of the car.
‘Let’s go and kill him,’ she added eagerly.
He walked around the car, eyed the still steaming snow where she had urinated, and sniffed the air like a dog.
‘Asparagus,’ he said. ‘For your supper. Quite unmistakable.’
Ronica felt herself blush with embarrassment. She was going to enjoy killing him. Blowing Rimmer’s brains out would count as a service to humanity.
Rimmer turned his back on her and trudged down the narrow street toward the hotel’s front door. ‘When we get in there,’ he said, ‘you can do the talking. Let’s see how clever you really are.’
‘Afraid you’ll fuck it up again, is that it?’ she asked, finding it difficult to keep up with him in her expensive Federico Ingannevole evening shoes, which were not made for walking, least of all in snow.
‘You’re the one who seems to lack the stomach for this, not me,’ he said, sniffing the air again.
‘That reminds me. What blood type are you, Rimmer?’
Rimmer stopped in his tracks and, turning around, fixed her with a look of disdain. ‘Don’t tell me you believe that EPTR[73] bullshit?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Rimmer shook his head and started walking again. ‘And the director said you were clever,’ he snorted.
‘Why shouldn’t there be some truth in it?’ argued Ronica. ‘There are over four hundred blood groups.’
‘But most people are just O or A. I can’t see how that helps to determine the kind of guy I am.’
‘So which are you, Rimmer?’
‘Neither. I’m AB.’
‘Interesting. Only three percent of people are AB.’
‘I know.’
‘A Universal Recipient.[74] Means you’re full of internal contradictions, as you might expect of someone with your blood group history.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘The melancholic type: quiet, unsociable, reserved, pessimistic, rigid, and moody. Not to mention greedy and manipulative. How am I doing, Rimmer? Recognize yourself?’
Rimmer didn’t reply.
‘Me, I’m group O. Makes me relaxed and sociable, outgoing, poor on details, but with good leadership qualities.’
‘I thought all blacks were group B.’
‘Phenotype frequencies vary across different racial groups. The B phenotype is not exclusive to blacks, merely more common. Talking of misconceptions, you should get your chart done. That is, if you’re planning to marry and have children. Although I can tell you that we’re not the right mix. O’s should stick to their own type.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Rimmer as they neared the hotel’s front door. ‘But I’ll be even more glad to hear what story you’ve thought up to explain our imminent arrival here.’
‘Hey, just watch my relaxed group O style,’ said Ronica, leading the way through the door. ‘You’re about to see someone whose temperament includes the very essence, the sanguis of cool.’
They were met by a hyperbaric attendant, a tall black who stifled a yawn and nodded a silent greeting.
‘We’re from the Oxygen Institute,’ Ronica explained smoothly. ‘Checking free radicals.’
‘Free what?’ The attendant looked back at the glass-walled office from which he had just emerged, as if someone might come to his assistance, but there was no one else.
‘Unstable and reactive electrons,’ she said. ‘In this case, oxygen.’
‘Nobody told me you were coming,’ said the attendant, scratching his head.
‘You’re not supposed to have any prior knowledge,’ tutted Ronica. ‘That’s the whole point of the check.’
‘At...’ The attendant glanced at his watch. ‘At two-thirty in the morning?’
‘Middle of the night’s when people least expect us. When they’re able to offer the least amount of resistance. You know, I’m surprised no one told you about us before. We’ve been to quite a few hyperbaric hotels in this district.’
‘You have?’
‘You obviously have no idea who we are, do you?’
The attendant shrugged.
‘That’s okay.’ Ronica smiled patiently and began to walk around him as she went on with her patter. Rimmer had to admit she sounded pretty convincing, even in a floor-length lambskin coat and pretty shoes.
‘We’re an organization acting under federal law,’ she explained. ‘We’re empowered to check places like this to see if there has been any involvement of iron in the process by which oxidative damage is produced in DNA in human cells that are undergoing oxidative stress. As might be expected in a hyperbaric hotel. You see, through their reactions with this trace metal, elevated levels of activated oxygen species can cause alterations to human DNA. We wouldn’t want that, now would we?’
‘What trace metal is that?’ frowned the attendant. ‘I thought oxygen was a nonmetallic element.’
Ronica sighed loudly. ‘Iron, of course. Cells must maintain iron, even though it can’t be used for metabolic processes. Look, you do work here, don’t you? I mean, you’re not a guest or a patient or whatever you call your customers?’
‘Sure, I work here. I’m the night shift hyperbaric attendant.’
‘In which case you’ll have the superoxide levels of your guests at hand. If we could just check those out, we’ll be on our way.’
‘Superoxide levels?’ The attendant grinned awkwardly.
‘Kind of a place is this?’ muttered Rimmer, getting the idea.
‘When cells are diseased or injured, the normal metabolism of oxygen goes wrong, leading to the increased production of superoxide,’ Ronica explained patiently. It was amazing what she found she knew when she put her Connex-stimulated mind on to the case. She must have read all this somewhere, sometime. ‘For example,’ she added, ‘white blood cells intentionally produce superoxide in order to kill microorganisms. These same white cells are activated by trauma and inflammation.’ She smiled thinly and continued slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. ‘So nearly all diseases involve the production of increased amounts of free radicals.’
‘Free radicals, right?’
‘Yeah,’ growled Rimmer. ‘Listen and you might learn something.’
‘You’re obliged to keep patient records of superoxide levels as a matter of federal law.’ Ronica was making it up now. She had no idea what kind of laws affected hyperbaric hotels, but she thought that there ought to be some, which is as good a legislative philosophy as any.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ grumbled Rimmer. ‘He doesn’t have the first idea what you’re talking about. I say we go back to the office, issue a closure notice, and then it’s someone else’s problem.’
‘Closure notice?’ The attendant sounded alarmed. ‘Wait a second. You guys can close this place?’
‘We just issue the order,’ said Ronica. ‘It’s nothing personal, you understand. But failure to monitor superoxide levels properly is a serious matter.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s out of our hands.’
‘Couldn’t we find some way around this? Some of our guests have been here a while. They’re sick people. I’m not sure they’d survive being transferred somewhere else.’
Rimmer looked doubtfully at Ronica, and seeing her apparently thinking about the matter, he turned away in a show of disgust.
‘No way,’ he snarled.
‘Please?’
‘Well,’ said Ronica. ‘I guess we could do the superoxide tests ourselves. Of course, to do that we’d need to take mitochondrial samples from your longest guest and, as a control, your most recent guest.’
‘Hey, no problem,’ said the attendant. ‘That’s easy. Don’t even have to look it up. Last guest came in only an hour or so ago. Name of Dallas. He’s in 1218. And the longest resident? That’s Ingrams, in 1105. Been here so long he’s practically part of the furniture. You could take a sample from him and he probably wouldn’t even know it. Guy’s practically a corpse. He’s been in a Three Moon crisis for must be a couple of years now.’
‘Where’s the harm?’ Ronica asked Rimmer.
‘I dunno,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a fudge and you know it. There ought to be twenty tests, not just two.’
‘We both know two’s quite sufficient if you can accurately identify the two chronological parameters. As it happens we can.’
‘All right,’ said Rimmer. ‘But if anyone finds out, this is your responsibility, okay? I’m done sticking my neck out for people.’
‘Relax, will you? What can go wrong?’ She looked back at the attendant and smiled. ‘Okay. Why don’t you show us the way?’
‘All right,’ he grinned, and collected an electronic pass key off his desktop. ‘Now you’re talking.’
III
At this point, a word of explanation is required. How is it, you may ask, that the author of this book, who regrets the necessity to speak of himself, knows these things? How, for instance, is the author able to describe what someone thought, and, perhaps, why they thought it? But to be quite frank, I can’t imagine why you don’t ask this question more often in connection with a book. And I find it surprising that more authors do not attempt to clear up the small matter of narrative device somewhere during the course of their written endeavors.
Of course, narration is not a science, but an art. Even so, you would still think that some critic had attempted to formulate a few principles about it, or even to create a terminology that might be equal to the task of describing the point of view. In this respect, there is an embarrassing inadequacy of classification, and I am obliged to explain myself and my narrative position in terms that might seem enigmatic, since ‘first person’ and ‘omniscient’ hardly seem to come up to the mark.
Let us say then that this story is told by a narrator who is dramatized in his own right, although it is arguable that even the most retiring of narrators has been dramatized as soon as the personal pronoun has been called into play. Say also that by producing some measurable effect on the course of events (and in time all will be revealed concerning my own role in this story), I can justly claim to be more than a mere observer — I am that particular kind of narrator who is also an agent. Naturally, you will have judged me to be a narrator who is the self-conscious kind, who is aware of himself as a writer, to which I would like to add that I may be relied upon to tell you all you need to know, and more, until the time comes when you know absolutely everything, as I do.
This leads me, neatly, to the question of how the narrator is privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means — what we authors usually call, because we like to play at being God, omniscience. Obviously the most important privilege is the inside view — the characters and their thought processes to which I referred a little earlier. Perhaps it’s a little difficult for you to understand it now, but the fact is, I have the best inside view any author has ever enjoyed. What is more, the means of its learning has indeed been strictly natural. Science has provided me with unlimited omniscience. But what kind of science? I hear you ask. Why the science of hematology, of course. The state or fact of knowing what I do, as much as I do — everything that ever was, is, and shall be — comes from blood. This is the infinite knowledge, the fountain of youth, and the secret of life. Through the communion of the blood of man, everything shall be known and understood. And if I give you notice of this betimes, it is, to paraphrase Antoine Furetière,[75] ‘because I design not to surprise you, as some malicious Authors are wont to do, who aim at nothing else.’ I wish you to be prepared to understand. For ahead lies great understanding and great effort of understanding. You must lift yourself up, by your own bootstraps, so to speak.
There, I hope that’s made things just a little clearer.
IV
Rimmer placed the Pinback in his ear and, unobserved by the black night attendant, selected a piece of Mendelssohn, Elijah, as accompaniment for his imminent act of homicide. Be not afraid, sang the voice. It made a pleasant alternative to the Muzak and the chatter of the attendant leading them along an eleventh-floor corridor to 1105, the chamber of the Clostridium’s longest resident. Part of him wondered why they were still bothering with this little facade. They knew where Dallas was to be found. It was simply a matter of going there and killing him.
