In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  “So, it was one of these more peripheral interests of mine that started giving me so much trouble. I have several such institutes in various parts of the world, but the one in Basel – the Hollenbeck Institute – was one that I was especially interested in. Its main concern is longevity research.”

  Seeing Miranda’s puzzled look, her father added, “Longevity – that means living longer, not growing old and dying so soon.”

  Miranda’s attention sparked. ‘Not dying so soon,’ she heard. ‘How can you do that? What does your institute do to make that happen? Could I learn how to do that?’ she found herself wanting to ask.

  But before she had time to voice her questions, her father said decisively, “Anyway, it was my longevity research that was at the centre of the conflict I had to handle and it’s that research and the way it’s financed that is the cause of the three people coming all the way to this island. They’re coming to have me tell them what they will do. And while I do that, Miranda, I want you to give me all the support you can. I don’t want you disappearing anywhere and causing an upset. I want you here to welcome my visitors and be polite and interested in them. I am going to be making them very uncomfortable indeed and if you can provide them with a little relief from that, it will make it easier for them to do what I say. Now, I think I can hear Lefevre arriving so I want you to slip up to your room before he comes in and I want you to think about what I’ve said. Can you do that?”

  Miranda nodded obediently, got to her feet, gave her father a kiss on the cheek and made a rapid exit in the direction of her room. Once up the stairs, she stopped on the landing and listened. There was the ring of the doorbell, followed by the firm tread of Donnell going to open the door, then her father saying, “Lefevre, really glad you could make it – you must be up to your eyeballs getting ready for tomorrow – come on through.” Then there was a voice she recognised as that of the man who had met them when they arrived on the island, then the sound of the lounge door closing and the sound of Donnell’s footsteps retreating to the back of the house where, Miranda happened to know, he would be kissing the maid and feeling her all over. Miranda crept back down the stairs and positioned herself outside the lounge door to listen. She simply wanted to hear anything that might have anything to do with longevity research and she knew that Mr Lefevre was going to Europe, which was where her father was doing his longevity research.

  With her ear close to the closed door, Miranda heard the sound of ice clinking in glasses and her father saying, “First of all, Lefevre, I just want to make it clear that the stupid business with your son and my daughter is of no consequence. I don’t want anything that a couple of kids get up to getting in the way of what matters. Now, I know you’re all ready to hit the ground running but there are some things you may find yourself up against that I don’t want you tripping on, things that have nothing to do with what you’ll be handling, but a lot to do with me. People may try and use you to get a line on me and you need to be ready to deflect them. The point is, there’s an institute in Basel I finance – the Hollenbeck Institute – it does longevity research. It’s still one of the great prizes, Lefevre – finding something that can hold back death. There’ve been plenty of ideas, but none of them has emerged as a clear winner. People are still elbowing each other for advantage, funding, development, further research. So I set up something as fundamental as I could – more than that, I set it up in humans. Most of the work is being done on flies or worms or, at best, rats, but I wanted to set up work that was focused entirely on people – after all, it’s people who want to live longer. I made a mistake though. I put in a director who was a scientist, not a clinician. When you’re working on people, it’s the doctors who have to be in charge. So there was a fight started between the clinicians who were doing the work and the director who was telling them how to do it. I should have seen it coming, but the director – Joseph Mancewicz – Prof Joe – he got there before me. You see, there are several big drug companies with important facilities in Basel and, until some recent rulings, pharmaceutical companies have had to do a lot of safety testing on animals. That’s over now – there are effective alternatives – so the companies are left with some extraordinarily well-equipped animal experimentation facilities they have no use for. Joe’s plan was to come to an arrangement with the companies so the animal facilities could be turned over to a charity called the Ageing Initiative and used for longevity research, but under his direction, of course. That way, the companies would get early warning of any breakthroughs, Joe would have a non-clinical power base and, with the Ageing Initiative behind him, he wouldn’t have to do what I told him. You see, the Ageing Initiative has established itself as the main clearing house for ageing research funds, so it’s wealthy and powerful and anyone it funds can afford to give the finger to everyone else. Normally I would have sacked the bastard, but Prof Joe had a hold over me, and he was about to use it in order to make me let go of the institute. It’s complicated, Lefevre, but there was a way I could pay for the institutes through the profits from my other businesses, which I could work to quite a considerable financial advantage. But I left myself open to being accused of using the institutes’ charitable status for my own ends and Joe was going to make an issue of it. If I had let him, it could have done my wider interests enormous damage. I considered staying behind to fight, but ethical issues are very sensitive and it pays to be out of reach of the press. Much more importantly, though, by choosing to come here I made Joe think he could gain control of the institute without any messy legal battle. It was a good move, don’t you think? You see, it gave me a chance to organise my counter-attack.”