‘As a matter of fact, in the morning I was going to have to decompress Ingrams anyway,’ explained the attendant, whose own name, he said, was Taylor. ‘We have to do all the long-term guests once or twice a week, otherwise they get the bends. Y’know? Bubbles in the bloodstream. We’re real careful about that.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Ronica, as Taylor stopped outside the door to a chamber and inserted his electronic key into the security lock. She was still trying to think of some way in which she could put on a show of testing the hapless resident of 1105 for superoxides. Perhaps she would get the guy to lick the screen of the matchbook phone she was carrying: It was a new one, a little different from how they normally looked, and she was banking on Taylor not having seen this kind of phone before. That would have to do.
Now that he had the key in the lock, Taylor was able to open a control panel on the wall beside the door and manually override the pressure settings that had been made on the inside of the chamber. He glanced at his watch and said, ‘This’ll take a few minutes. But you can’t hurry it.’ He laughed grimly. ‘Not unless you want to kill the guy.’
Rimmer’s available ear picked up.
‘As a matter of interest, how high can you set the pressure?’
‘High as you like. Two or three hundred atmospheres. These chambers are built to withstand huge amounts of pressure. Much more than the human body can take, anyway. But we don’t let guests set their own pressures as high as all that. Anything really high has to be done from the outside by an attendant with a key like this one. It stops some of the guests from using the pressures to commit suicide, when they get depressed.’ Taylor shook his head. ‘You should see the mess it used to make.’
‘That is fascinating,’ said Rimmer. ‘You learn something useful every day.’
‘Don’t know about useful,’ murmured Taylor. He glanced up as a red light above the door extinguished. ‘Soon as it turns green we can go in.’
Rimmer looked at Ronica and smiled. ‘I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you?’ Be not afraid, saith God the Lord, be not afraid, thy help is near.
‘What are you talking about?’ Taylor frowned. ‘I thought you wanted to do this test on Ingrams. Superoxide test, or whatever.’
Rimmer had the gun behind his back now, his thumb adjusting the bezel of the noise suppressor to ensure the shot would be a silent one. No point in disturbing the other guests, he thought. Especially if those guests included Dallas on the floor immediately above them. Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, and tens of thousands around thee perish, yet still it shall not come nigh thee. That didn’t include Taylor, obviously. But Rimmer was beginning to feel a bit like some Old Testament prophet of doom. It was a good feeling. He was just waiting on a sign from the Lord now. A green light to go. He hardly cared that some hidden camera might record his image. Not in a place like this. It was only in the Zone that such considerations really mattered. The police from a city sector like this one were never allowed to enter a CBH Zone.
The attendant’s eyes flicked momentarily above the door as the green light came on, and in the same instant, Rimmer placed the thick square muzzle of the gun against the back of Taylor’s head and squeezed the trigger, stepping neatly out of the way of the collapsing body and the great spout of blood that discharged itself in a red arc from the pressurized chamber that was the instantaneously dead man’s skull. Quite unprepared for what had happened, Ronica was not so smart on her elegantly shod feet, and these were quickly drenched in a shower of hot, steaming blood. Horrified at this sudden eruption of potential contamination, for you didn’t work in a hyperbaric hotel unless you too were infected with the virus, Ronica started back on her high heels until she felt the wall on the opposite side of the corridor against her back, whereupon she stared down at her incarnadined shoes.
‘You bloody idiot,’ she screamed.
‘Keep it down, will you? There are people trying to sleep, you know?’
‘Keep it down?’ Ronica gasped with outrage. ‘Keep it down? Rimmer, do you see what you’ve done to my fucking shoes? They’re ruined. They were by Federico Ingannevole. And they cost a bloody fortune. But now. Christ, I look like...’ Ronica shook her braided head.
Rimmer glanced down at her shoes and laughed.
‘His blood be upon us,’ he said. ‘And on our children. And on our shoes. You’re right.’
‘Yeah, well I don’t notice any of it on you,’ she replied bitterly, trying to wipe the worst of it off onto the carpet.
‘You’ve got to move quickly on this job.’ Rimmer kicked the attendant experimentally, drawing forth a sharp exhalation of air from the dead man, enough to make Rimmer step back and contemplate firing another shot. Then, looking up and seeing a green light, he perceived the real source of the noise. It was not Taylor gasping his last, but the door to the hyperbaric chamber, where a near naked man of indeterminate age stood, his whole skeletally thin body covered in the bright red lace that was the maculopapular rash characteristic of final phase P2. The dying man uttered a hoarse, parched cry and staggered forward into the bright light of the corridor, pointing an accusing finger at Rimmer in an almost spectral manner. Now that he was in the light Ronica and Rimmer could clearly see the cheeks of the man’s emaciated face, as red as if he had been slapped hard several times and flecked with tiny pinpricks of oxygen-starved blood.
Snatching the Pinback from his ear — for the sight looked a little too biblical even for him, like Samuel returned from the grave to haunt King Saul — Rimmer recoiled from this walking corpse and the putrid smell that preceded him. And with a shudder of distaste that quickly turned to panic as the figure reached out to touch him, Rimmer shot the man in the leg. This was not for mercy’s sake, so as not to have to shoot him dead, but only to allow Rimmer to step a little farther away from the now supine, groaning wretch — Rimmer had no wish to be spattered with any body fluids from this contaminated creature — before shooting him twice more, in the chest. But in truth, the old man, Ingrams, hardly bled at all. It was as if the blood that had become his every waking preoccupation was simply too exhausted to leave the etiolated cadaver.
Ronica removed the protective hand from her still gaping mouth and let out a gasp of horror.
‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘It sure looks like it,’ Rimmer said coolly.
‘Jesus Christ, Rimmer, what is it with you?’
He shrugged a half-apologetic little smile. ‘I didn’t want him touching me. You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘I guess when you’ve got a gun everyone looks like a target, eh?’
‘Sweetheart?’ he said, collecting the attendant’s electronic pass key, and starting back along the corridor toward the stairs, ‘we’ve hardly started.’
V
For a moment, Lenina looked at the footprints on the corridor’s beige carpet and thought someone must have stepped in dog shit — until she remembered how a particularly virulent strain of canine parvovirus the previous year had left most of the city’s population of uneaten dogs dead of a combination of enteritis and myocarditis. As a child in California, there had been a dog. While she had lived in the country, anyway. Before the family had moved to Los Angeles, and she had started her life of crime. But these days the only dogs you saw were the Motion Parallax kind. Lenina no longer cared very much about dogs. It had been a police German shepherd that had apprehended her during the commission of the aggravated burglary that got her sent to Artemis Seven, and it had left her with a badly scarred calf that still caused her pain when she stretched the muscle. As it did now, kneeling down to investigate the woman’s footprints — that much was obvious from the shape of the shoe. This was not the kind of shoe that guests in the Clostridium were ever likely to wear, too expensive, designed not for comfort and practicality, but for style, and that meant a woman with credits to her name and good blood in her veins. The kind of woman Lenina would like to have been. It was impossible to tell if the blood on the carpet was good or bad, but blood it was, for the dark brown tracks were sticky and unmistakably salty to taste.
She stood up painfully and glanced along the bay-curved, beach-colored corridor, from where the footprints had originated. It took only a matter of seconds to walk around the bend and find the two bodies. The attendant, she recognized. She’d tried to get to know most of them by name. Just to remind herself that this was not a prison, and that the attendants were not warders. But the other man — the old, half-naked one — was a stranger to her.
As soon as she saw the two bodies, Lenina turned around and headed back to the hyperbaric chamber she shared with Rameses Gates. Only a few minutes before, she had abruptly walked out on an argument with him over this crazy guy, Dallas, whose harebrained scheme she had thought would surely result in Gates getting sent back to Artemis Seven. Or something worse. Robbing a blood bank probably counted as a major blood felony, for which the penalty would almost certainly be death. Not just any blood bank either, but the biggest and best of them all, the First National Blood Bank on the Moon. Lenina had thought that only served to underline how deluded Dallas really was. It was asking for trouble. Begging for it. Like slapping a grizzly bear on the nose. Not that there were any of those left either. An outbreak of ursine parvovirus had seen the extinction of pretty much the whole of the world’s bear population. Now that really was a pity, thought Lenina. She had liked bears. Perhaps that was the reason she liked Gates. And why she was prepared to humor him now. Maybe even ready to go along with him and his new scheme. After all, this Dallas guy he had told her about, the one who said he built the blood banks and who was hiding out in the hotel, well, maybe he was for real. It certainly looked as if someone had come after him, someone from the Zone who was not just dressed to kill, but seriously equipped for it as well. Perhaps Dallas had been telling the truth.
Rameses Gates was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a puzzled expression, as if he was wondering why Lenina had stormed out of the chamber. Seeing her in the doorway, Gates stood up and sheepishly started to apologize.
‘Forget it,’ Lenina said, cutting him short. ‘I think your new friend might be the real thing after all.’ She explained about the bloody footprints she had found and the two bodies farther up the corridor.
‘Dallas is on the floor above,’ said Gates, hauling a bag out from underneath the bed. ‘Sounds like someone got the wrong room.’
‘Not a someone. A she. They were a woman’s footprints.’
‘Then you can shoot her.’ Gates threw her a gun, collecting a second weapon for himself — a recoilless fifteen-millimeter automatic — and sprang off the bed. ‘C’mon, let’s go. We’ve got a rich uncle to take care of.’
Lenina followed the big man through the chamber door, inspecting the piece he had given her. ‘Been a while since I shot anyone.’
‘It’s like riding a bicycle,’ said Gates, heading toward the stairs. ‘You never forget how.’
VI
Outside the door to 1218, Rimmer inserted the attendant’s electronic key into the security lock and opened the control panel.
‘Looks like Dallas must be in here, all right,’ he said, jerking his head up at the green light above the door. ‘This one’s not even pressurized. Kind of pointless coming to a hyperbaric chamber and not switching the thing on, wouldn’t you say? Like going to a restaurant to read a book.’
Ronica’s hand tightened on the little Matahari automatic in her coat pocket. Now that she had seen the instant effect of a clean head shot she was thinking she ought to shoot Rimmer in the same way. This time she would be ready for the blood — although her shoes were ruined, there was still her coat to think of. As soon as Rimmer opened the chamber door, and Dallas registered that it was him, she would do it. Just the way the director had ordered. As a demonstration of the company’s goodwill toward its most brilliant designer. But instead of opening the chamber manually, as she had been expecting, Rimmer started to adjust the pressure controls and, a second or two later, the green light over the door was replaced by a red one.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded.
‘What’s it look like?’ said Rimmer, not even turning around. ‘I’m putting him under pressure.’ He uttered a sadistic little chuckle. ‘Quite a lot of fucking pressure, as it happens.’
‘Shouldn’t you make sure he’s in there?’ asked Ronica. ‘I mean, suppose he’s not? Suppose it’s someone else? By the time you’ve finished screwing around with that pressure, it might be quite hard to identify if it’s Dallas, or not. And the director will want to know that you made sure, Rimmer.’
‘You heard the attendant, didn’t you?’ sneered Rimmer. ‘Dallas checked into 1218. Well, this is 1218. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to decipher what’s written on these doors, Ronica. Besides, the point of my screwing around with the pressure is not to kill Dallas, merely to make him more amenable to me offing him when eventually I do open the door. Dallas has got a gun, you see. And he’s quite likely to use it unless I can soften him up a bit first. Squeeze him with some breeze, so to speak.’
Ronica bit her voluptuous lips, wondering just how useful Dallas would remain to her employer by the time Rimmer had finished giving him the hyperbaric equivalent of peine forte et dure. There might be nothing left of his brilliant mind to make it worth her while returning him to the company. As Rimmer moved from the control panel, she caught a glimpse of the pressure gauge and a needle flickering dangerously close to the red section of the value arc. She realized she could delay no longer. It was now or never.
Still facing the door, Rimmer felt something as cold and metallic as the voice that controlled it pressed hard against his scrawny neck.
‘Turn it off,’ she said. ‘Now. Or I’ll kill you.’
There was something comic in his situation that made Rimmer laugh.
‘Is that a gun?’ He started to turn around and found the object gouging the flesh under his ear, pushing his head back toward the chamber door.
‘It’s not a stethoscope. Now turn that pressure off or I’ll give you the irrefutable proof.’
Rimmer reached for the hyperbaric controls and reversed the chamber pressure.
‘Empiricism,’ he said coolly. ‘That’s always been my problem. A linguistic expression can only be significant for a man like me if it’s accompanied by something that can be experienced.’
‘Now step away from the door. Slowly. I’d hate you to discover that my threat was more than just syntactical. For you the principle of verification is likely to come in the shape of a fifteen-millimeter bullet.’
‘Fifteen mill, eh?’ said Rimmer, moving away with the gun still pressed against the nape of his neck. ‘That’s quite a load you’re packing.’
‘More than enough to trepan your skull, Rimmer. I’ve already ruined a good pair of shoes. Don’t make me spoil this coat as well.’
‘Must be one of those little three-shot autos. Pussy gun. Been inside your panties all this time. Nice. Mmm, perhaps you’ll let me smell it later. After we’ve sorted out this small misunderstanding.’
‘I’ll only need one shot to put a groove in you. Now face the wall and keep your mouth shut.’ She glanced at the red light above the door, hoping to be able to avoid killing Rimmer until Dallas was there to witness it. Or maybe she would let Dallas kill Rimmer himself. If he was still up to it. Either way, killing Rimmer was going to be the easy part. Much harder still was going to be the sales pitch that followed — trying to convince Dallas that the director had not ordered Rimmer to murder Dallas’s family. Ronica could see no reason why he would believe her. Surely a man as intelligent as he would see through her little charade.
The red light stayed on as the chamber continued its slow return to sea-level pressure. With her gun still on Rimmer’s neck, Ronica’s eyes searched the pressure gauge impatiently. It was still only halfway back to normal. Gritting her perfect white teeth, she tried to contain the sour uncertainty she was feeling in her stomach. She was close enough to smell Rimmer’s bad breath as it blew back off the corridor wall. There was something less culpable about killing a man with offensive breath, she thought. Another glance at the pressure gauge. Almost there. Just a few more seconds and it would all be over.
‘Do you want to talk about this now?’ he asked.
‘Shut up.’
‘I love a dominant female. As it happens, I’m looking for a responsible and reliable person to set my ten-inch cock on fire for a home movie I’m making. Why don’t we go back to my car where we can discuss the details and possible financial compensation?’ He licked his lips and smiled. ‘Or maybe I’m asleep and this is all an erotic dream. Any minute I’ll have a nocturnal emission, all over the bottom sheet, and wake up.’
Ronica grabbed a handful of Rimmer’s lank and greasy hair to better grind the muzzle of her gun into the boil on Rimmer’s cheekbone.
‘If this is just a dream,’ she said, ‘it’s not one you’ll ever wake up from unless you shut your mouth.’
‘You’re not going to kill me for talking,’ persisted Rimmer. ‘Fact is, you’re not ready to kill me yet, otherwise you’d have done it already. Besides, you can’t live forever.’
With one side of his face pressed up against the wall he had a half-view of her out of the corner of his eye. Although it was hardly hot in the corridor, Ronica’s beautiful black face was shiny with perspiration, as if she still had a few doubts about what she was doing, as if — Rimmer smiled — as if she hadn’t quite convinced herself that she would squeeze the trigger. Fie was about to suggest that he wouldn’t die in his dreams, or any place else for that matter, so long as she still had the safety catch on on her little Matahari — a pretty obvious feint, he thought, but worth a try all the same — when a shot blasted its fortissimo way past his devious thought process.
Ronica’s scream persuaded him that he would feel no pain — at least not from the first shot anyway. She was already down on one knee, but in the second or two available to him before the next shot was heard, he couldn’t tell if she had been hit or not. What was clear was that someone else was doing the shooting, and with no regard for noise. Sometimes it was better that way. Scaring the shit out of people was more efficient than shooting them. Instinctively, Rimmer crouched down as a third shot came zipping up the corridor, bursting with lethal energy. He reached for his gun, pointed it at Ronica’s head, and then thought better of killing her right then and there — he might need all his ammunition to deal with whoever was doing the shooting. Having adjusted the volume in the handgrip, just to let the guy know he was well-heeled, Rimmer returned fire in the general direction from which the first three shots had come. All he could think of was that Ronica had been right after all — that Dallas couldn’t have been in his chamber. Who else would want to shoot at them?
Rimmer fired twice more, and, ignoring Ronica, who was now crouched down in the opposite doorway, he scrambled away in the nick of time as a hole the size of an orange got blasted from the wall he’d been leaning against.
‘Dallas?’ he yelled. ‘Is that you?’
More shots. And, thought Rimmer, more than just the one gun, surely. He fired back, only this time he and Dallas, or whoever it was, both hit the someone foolishly drawn into the corridor to inspect the noise — the same someone, a woman.
Rimmer kept on firing, not caring who he shot. What with the roar of the guns and the smell of cordite, he was enjoying his evening. There were two of them, he was certain of that now, concealed inside the opaque plastic-walled prism that housed the stairwell and helped light the far end of the curving corridor. Behind him, farther around the bend, the elevator shaft sank through a glazed circle in the floor. It was time to make himself scarce. If he could just cross the floor, he would be safe.
Right on cue, a head and shoulder appeared around the edge of another doorway. Rimmer aimed carefully, and as the target collapsed forward into the corridor, screaming loudly, he used him as cover to make his escape, rolling acrobatically across the floor before scrambling around the bend in the corridor, and out of the line of fire. Sensing Rimmer’s presence, the elevator shaft lit up as a car began its automatic ascent to the twelfth floor. Quickly Rimmer reloaded his gun and, from the comparative safety of his new position, glanced around the bend, hoping to get a clear shot at his attackers before making his getaway. Discovering his own line of fire partially blocked by the man he had shot, Rimmer finished him off with a couple of bullets in the chest. A second stolen glance confirmed that he no longer had a clear shot at Ronica, who was pressed into the protection afforded by a doorway. If he was going to settle this account, he was going to have to persuade her that he still cared what happened to her. When she made her own getaway bid and ran toward him, he would kill her.
‘Ronica?’ he yelled. ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here. I’ll cover you.’
‘With what? Kisses?’
‘Stop screwing around, Ronica. The elevator car’s here. You want to stay there and get shot, that’s up to you, but I’m leaving.’
Flattened against the smooth metallic surface of the chamber doorway, Ronica caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the door of 1218 opposite. She looked like some two-dimensional vignette from the Egyptian Book of the Dead — the deceased holding in her left hand a lotus flower. Except that the flower was a gun and she was, for the moment, very much alive. Not that she expected to stay that way the minute she showed herself to Rimmer.
‘You better get going then,’ she said, and seeing the slimmest margin of what looked like Rimmer’s head, she took careful aim with the Colt Matahari and fired.
Rimmer yelped like a dog as Ronica’s bullet hit the wall about an inch ahead of his face, sending up a small explosion of wood and metal splinters, one of which chamfered its way through the scrofulous tip of his earlobe like some large, stinging insect.
‘Bitch,’ he yelled, as he fired off a volley of shots as close as he was able to the doorway where she was still crouched. Then, finding his ear and neck wet with his own blood, and the elevator doors opening expectantly behind him, Rimmer made his exit. As soon as the doors closed and the elevator sank down into the shaft, Rimmer pressed himself back against the wall of the car, with his gun aimed at the glass ceiling and retreating circular lip that was the twelfth floor.
Ronica heard the elevator car descend into the shaft, and longed to go after Rimmer and fire her two remaining shots. But there were still the two gunmen at the other end of the corridor to think about. Her one abiding hope now was that one of them might turn out to be Dallas. Surely she might still convince him of her own good faith even without the corroborating evidence of Rimmer’s corpse. That could mean telling Dallas everything, but she might have little or no alternative. She was about to call out to him when she realized that the door to 1218 was now open, and standing there, a little unsteady, as might be expected of someone who had just been subjected to several hundred atmospheres, but still managing to aim a gun levelly at her braided head, was Dallas.
VII
‘Drop it,’ he said quietly. Dallas was still feeling lightheaded after his experience inside the hyperbaric chamber. Less than half an hour after Gates had left the room, he had been awakened by what felt like some kind of invisible force pressing him down in bed. The pressure quickly became so great that it had forced the blood into the back of his body, and for a minute or so, he had actually blacked out. Recovering consciousness, Dallas had discovered the pressure returning to normal, and hearing the sound of gunfire immediately outside his door, he reasoned first that Rimmer must have found him, and second that Gates must have found Rimmer. So he was a little surprised to find Ronica, a woman whom he recognized as an employee of Terotechnology, cowering in the opposite doorway. She threw her gun toward him. Dallas glanced one way and then the other, his eyes taking in the bodies that now lay on the corridor floor.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said irritably. The high pressure had given him a severe headache.
‘Saving you from Rimmer.’ Ronica stood up slowly as Dallas lowered his gun.
‘Where is he?’
‘Gone.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the elevator.
‘Tell me...’ Dallas shook his head as he tried to recall the woman’s name.
‘My name’s Ronica.’
‘How did you find me here?’
‘Rimmer. He got it out of your assistant.’
‘Dixy told him?’
Ronica told him what Rimmer had said to her, about Dixy’s pet program, and how Rimmer had threatened to erase it. Dallas nodded. Perhaps a little part of him was disappointed that Dixy should have betrayed him, but he was more interested to learn that his computer assistant should have demonstrated such an attachment to a simple pet program.
‘You okay, Dallas?’ It was Gates, followed closely by Lenina.
Dallas nodded. ‘Just two of my former colleagues. Thanks, Gates.’
‘Don’t thank me, thank Lenina. It was she who spotted this lady’s footprints.’
Lenina regarded Ronica with admiration: This was the first time she had seen a rich, healthy woman close up, and she liked what she saw. The big coat, the fabulous dress, the expensive jewelry, the braided hair, even Ronica’s bloodied shoes. Seeing Ronica and envying her well-groomed appearance sharpened Lenina’s appetite to go along with whatever scheme Dallas had in mind.
Ronica glanced down at her shoes and then smiled at Dallas. ‘You never know what you’re stepping into with Rimmer around.’
‘Who ordered you to save me from Rimmer?’ asked Dallas.
‘The director. With Tanaka dead he needs you back at Terotechnology. Wants to return to the status quo, with you as head of Design. Killing Rimmer was to be my opening bid. So you’d think it had all been a big misunderstanding. An overzealous Rimmer acting on his own authority, that kind of thing.’
‘And was he?’
‘No. Rimmer was just doing exactly what Simon King told him to do, just like me. Let Rimmer find Dallas, he told me, and then kill Rimmer. If possible, I was supposed to trump the guy within your eyeshot so you’d gain the impression that the company, as represented by myself, was on your side.’
‘So why pick you and not one of those thugs who work for Rimmer?’
Ronica looked vague. ‘Fresh blood? Someone who was uncontaminated by association with failure? I don’t know. You’d have to ask the dealer.’
Dallas nodded, estimating that Ronica was telling the truth.
‘So why are you showing me your hand?’ he asked.
Ronica let out a long breath and glanced up at the ceiling before staring back at Dallas. ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘Well, let’s see now. I already lost the first trick. And now that I’ve looked you straight in the eye I can’t see any other tricks going my way either. I think maybe the best I can expect now is another deal. Because Rimmer is probably already on his way back to the Zone, with some story for the director about how I screwed up. So I can’t go back there.’
‘What makes you so sure that I wouldn’t have believed your story? That Rimmer acted on his own initiative. Maybe I want to go back to the Zone.’
Ronica shook her head very firmly. ‘Like I said, Dallas, I’ve looked you in the eye.’
‘Maybe I could have let myself be persuaded.’
‘You don’t seem like the type prepared to forgive and forget something like losing a family. And certainly not after less than twenty-four hours.’ Ronica paused for a moment, as her certainty about the character of Dallas gave way to a growing anxiety about her new situation: She didn’t think Dallas and his two weird-looking friends would kill her in cold blood, but what was she to do with herself now? Could she risk going back to the Zone, let alone Terotechnology? Knowing what she did, which didn’t feel like very much, was there any certainty that the director, and Rimmer, would let her remain alive?
‘I do have one question.’ She swallowed. ‘Outside the Zone is no life. No life at all. What else is there, Dallas?’ She bit her lip back from trembling. ‘I’m scared.’
‘We should all be scared,’ declared Lenina. ‘The cops aren’t about to ignore a gun battle that leaves four dead, even in a sector like this. We should leave right now.’
‘Lenina’s right,’ said Gates.
‘Four dead?’ Dallas was frowning and could see only two bodies.
‘Rimmer shot two more on the floor below,’ explained Ronica.
‘How do we know it wasn’t you who shot them?’ inquired Lenina.
‘Does she look like a killer?’ Gates asked.
Lenina shrugged. ‘I don’t know what she looks like. But she’s the one with the red shoes.’ Her admiration of Ronica was quickly turning to jealousy.
Dallas shook his head.
‘Ronica was the one who turned down the pressure in my hyperbaric chamber,’ he said. ‘After Rimmer had so thoughtfully turned it up. Isn’t that so, Ronica?’
‘Yes. He wanted to soften you up, he said. So you wouldn’t be in a state to shoot him when he came through the door.’
‘Sounds like Rimmer, all right,’ admitted Dallas.
‘We ought to move,’ insisted Lenina.
Gates was already heading toward the elevator.
‘Ronica?’ said Dallas. ‘That question you asked. About the Zone? I’m not sure I’ve got an answer for you. At least not yet anyway. But if you’re prepared to wait, I might make it worth your while.’
‘That sounds like you’re asking me to come along with you,’ she said.
‘Sure. Why not? I could have just the kind of deal to interest you.’
9
I
All cities possess a nefarious quarter, a dark, sequestered place, an underworld, a place ruled by crime. This particular city’s underworld was known as the Black Hole, after the very violent region of space-time that lies at the center of every galaxy — the result of an imploded star — from which matter and energy cannot escape. Unlike Hades, who, except for the story of his wedding to Persephone, has next to no specific mythology, the city’s Black Hole was the source of almost as many mysteries and legends as there are forces at work in the creation of its cosmic namesake. Not the least of these stories concerned the trio of master criminals who ruled this unpitying lower world.
Kaplan, who was also known as the Spider, was confined to a walking machine, the victim of osteonecrosis[76] caused by the frequent and inadequately decompressed hyperbaric treatments he had received prior to obtaining the black market supply of blood that had cured him of P2. He was the principal buyer and supplier of illegal blood — much of it recombinant hemoglobin substitute, or simply fake — not to mention counterfeit pharmaceuticals. In one Far Eastern country, it has been estimated that as many as half the medicines held in the dispensaries of hospitals and clinics are fakes, sold by Kaplan’s people. Even the richer countries are not immune to this murderous trade. Rumor had it that Kaplan had been married and had fathered children himself, only to murder them for their bone marrow, in a vain attempt to be cured of his osteonecrosis.
Elstein was without question the cleverest of the three, being a trained physicist as well as a gifted amateur chemist. It was Elstein who formulated Depreneyl Amitriptyline, the first of the so-called paradeisotropic[77] drugs. Both Depreneyl and Amitriptyline are antidepressants: the first, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and the second, a tertiary amine tricyclic that boosts serotonin levels. The combination of the two produces a chemically induced near-death experience supposedly allowing the person taking the drug to peek through the gates of paradise without actually dying. The novelist Wystan Hughes in his book Heaven’s Gate[78] famously described his experiences with DA. However, the drug was very quickly outlawed when thousands of near-death experiences turned out to be the real thing. Elstein was sent to a Moon colony for five years. Upon his return to Earth, he originated the Lion Cult, recruiting hundreds of thousands of people prepared to pay large sums of money in order to be able to understand what was briefly assumed to be the Final Theory in Physics — the theory explaining everything from subatomic particles, atoms, and supernovae, to the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. For years after the death of Albert Einstein, scientists struggled to create an ultimate theory that would unite gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear force in one short equation. Einstein himself described the problem thus: ‘Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.’ A new cult was spawned when, for a while, it was believed that the lion had been finally captured with Hugh Van Creveld’s multidimensional Quantum Theory of Gravity. Called the Unique Theory, Van Creveld’s theorem, which its many supporters still argue has united Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum theory,[79] proved so fiendishly difficult that it was practically impossible for any layman to understand, which is where Elstein stepped in with his essentially skeptical doctrine of Universal Apologetics,[80] thereby founding the Lion Cult.
Following several attempts on his life by Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, Elstein disappeared into the Black Hole and thereafter devoted himself, with one eye on the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to becoming, like Professor Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of Crime.’
Cregeen was the third member of the unholy trinity, this ‘three-headed dog’ that lurked in the depths of the city’s underworld. He was the darkest, the most shadowy figure of the three, about whom very little was known. Was his name really Cregeen? Probably not. Could anyone say anything about his appearance? No. Rumor enveloped him like a poisonous miasma from some ancient sewer. It was said that Cregeen was the brains behind the Great Aerocarrier Robbery of 2039, when the P&O dirigible[81] was boarded in midair and relieved of its multimillion-dollar cargo, a Virgin communications satellite weighing twenty-five thousand pounds. Reportedly Cregeen had also masterminded the extortion of one billion dollars from the West African state of New Congo when he threatened to explode a small atomic weapon close to a natural nuclear fission reactor located deep underground in the jungle that had formed five hundred million years ago when large deposits of uranium began a chain reaction lasting hundreds of thousands of years.[82]
These three men formed a triumvirate that was behind most of the city’s organized crime. Sometimes it was thought that they were one man, so closely did they operate with one another; at other times, their reach was so extensive and their influence so omnipresent that it seemed they must be many more than just three. Naturally they had their accomplices, faces and names such as Galloway, Orff, Jondrette, Connor, Pike, Allum, Opie, Harris, Ford, and Reinbek, that were more familiar to the rank and file of the city’s criminal fraternity, among which, prior to his period of hard labor on the Moon, had numbered Rameses Gates.
It was to a light-industrial building close to the elevated section of a disused highway that Gates now led the way. This was Reinbek’s base of operations.
Reinbek was the close associate, not to say the instrument of Kaplan, and all of the faces who acted under his orders owed the same higher allegiance. Reinbek himself was a doctor and an ex-soldier. For many years after leaving the army he had been attached to the Criminal Intelligence Service in an interrogative capacity, which was a euphemistic way of saying that he had been a torturer. No one knows more about how much pain may safely be inflicted on the body of a valuable suspect in the search for information than a doctor. For, after all, what is surgery but the strictly controlled wounding — sometimes grievously — by one person on another? Some men are fascinated by the stars, others with fine porcelain, but whatever wonder the world contained for Reinbek was confined to the workings of the human body, and despite his trade, he was a skilled doctor — his victims were always in excellent hands. But as sometimes happens, one particular victim, finding himself restored to political favor, made it his mission to bring Reinbek to justice, or at least what he perceived to be justice. In reality, law and justice, always uncomfortable bedfellows, had long since parted company; law needs only to be applied to a set of facts, whereas justice requires that those facts be explained to the accused’s best advantage; in short, justice requires a concern for individual rights that was no longer anywhere in evidence. And so it was that pursued by the very system he had served so faithfully, Reinbek was obliged to disappear, and Kaplan, judging the former CIS man too valuable to kill, had given him a job instead.
Like most of those who lived in the Black Hole, Reinbek and his gang were nocturnal, taking counsel together, carrying out their criminal activities, even sometimes partying, during the many long hours of winter darkness. In daytime, fatigued by the events of the night, they found the darkest places to hang their hammocks and slept, like clusters of bats after a successful evening’s excursion in search of nourishment.
II
It was close to daybreak when Gates and the other three reached the former factory. Many of the nameless who had used the darkness to cloak their various pursuits were arriving back there, as if in flight from the rare sound of cockcrow — a rare sound indeed since outbreaks of Campylobacter jejeuni and Campylobacter coli[83] had made it strictly illegal to keep any variety of domestic fowl inside the city limits. A few of the ‘Black Holers,’ as they were known, remembered Gates and greeted him warmly. Others regarded his more affluent-looking companions with an almost demonic hunger, for affluence was the most obvious outward manifestation of good blood. It is written in the Talmud that ‘Man’s Soul has a loathing for blood.’[84] But among these particular men and women, the sight of so much healthy blood walking around in their midst was no more loathsome to their souls, assuming they had such a thing, than several gallons of pure alcohol might have looked to a sprawl of thirsty drunkards.
‘Better keep close to me,’ Gates instructed Dallas and Ronica, as several well-armed men led the quartet of arrivals up a couple of flights of escape stairs to the arrowhead-shaped glass room at the top of the building where Reinbek had his quarters. ‘Just in case someone tries to take a bite out of either of you.’
‘It is kind of tempting,’ admitted Lenina, bringing up the rear, her eyes on Ronica’s back, inhaling her expensive perfume. ‘Might be worth it to have a coat like that.’
‘If someone were to bite me, they’d probably fall asleep,’ yawned Dallas. ‘I could sleep for a hundred years.’
‘A hundred years is nothing to a man like Reinbek,’ said Gates. ‘You want to sleep for all eternity, he could fix it. That kind of sedative, the permanent kind, is something he gives people all the time. So be careful what you say, that is, in case you forget to keep your mouths shut and let me do all the talking. Because I know how to handle him. Reinbek’s mood can oscillate like the atoms of a hot metal pendulum. On account of the fact that he has a bipolar disorder. And I don’t mean he doesn’t like Antarctica.’
‘He’s a manic-depressive?’ frowned Dallas.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a comforting thought,’ observed Ronica. ‘I sure hope he’s taking his medication.’
‘Reinbek doesn’t believe in it,’ said Gates. ‘He says drugs interfere with his general intellect and limit his creativity and perceptual range.’
‘Creativity? Who does he think he is? Some kind of artist?’
‘Vincent van Gogh. Schumann. Tennyson. Who the fuck knows?’ growled Gates.
‘He sounds like just the kind of person you’d turn to in a crisis,’ remarked Dallas.
‘Yeah,’ echoed Ronica. ‘Why on earth bring us here?’
‘I brought you here for the simple reason that there’s nowhere else to go,’ said Gates. ‘And because only a crazy person would try and follow us here.’
‘Why don’t I find your explanation reassuring?’ Ronica asked Gates.
‘Will you listen to her?’ Lenina said scornfully. ‘The Queen of Sheba talking. Honey? Safety, hope, security, trust, confidence, and faith — none of those words mean shit down here. You left them all behind with your health care and your lip gloss when you drove your silky smooth black ass out of the Zone. The only expectation that means anything to bad bloods like me and Rameses is the prospect of an early death. You want reassurance, beautiful, then you’d better get yourself a rabbit’s foot.’
‘Yeah,’ laughed Gates. ‘Only first you gotta find yourself a rabbit.’
III
The large, starkly furnished room was dominated by a dolmen-sized fireplace where a tepee of logs big enough to have consumed Savonarola and all the vanities with him burned fiercely under the gaze of one who stared into the flames with an almost pyrolatrous enthusiasm.
‘Shit, Reinbek,’ exclaimed Gates, sniffing the air with relish. ‘Are those real logs?’
‘Yeah. I was just thinking what the world must have been like when there were lots of trees around. Can’t think why they cut ’em down. There’s not much heat in wood. But it’s better than holo-TV. You can see plenty of things in fire.’
‘Moses did,’ said Gates.
‘You should know, Rameses.’ Reinbek turned away from the fire to face the quartet of recent arrivals, and put his arm around the neck of a woman wearing an eyepatch who seemed to be his companion. ‘How are you, Gates?’
Gates nodded. ‘Not so bad.’
Reinbek stood up straight and smiled at Ronica.
‘What tribe are you?’ he asked her abruptly.
Ronica didn’t really think of herself as belonging to any tribe. No one would have asked her such a question in the Zone. But she knew what Reinbek meant and tried to humor him. ‘Originally, I’m Masai,’ she said.
‘And what’s the blood quantum on that?’[85]
‘Qualification is set at quite a high level,’ she explained. ‘You have to show one-eighth pure Masai blood. As it happens, I’m a quarter-blood.’
Reinbek nodded. ‘Me,’ he said, ‘I’m from a little town near Hamburg.’
Tall and thin, with long gray-blond hair, a straggly beard, and dark shadows under his blue eyes, Reinbek reminded her of a painting she had once seen, a self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer. Or maybe it had been of some saint or maybe an angel. She couldn’t remember, which was a sure sign that the Connex drug was wearing off now. And there was certainly nothing saintly about what Reinbek did next. Suddenly he was behind her, with one arm across her chest and arms, and pressing the cold edge of a long thin blade against the side of her neck.
‘I’m half German,’ he breathed. ‘But as anyone will tell you, I’m a full-blooded sadist. Isn’t that right, Rameses?’
Gates spoke carefully. It was clear there was no point in trying to pull Ronica away from Reinbek. He would almost certainly have cut her throat just for the pleasure of it. ‘Let her go, Reinbek,’ he said. ‘She’s not done you any harm.’
‘What do you weigh, Miss Masai?’
‘Around one forty,’ she answered coolly.
‘Mmmm, that’s about eleven pints of RES Class One,’ Reinbek said thoughtfully. ‘More than enough to fix up my friend there.’ He nodded toward his female companion. ‘What do you say, Miss Masai? Shall I cut this artery and fetch a bucket?’
‘And risk spilling it?’ said Ronica. ‘Sounds like a waste of good blood to me.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t spill much. Only fifteen percent of your blood is in your arteries at any one time. Mostly the blood’s in your veins. They’ve got seventy percent of the load.’
‘C’mon, Reinbek. Stop fooling around,’ said Gates. ‘We’ve got some business to talk about.’
With a greasy thumb, Reinbek stretched the skin across Ronica’s carotid artery, as if he really might cut it with his blade. The pressure made Ronica feel momentarily faint, which only served to remind her of how the word ‘garrotte’ had the same Greek origin as ‘carotid.’ That, she told herself, was the last of the Connex working. What a night this was turning out to be. Somehow she was managing to keep her nerve, even when she found Reinbek’s hand underneath her dress and between her breasts, pressing hard against her sternum. He was searching for her heartbeat. It wasn’t difficult to find. She reckoned her aorta must have been receiving blood pumped from her left ventricle at the rate of over one hundred and forty beats a minute — twice her resting rate. She was even feeling a little out of breath.
‘I can hear your blood talking to me, Miss Masai,’ Reinbek said gleefully. ‘Lots of it, too. It’s a fine heart you have there, miss. What if I was to cut it out and eat it?’
In view of what Gates had said about Reinbek’s mental state, she tried to maintain the illusion of calm, though she was close to panic. Even Rimmer had not frightened her this much.
‘Then you’d be a cannibal,’ she said.
‘True,’ grinned Reinbek. ‘You know, maybe I should just sell your blood to the highest bidder. Eleven pints of the ice you’ve got in your veins ought to be worth a great deal.’
‘Eleven pints,’ sneered Gates. ‘That’s a pinprick compared to what we’re offering to sell.’
‘Much less than a pinprick,’ echoed Dallas. ‘It’s a single cell compared to what we’re offering.’
Reinbek released his hold on Ronica and smiled broadly at her.
‘I like you,’ he said, pocketing the knife, his mood pitching in the opposite direction now. ‘I do admire a girl who’s got real blood in her veins. Sangfroid, my dear. You’ve got it in spades. That’s what you’ve got. Yes indeed. Whole fridges full of the stuff. Yes, you’ll do very well, Miss Masai.’
Ronica rubbed her neck with relief and said, ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ Reinbek lit up a large cigar and puffed it into action. ‘Now then, Rameses. What exactly are we talking about here?’
‘The opportunity of a lifetime. Lots of people’s lifetimes, I shouldn’t wonder. Mine included. We’re talking about the seat of the soul here, Reinbek. Life’s microcosm.’
‘Well I hear that, Rameses old friend. He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the earth,[86] has he not? I do believe he has. What kind of blood are we talking about here, Rameses. And how much?’
‘Pure erythrocyte. The real McCoy. No substitute. And in the kind of quantities that Moses might use to drown an Egyptian army or two.’
‘I am metabolized by your information, Rameses. My humor improves. Black bile and phlegm give way to blood, as you might expect. Where exactly is this red sea of yours?’
‘I’ll only tell Kaplan.’
‘Then why do you need me?’
‘Everyone knows, you’re Kaplan’s liver. Such a heavy flow of blood must come through you first. You could fix a meeting.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Protection. Somewhere to sleep. Food.’
Reinbek glanced at Dallas as if judging the truth of Gates’s story.
‘The red sea, huh?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’ Gates nodded toward Dallas. ‘And with an angel promised as a guide.’
IV
Time: Perhaps it is best understood in the way a story is told. Most stories seem to have a narrative flow, which is of course how most people would characterize time: as something that moves inexorably forward. But of course this is simply not so. Time is not a sequence of events, any more than a story needs to be told this way. That time seems to pass by is only a matter of perception, between what is now and what was then. The present exists only subjectively. We can look at one representation of the present and compare it with another representation of the present, and be forgiven for thinking that there is motion between these moments. There is not. No more than there is real motion between the way two writers will deal with a lapse of time. Just as one author will give you a summary of ten years in two pages, another will spend thirty pages to render a conversation lasting as many minutes.
There are two lapses of time to take account of here, although of course we now know that there has been no real change in time itself, merely the entirely understandable perception that this is what has occurred. When we meet Dallas, Gates, Ronica, and Lenina again — when they do indeed meet Kaplan — only a few days shall have elapsed.
After the meeting with Kaplan, the second lapse of time that occurs is rather longer, being of several months in duration — winter shall have become summer.
I dare to mention these not for the purpose of once more drawing myself to the reader’s attention but to say something about the nature of time — in part, I have already done so — and life itself This is something that will help to prepare the general reader for that which follows. It need not be understood, merely recognized (in the same sense that while most people recognize the existence of gravity, they do not necessarily understand how it works in a way that would enable them to explain it to someone else) that the quantum nature of the universe affects everything — physics, evolution, what can be computed, and what can be known.
The notion of time is basic for physics, and quantum theory, which was originally developed to explain the properties of atoms and molecules, quickly rendered Newton’s concept of an absolute ideal of time obsolete. Time is now recognized to be a quantum concept. Important, yes, but of much greater significance is the smaller matter of life itself — something else that classical Newtonian physics could never quite accommodate. Because life is not something governed by the laws of physics. The fact is that life is one of the laws of physics, as fundamental to the universe as time and space are themselves; and just as the inherent power of physics may be harnessed and unleashed in the shape of a nuclear weapon, the same is true of life. This is the key to understanding. Given another epoch why shouldn’t everything be understood? After all, and to speak figuratively, there is so much more of the future than there is of the past.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, and in a big way. The second lapse of time will find our characters in space, orbiting Earth, and on their way to the Moon for the purpose of robbing the First National Blood Bank, and to find the new life that awaits them there. Before that, as I said earlier, we have to introduce them all to Kaplan.
V
He was an unnerving man to look at because he looked so very like a spider. It has already been mentioned that he was the victim of a bone-wasting disease that left him confined to a walking machine. What has not yet been explained is that Kaplan’s walking machine was an arachnidroid,[87] an intelligent control system equipped with eight legs, each with its own artificial nervous system. A spiderlike robot had the advantage of always having four legs on the ground at the same time, thus forming a very stable platform for a human passenger, without any loss of speed or mobility. Each hydraulic leg was five feet long with four independent motorized joints that helped the droid both to surmount the most difficult obstacles and to achieve a top speed of almost thirty miles an hour. Kaplan occupied a gimbaled harness on top of the droid’s abdomen. It was hardly surprising then that Kaplan should be known as the Spider, nor that he was almost as interested in these common terrestrial creatures as he was in controlling the supply of illegally obtained human blood.
Gates and Dallas met Kaplan in the disused mosque where he had his headquarters. Built during the last years of the twentieth century, before the anti-Muslim pogroms that accompanied the Great Middle Eastern War,[88] the building was essentially an open space, roofed over, with a minaret used by Kaplan’s men as a communications tower and lookout post. Inside the mosque itself thermoelectric Persian carpets covered the marble floor, helping to heat the lofty, echoing interior against the winter cold. At one end of the floor, and pointing in what had once been the direction of Mecca, was a tall semicircular niche[89] once reserved for the prayer leader,[90] and now the spot where Kaplan had what he called his web. The interior of the niche was covered in relief tile-work with a classic three-dimensional cobweb design, replacing the Qur’anic inscriptions placed there by the original architects as a reminder of the faith. To the right of the niche was a set of stone steps that led up to the pulpit once used by a preacher[91] but which now functioned as the vantage point for two heavily armed bodyguards.
‘Nice place you have here,’ remarked Gates.
‘I sincerely hope you’re not going to try and be amusing,’ said Kaplan, tapping the floor impatiently with one of his eight legs. ‘Because you’d be wasting your time, and more importantly, you’d be wasting mine. There’s very little I find amusing that doesn’t involve some kind of bipedal suffering. If I do have a sense of humor, it’s the cardinal kind, as devised by Galen,[92] specifically blood. Until he came along people believed that the arteries carried air, not blood, and that when someone was cut the blood rushed in to fill the gaps, as it were. His interest was academic, of course. Mine’s purely financial. So don’t waste my time. Where is it — this large supply of blood that Reinbek told me you have access to?’
‘I wouldn’t say that access is exactly the right word,’ said Gates. ‘Let me explain.’
‘Yes, I think you had better.’
‘My partner and I are intent upon securing a market for our supply before we go and get it. And of course you are the major—’
‘Do you mean to tell me that you don’t actually have this red sea you spoke of?’
‘Not as such, no.’
‘Where is it?’
‘In a bank.’ It was Dallas who answered, with an insouciance that Gates found more than a little unnerving. ‘To be exact, the First National Blood Bank, on the Moon.’
‘Yes, I know where that is,’ Kaplan said testily. ‘Is this a joke? If so, then it’s even less amusing than the first one.’
‘It’s no joke,’ said Dallas, looking around the mosque’s interior like a curious tourist.
‘Then do I understand you correctly? You’re planning to rob the First National?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any particular reason you picked that bank?’ asked Kaplan.
‘Yes,’ Dallas said again. ‘It has by far the largest supply of blood. Over twenty million liters: forty million units. It’s the first choice in component storage,’ he added, parroting the advertising slogan that appeared in every magazine and on neon signs throughout the Zone.
‘With good reason,’ said Kaplan. ‘It’s impregnable. The high-security environment that protects the place is the very best. The state of the science.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If I sound like I’m stating the obvious, it’s because the obvious seems to need repetition,’ said Kaplan. ‘The place is impregnable. You do know that.’
‘I should know,’ said Dallas. ‘I did design the place.’
Kaplan was silent for a long minute. He rocked up and down on all eight legs and then, slowly, walked out of the niche until he stood only a few inches from Dallas. ‘Did you say what I thought you said?’
‘Yes. I said I designed the bank. And many others like it. Until a few days ago I was chief designer at Terotechnology. I assume you’ve heard of that company.’
‘Oh, indeed I have. And how is it that a god like you has descended from Mount Olympus to come among us mere mortals in the Black Hole?’
Dallas told him the bare bones of his own personal story, to which he added only the vague outline of a plan.
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ said Kaplan. ‘Spiders do have hearts, you know. Interestingly enough, they are as long as their whole abdomens. So if this droid I’m forced to sit on was the real thing, its heart would be three feet long.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Dallas, who could only feel revulsion for the half-human-looking creature in front of him.
‘But not nearly as fascinating as you and your special skills.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘You really think you could pull off something like that?’
‘With your help,’ said Dallas. ‘I’ll need a few things. Many of them I’ll be able to pay for myself. I’m not a poor man. Money’s not the reason I’m doing this.’
‘Revenge?’
‘What else?’
‘So tell me what you’ll need.’
Dallas had given the matter some considerable thought. They were going to need a spaceship, new identities and travel documentation, Clean Bill of Health certificates, life-support suits, a virtual reality suite on which they would test a model of the plan, a space fridge, food and water for at least three weeks, a telecommunications and detection screen, a Motion Parallax generator, electron-beam welding tools, lithium hydroxide CO2 collectors, piezoceramic vibration absorbers, infrared headsets, power spectacles, headtop computers, an electric car, and, of course, transfusion facilities for those of his team who had the virus.
He thought of the various people he would need in his ideal team: a quantum cryptographer, an aeronautical engineer, a navigations and communications engineer, a computer engineer, an electrical engineer, a virtual reality model-maker, and a mechanical engineer. He knew there was no way he would find half of them, and many of their vital skills would have to be acquired by his own team using artificial aids. This all passed through his mind in just the few seconds before he answered Kaplan’s question.
‘I’ll tell you what I need most. I need a recent amputee,’ he said. ‘That’s right,’ he added, noting the puzzled look that appeared on Kaplan’s wasted-looking face. ‘I need a man who has recently lost an arm.’
I
All cities possess a nefarious quarter, a dark, sequestered place, an underworld, a place ruled by crime. This particular city’s underworld was known as the Black Hole, after the very violent region of space-time that lies at the center of every galaxy — the result of an imploded star — from which matter and energy cannot escape. Unlike Hades, who, except for the story of his wedding to Persephone, has next to no specific mythology, the city’s Black Hole was the source of almost as many mysteries and legends as there are forces at work in the creation of its cosmic namesake. Not the least of these stories concerned the trio of master criminals who ruled this unpitying lower world.
Kaplan, who was also known as the Spider, was confined to a walking machine, the victim of osteonecrosis[76] caused by the frequent and inadequately decompressed hyperbaric treatments he had received prior to obtaining the black market supply of blood that had cured him of P2. He was the principal buyer and supplier of illegal blood — much of it recombinant hemoglobin substitute, or simply fake — not to mention counterfeit pharmaceuticals. In one Far Eastern country, it has been estimated that as many as half the medicines held in the dispensaries of hospitals and clinics are fakes, sold by Kaplan’s people. Even the richer countries are not immune to this murderous trade. Rumor had it that Kaplan had been married and had fathered children himself, only to murder them for their bone marrow, in a vain attempt to be cured of his osteonecrosis.
Elstein was without question the cleverest of the three, being a trained physicist as well as a gifted amateur chemist. It was Elstein who formulated Depreneyl Amitriptyline, the first of the so-called paradeisotropic[77] drugs. Both Depreneyl and Amitriptyline are antidepressants: the first, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and the second, a tertiary amine tricyclic that boosts serotonin levels. The combination of the two produces a chemically induced near-death experience supposedly allowing the person taking the drug to peek through the gates of paradise without actually dying. The novelist Wystan Hughes in his book Heaven’s Gate[78] famously described his experiences with DA. However, the drug was very quickly outlawed when thousands of near-death experiences turned out to be the real thing. Elstein was sent to a Moon colony for five years. Upon his return to Earth, he originated the Lion Cult, recruiting hundreds of thousands of people prepared to pay large sums of money in order to be able to understand what was briefly assumed to be the Final Theory in Physics — the theory explaining everything from subatomic particles, atoms, and supernovae, to the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. For years after the death of Albert Einstein, scientists struggled to create an ultimate theory that would unite gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear force in one short equation. Einstein himself described the problem thus: ‘Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.’ A new cult was spawned when, for a while, it was believed that the lion had been finally captured with Hugh Van Creveld’s multidimensional Quantum Theory of Gravity. Called the Unique Theory, Van Creveld’s theorem, which its many supporters still argue has united Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum theory,[79] proved so fiendishly difficult that it was practically impossible for any layman to understand, which is where Elstein stepped in with his essentially skeptical doctrine of Universal Apologetics,[80] thereby founding the Lion Cult.
Following several attempts on his life by Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, Elstein disappeared into the Black Hole and thereafter devoted himself, with one eye on the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to becoming, like Professor Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of Crime.’
Cregeen was the third member of the unholy trinity, this ‘three-headed dog’ that lurked in the depths of the city’s underworld. He was the darkest, the most shadowy figure of the three, about whom very little was known. Was his name really Cregeen? Probably not. Could anyone say anything about his appearance? No. Rumor enveloped him like a poisonous miasma from some ancient sewer. It was said that Cregeen was the brains behind the Great Aerocarrier Robbery of 2039, when the P&O dirigible[81] was boarded in midair and relieved of its multimillion-dollar cargo, a Virgin communications satellite weighing twenty-five thousand pounds. Reportedly Cregeen had also masterminded the extortion of one billion dollars from the West African state of New Congo when he threatened to explode a small atomic weapon close to a natural nuclear fission reactor located deep underground in the jungle that had formed five hundred million years ago when large deposits of uranium began a chain reaction lasting hundreds of thousands of years.[82]
These three men formed a triumvirate that was behind most of the city’s organized crime. Sometimes it was thought that they were one man, so closely did they operate with one another; at other times, their reach was so extensive and their influence so omnipresent that it seemed they must be many more than just three. Naturally they had their accomplices, faces and names such as Galloway, Orff, Jondrette, Connor, Pike, Allum, Opie, Harris, Ford, and Reinbek, that were more familiar to the rank and file of the city’s criminal fraternity, among which, prior to his period of hard labor on the Moon, had numbered Rameses Gates.
It was to a light-industrial building close to the elevated section of a disused highway that Gates now led the way. This was Reinbek’s base of operations.
Reinbek was the close associate, not to say the instrument of Kaplan, and all of the faces who acted under his orders owed the same higher allegiance. Reinbek himself was a doctor and an ex-soldier. For many years after leaving the army he had been attached to the Criminal Intelligence Service in an interrogative capacity, which was a euphemistic way of saying that he had been a torturer. No one knows more about how much pain may safely be inflicted on the body of a valuable suspect in the search for information than a doctor. For, after all, what is surgery but the strictly controlled wounding — sometimes grievously — by one person on another? Some men are fascinated by the stars, others with fine porcelain, but whatever wonder the world contained for Reinbek was confined to the workings of the human body, and despite his trade, he was a skilled doctor — his victims were always in excellent hands. But as sometimes happens, one particular victim, finding himself restored to political favor, made it his mission to bring Reinbek to justice, or at least what he perceived to be justice. In reality, law and justice, always uncomfortable bedfellows, had long since parted company; law needs only to be applied to a set of facts, whereas justice requires that those facts be explained to the accused’s best advantage; in short, justice requires a concern for individual rights that was no longer anywhere in evidence. And so it was that pursued by the very system he had served so faithfully, Reinbek was obliged to disappear, and Kaplan, judging the former CIS man too valuable to kill, had given him a job instead.
Like most of those who lived in the Black Hole, Reinbek and his gang were nocturnal, taking counsel together, carrying out their criminal activities, even sometimes partying, during the many long hours of winter darkness. In daytime, fatigued by the events of the night, they found the darkest places to hang their hammocks and slept, like clusters of bats after a successful evening’s excursion in search of nourishment.
II
It was close to daybreak when Gates and the other three reached the former factory. Many of the nameless who had used the darkness to cloak their various pursuits were arriving back there, as if in flight from the rare sound of cockcrow — a rare sound indeed since outbreaks of Campylobacter jejeuni and Campylobacter coli[83] had made it strictly illegal to keep any variety of domestic fowl inside the city limits. A few of the ‘Black Holers,’ as they were known, remembered Gates and greeted him warmly. Others regarded his more affluent-looking companions with an almost demonic hunger, for affluence was the most obvious outward manifestation of good blood. It is written in the Talmud that ‘Man’s Soul has a loathing for blood.’[84] But among these particular men and women, the sight of so much healthy blood walking around in their midst was no more loathsome to their souls, assuming they had such a thing, than several gallons of pure alcohol might have looked to a sprawl of thirsty drunkards.
‘Better keep close to me,’ Gates instructed Dallas and Ronica, as several well-armed men led the quartet of arrivals up a couple of flights of escape stairs to the arrowhead-shaped glass room at the top of the building where Reinbek had his quarters. ‘Just in case someone tries to take a bite out of either of you.’
‘It is kind of tempting,’ admitted Lenina, bringing up the rear, her eyes on Ronica’s back, inhaling her expensive perfume. ‘Might be worth it to have a coat like that.’
‘If someone were to bite me, they’d probably fall asleep,’ yawned Dallas. ‘I could sleep for a hundred years.’
‘A hundred years is nothing to a man like Reinbek,’ said Gates. ‘You want to sleep for all eternity, he could fix it. That kind of sedative, the permanent kind, is something he gives people all the time. So be careful what you say, that is, in case you forget to keep your mouths shut and let me do all the talking. Because I know how to handle him. Reinbek’s mood can oscillate like the atoms of a hot metal pendulum. On account of the fact that he has a bipolar disorder. And I don’t mean he doesn’t like Antarctica.’
‘He’s a manic-depressive?’ frowned Dallas.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a comforting thought,’ observed Ronica. ‘I sure hope he’s taking his medication.’
‘Reinbek doesn’t believe in it,’ said Gates. ‘He says drugs interfere with his general intellect and limit his creativity and perceptual range.’
‘Creativity? Who does he think he is? Some kind of artist?’
‘Vincent van Gogh. Schumann. Tennyson. Who the fuck knows?’ growled Gates.
‘He sounds like just the kind of person you’d turn to in a crisis,’ remarked Dallas.
‘Yeah,’ echoed Ronica. ‘Why on earth bring us here?’
‘I brought you here for the simple reason that there’s nowhere else to go,’ said Gates. ‘And because only a crazy person would try and follow us here.’
‘Why don’t I find your explanation reassuring?’ Ronica asked Gates.
‘Will you listen to her?’ Lenina said scornfully. ‘The Queen of Sheba talking. Honey? Safety, hope, security, trust, confidence, and faith — none of those words mean shit down here. You left them all behind with your health care and your lip gloss when you drove your silky smooth black ass out of the Zone. The only expectation that means anything to bad bloods like me and Rameses is the prospect of an early death. You want reassurance, beautiful, then you’d better get yourself a rabbit’s foot.’
‘Yeah,’ laughed Gates. ‘Only first you gotta find yourself a rabbit.’
III
The large, starkly furnished room was dominated by a dolmen-sized fireplace where a tepee of logs big enough to have consumed Savonarola and all the vanities with him burned fiercely under the gaze of one who stared into the flames with an almost pyrolatrous enthusiasm.
‘Shit, Reinbek,’ exclaimed Gates, sniffing the air with relish. ‘Are those real logs?’
‘Yeah. I was just thinking what the world must have been like when there were lots of trees around. Can’t think why they cut ’em down. There’s not much heat in wood. But it’s better than holo-TV. You can see plenty of things in fire.’
‘Moses did,’ said Gates.
‘You should know, Rameses.’ Reinbek turned away from the fire to face the quartet of recent arrivals, and put his arm around the neck of a woman wearing an eyepatch who seemed to be his companion. ‘How are you, Gates?’
Gates nodded. ‘Not so bad.’
Reinbek stood up straight and smiled at Ronica.
‘What tribe are you?’ he asked her abruptly.
Ronica didn’t really think of herself as belonging to any tribe. No one would have asked her such a question in the Zone. But she knew what Reinbek meant and tried to humor him. ‘Originally, I’m Masai,’ she said.
‘And what’s the blood quantum on that?’[85]
‘Qualification is set at quite a high level,’ she explained. ‘You have to show one-eighth pure Masai blood. As it happens, I’m a quarter-blood.’
Reinbek nodded. ‘Me,’ he said, ‘I’m from a little town near Hamburg.’
Tall and thin, with long gray-blond hair, a straggly beard, and dark shadows under his blue eyes, Reinbek reminded her of a painting she had once seen, a self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer. Or maybe it had been of some saint or maybe an angel. She couldn’t remember, which was a sure sign that the Connex drug was wearing off now. And there was certainly nothing saintly about what Reinbek did next. Suddenly he was behind her, with one arm across her chest and arms, and pressing the cold edge of a long thin blade against the side of her neck.
‘I’m half German,’ he breathed. ‘But as anyone will tell you, I’m a full-blooded sadist. Isn’t that right, Rameses?’
Gates spoke carefully. It was clear there was no point in trying to pull Ronica away from Reinbek. He would almost certainly have cut her throat just for the pleasure of it. ‘Let her go, Reinbek,’ he said. ‘She’s not done you any harm.’
‘What do you weigh, Miss Masai?’
‘Around one forty,’ she answered coolly.
‘Mmmm, that’s about eleven pints of RES Class One,’ Reinbek said thoughtfully. ‘More than enough to fix up my friend there.’ He nodded toward his female companion. ‘What do you say, Miss Masai? Shall I cut this artery and fetch a bucket?’
‘And risk spilling it?’ said Ronica. ‘Sounds like a waste of good blood to me.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t spill much. Only fifteen percent of your blood is in your arteries at any one time. Mostly the blood’s in your veins. They’ve got seventy percent of the load.’
‘C’mon, Reinbek. Stop fooling around,’ said Gates. ‘We’ve got some business to talk about.’
With a greasy thumb, Reinbek stretched the skin across Ronica’s carotid artery, as if he really might cut it with his blade. The pressure made Ronica feel momentarily faint, which only served to remind her of how the word ‘garrotte’ had the same Greek origin as ‘carotid.’ That, she told herself, was the last of the Connex working. What a night this was turning out to be. Somehow she was managing to keep her nerve, even when she found Reinbek’s hand underneath her dress and between her breasts, pressing hard against her sternum. He was searching for her heartbeat. It wasn’t difficult to find. She reckoned her aorta must have been receiving blood pumped from her left ventricle at the rate of over one hundred and forty beats a minute — twice her resting rate. She was even feeling a little out of breath.
‘I can hear your blood talking to me, Miss Masai,’ Reinbek said gleefully. ‘Lots of it, too. It’s a fine heart you have there, miss. What if I was to cut it out and eat it?’
In view of what Gates had said about Reinbek’s mental state, she tried to maintain the illusion of calm, though she was close to panic. Even Rimmer had not frightened her this much.
‘Then you’d be a cannibal,’ she said.
‘True,’ grinned Reinbek. ‘You know, maybe I should just sell your blood to the highest bidder. Eleven pints of the ice you’ve got in your veins ought to be worth a great deal.’
‘Eleven pints,’ sneered Gates. ‘That’s a pinprick compared to what we’re offering to sell.’
‘Much less than a pinprick,’ echoed Dallas. ‘It’s a single cell compared to what we’re offering.’
Reinbek released his hold on Ronica and smiled broadly at her.
‘I like you,’ he said, pocketing the knife, his mood pitching in the opposite direction now. ‘I do admire a girl who’s got real blood in her veins. Sangfroid, my dear. You’ve got it in spades. That’s what you’ve got. Yes indeed. Whole fridges full of the stuff. Yes, you’ll do very well, Miss Masai.’
Ronica rubbed her neck with relief and said, ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ Reinbek lit up a large cigar and puffed it into action. ‘Now then, Rameses. What exactly are we talking about here?’
‘The opportunity of a lifetime. Lots of people’s lifetimes, I shouldn’t wonder. Mine included. We’re talking about the seat of the soul here, Reinbek. Life’s microcosm.’
‘Well I hear that, Rameses old friend. He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the earth,[86] has he not? I do believe he has. What kind of blood are we talking about here, Rameses. And how much?’
‘Pure erythrocyte. The real McCoy. No substitute. And in the kind of quantities that Moses might use to drown an Egyptian army or two.’
‘I am metabolized by your information, Rameses. My humor improves. Black bile and phlegm give way to blood, as you might expect. Where exactly is this red sea of yours?’
‘I’ll only tell Kaplan.’
‘Then why do you need me?’
‘Everyone knows, you’re Kaplan’s liver. Such a heavy flow of blood must come through you first. You could fix a meeting.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Protection. Somewhere to sleep. Food.’
Reinbek glanced at Dallas as if judging the truth of Gates’s story.
‘The red sea, huh?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’ Gates nodded toward Dallas. ‘And with an angel promised as a guide.’
IV
Time: Perhaps it is best understood in the way a story is told. Most stories seem to have a narrative flow, which is of course how most people would characterize time: as something that moves inexorably forward. But of course this is simply not so. Time is not a sequence of events, any more than a story needs to be told this way. That time seems to pass by is only a matter of perception, between what is now and what was then. The present exists only subjectively. We can look at one representation of the present and compare it with another representation of the present, and be forgiven for thinking that there is motion between these moments. There is not. No more than there is real motion between the way two writers will deal with a lapse of time. Just as one author will give you a summary of ten years in two pages, another will spend thirty pages to render a conversation lasting as many minutes.
There are two lapses of time to take account of here, although of course we now know that there has been no real change in time itself, merely the entirely understandable perception that this is what has occurred. When we meet Dallas, Gates, Ronica, and Lenina again — when they do indeed meet Kaplan — only a few days shall have elapsed.
After the meeting with Kaplan, the second lapse of time that occurs is rather longer, being of several months in duration — winter shall have become summer.
I dare to mention these not for the purpose of once more drawing myself to the reader’s attention but to say something about the nature of time — in part, I have already done so — and life itself This is something that will help to prepare the general reader for that which follows. It need not be understood, merely recognized (in the same sense that while most people recognize the existence of gravity, they do not necessarily understand how it works in a way that would enable them to explain it to someone else) that the quantum nature of the universe affects everything — physics, evolution, what can be computed, and what can be known.
The notion of time is basic for physics, and quantum theory, which was originally developed to explain the properties of atoms and molecules, quickly rendered Newton’s concept of an absolute ideal of time obsolete. Time is now recognized to be a quantum concept. Important, yes, but of much greater significance is the smaller matter of life itself — something else that classical Newtonian physics could never quite accommodate. Because life is not something governed by the laws of physics. The fact is that life is one of the laws of physics, as fundamental to the universe as time and space are themselves; and just as the inherent power of physics may be harnessed and unleashed in the shape of a nuclear weapon, the same is true of life. This is the key to understanding. Given another epoch why shouldn’t everything be understood? After all, and to speak figuratively, there is so much more of the future than there is of the past.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, and in a big way. The second lapse of time will find our characters in space, orbiting Earth, and on their way to the Moon for the purpose of robbing the First National Blood Bank, and to find the new life that awaits them there. Before that, as I said earlier, we have to introduce them all to Kaplan.
V
He was an unnerving man to look at because he looked so very like a spider. It has already been mentioned that he was the victim of a bone-wasting disease that left him confined to a walking machine. What has not yet been explained is that Kaplan’s walking machine was an arachnidroid,[87] an intelligent control system equipped with eight legs, each with its own artificial nervous system. A spiderlike robot had the advantage of always having four legs on the ground at the same time, thus forming a very stable platform for a human passenger, without any loss of speed or mobility. Each hydraulic leg was five feet long with four independent motorized joints that helped the droid both to surmount the most difficult obstacles and to achieve a top speed of almost thirty miles an hour. Kaplan occupied a gimbaled harness on top of the droid’s abdomen. It was hardly surprising then that Kaplan should be known as the Spider, nor that he was almost as interested in these common terrestrial creatures as he was in controlling the supply of illegally obtained human blood.
Gates and Dallas met Kaplan in the disused mosque where he had his headquarters. Built during the last years of the twentieth century, before the anti-Muslim pogroms that accompanied the Great Middle Eastern War,[88] the building was essentially an open space, roofed over, with a minaret used by Kaplan’s men as a communications tower and lookout post. Inside the mosque itself thermoelectric Persian carpets covered the marble floor, helping to heat the lofty, echoing interior against the winter cold. At one end of the floor, and pointing in what had once been the direction of Mecca, was a tall semicircular niche[89] once reserved for the prayer leader,[90] and now the spot where Kaplan had what he called his web. The interior of the niche was covered in relief tile-work with a classic three-dimensional cobweb design, replacing the Qur’anic inscriptions placed there by the original architects as a reminder of the faith. To the right of the niche was a set of stone steps that led up to the pulpit once used by a preacher[91] but which now functioned as the vantage point for two heavily armed bodyguards.
‘Nice place you have here,’ remarked Gates.
‘I sincerely hope you’re not going to try and be amusing,’ said Kaplan, tapping the floor impatiently with one of his eight legs. ‘Because you’d be wasting your time, and more importantly, you’d be wasting mine. There’s very little I find amusing that doesn’t involve some kind of bipedal suffering. If I do have a sense of humor, it’s the cardinal kind, as devised by Galen,[92] specifically blood. Until he came along people believed that the arteries carried air, not blood, and that when someone was cut the blood rushed in to fill the gaps, as it were. His interest was academic, of course. Mine’s purely financial. So don’t waste my time. Where is it — this large supply of blood that Reinbek told me you have access to?’
‘I wouldn’t say that access is exactly the right word,’ said Gates. ‘Let me explain.’
‘Yes, I think you had better.’
‘My partner and I are intent upon securing a market for our supply before we go and get it. And of course you are the major—’
‘Do you mean to tell me that you don’t actually have this red sea you spoke of?’
‘Not as such, no.’
‘Where is it?’
‘In a bank.’ It was Dallas who answered, with an insouciance that Gates found more than a little unnerving. ‘To be exact, the First National Blood Bank, on the Moon.’
‘Yes, I know where that is,’ Kaplan said testily. ‘Is this a joke? If so, then it’s even less amusing than the first one.’
‘It’s no joke,’ said Dallas, looking around the mosque’s interior like a curious tourist.
‘Then do I understand you correctly? You’re planning to rob the First National?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any particular reason you picked that bank?’ asked Kaplan.
‘Yes,’ Dallas said again. ‘It has by far the largest supply of blood. Over twenty million liters: forty million units. It’s the first choice in component storage,’ he added, parroting the advertising slogan that appeared in every magazine and on neon signs throughout the Zone.
‘With good reason,’ said Kaplan. ‘It’s impregnable. The high-security environment that protects the place is the very best. The state of the science.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If I sound like I’m stating the obvious, it’s because the obvious seems to need repetition,’ said Kaplan. ‘The place is impregnable. You do know that.’
‘I should know,’ said Dallas. ‘I did design the place.’
Kaplan was silent for a long minute. He rocked up and down on all eight legs and then, slowly, walked out of the niche until he stood only a few inches from Dallas. ‘Did you say what I thought you said?’
‘Yes. I said I designed the bank. And many others like it. Until a few days ago I was chief designer at Terotechnology. I assume you’ve heard of that company.’
‘Oh, indeed I have. And how is it that a god like you has descended from Mount Olympus to come among us mere mortals in the Black Hole?’
Dallas told him the bare bones of his own personal story, to which he added only the vague outline of a plan.
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ said Kaplan. ‘Spiders do have hearts, you know. Interestingly enough, they are as long as their whole abdomens. So if this droid I’m forced to sit on was the real thing, its heart would be three feet long.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Dallas, who could only feel revulsion for the half-human-looking creature in front of him.
‘But not nearly as fascinating as you and your special skills.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘You really think you could pull off something like that?’
‘With your help,’ said Dallas. ‘I’ll need a few things. Many of them I’ll be able to pay for myself. I’m not a poor man. Money’s not the reason I’m doing this.’
‘Revenge?’
‘What else?’
‘So tell me what you’ll need.’
Dallas had given the matter some considerable thought. They were going to need a spaceship, new identities and travel documentation, Clean Bill of Health certificates, life-support suits, a virtual reality suite on which they would test a model of the plan, a space fridge, food and water for at least three weeks, a telecommunications and detection screen, a Motion Parallax generator, electron-beam welding tools, lithium hydroxide CO2 collectors, piezoceramic vibration absorbers, infrared headsets, power spectacles, headtop computers, an electric car, and, of course, transfusion facilities for those of his team who had the virus.
He thought of the various people he would need in his ideal team: a quantum cryptographer, an aeronautical engineer, a navigations and communications engineer, a computer engineer, an electrical engineer, a virtual reality model-maker, and a mechanical engineer. He knew there was no way he would find half of them, and many of their vital skills would have to be acquired by his own team using artificial aids. This all passed through his mind in just the few seconds before he answered Kaplan’s question.
‘I’ll tell you what I need most. I need a recent amputee,’ he said. ‘That’s right,’ he added, noting the puzzled look that appeared on Kaplan’s wasted-looking face. ‘I need a man who has recently lost an arm.’
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