  Listening behind the door, Miranda thought that in the last few months before they left, her father had looked like a man who was in no position to organise anything – he had looked like someone who was running away rather than setting up some great scheme that would bring important people to this horrid island. But important people were coming, so her father must have changed something. Perhaps he had changed something in the way he had changed things with his hand, reaching out into the starburst at the centre of his computer screen.

  Her father continued, Miranda listening carefully all the while. “The first thing I did when I arrived here was to start buying and selling in order to create a very severe storm in the financial markets. The damn markets only remain as stable as they do because everyone behaves themselves and tries to make as much profit as possible. Anyway, I was determined not to behave and it cost me a lot, but it had the effect I wanted. My main targets were the pension-fund agencies, because it’s ultimately the pension agencies that control the Ageing Initiative. It looks good, you see. Not only are the funds investing to secure our material future, they’re also supporting research so we can enjoy that future more and make it last longer. Of course, it’s all so people will want to pay more into the funds. But why not? Everybody benefits in the end. Anyway, the pension funds found themselves with billions being wiped off their value and I told them I would stop the storm if they would change the rules for funding the Ageing Initiative. The proposal I have put to them is that I will pay my research money into their Ageing Initiative fund, providing it is used to run my institute in Basel according to my wishes. Joe is welcome to his animal work if he wants it. He’s good and I wouldn’t want to lose him. But I need to be in control of that operation. Joe shouldn’t have tried to blackmail me. If he’d had the grace to talk about it first, I might have given him more room.”

  What little she knew of her father, Miranda was surprised he had given this blackmailing Joe any room at all. But, perhaps there was something her father had not said. In some ways, she didn’t trust the entire story. There were bits of it that didn’t fit with what she had experienced – like how in control he claimed to have been – and because there were bits that didn’t fit, and because she had only a tenuous notion of the world he was talking about, she doubted everything. But powerful people were coming all the way to the island she
had been imprisoned on and if she gave her father all the support she could, she might help ensure she would no longer have to live there. Before she dropped off to sleep, propped against the wall – where Donnell would find her shortly after and carry her up to bed, thinking to himself the kid had just wanted more time with her dad – Miranda heard her father say, “So I have set it all up so they have to come and take what I offer them. That’s my condition – that they come to me here to finalise it all. They’re coming the day after tomorrow and they will do what I tell them, Lefevre – they will do what I tell them.”

  *

  They came two days later and they did what Whitlam told them, even Anton Staels, chairman of Lifeline Services Reserve, the principal joint pension-funds agency, whose client investments could have bought the entire island twice over with an hour’s interest on the wealth they commanded. Whitlam was dangerous enough to lengthen that time to two hours. The others who came were Matthew Waterhouse, Director of the Ageing Initiative Trust, and William Burger, Senior Research Fellow of the Hollenbeck Institute in Basel, the one individual far enough down the pecking order for his work to be tied to a specific geographical location.

  On being introduced, Miranda took in none of these grand titles. She merely noted that Mr Staels was rather high and patronising and was clearly unused to dealing with children, whereas Mr Waterhouse was older and easier, and gave her a nice smile. Mr Burger puzzled her, though. He seemed far too young; more like an older brother, but an older brother with plans of his own and not much time for a younger sister. He was quite good-looking though.

  Miranda also observed that on the day of their arrival Donnell had acquired two assistants. They looked rather unpleasant and didn’t make the slightest effort to be friendly towards her, unlike the other islanders she had met. The other islanders were mostly disappointed by her cool response, but Miranda noticed whenever their efforts were not made. The two hired hands spent most of their time during the visitation striking prominent poses in doorways, one hand occasionally lifting to the slight bulge under the left shoulder of their over-sized and obviously newly-bought jackets.

  The visitation arrived in the afternoon and stayed one night. Miranda was included in the dinner they had together. She listened closely to the conversation but found it difficult to follow. She nevertheless caught references to issues and places her father had told her about, in particular the institute in Basel.

  In a lull in the talk, she asked, “Mr Staels, why are you so interested in one institute? You must have many institutes, even more than my father.”

  And Staels had replied, with an odd sort of smile, “I am interested in one institute in particular, Miranda, because your father requires it of me.”

  In another lull, she asked, “Mr Waterhouse, has your Ageing Initiative found any way of stopping people dying?”

  And Mr Waterhouse had replied, “I don’t think that we will ever be able to stop people dying but we have helped them towards a longer and healthier life.”

  After which Miranda had asked, “Mr Burger, do you think people will ever be able to live forever?”

  William Burger said, “I don’t know, but I’m working on it,” and the others laughed.

  Though she was included in the dinner, Miranda was not included in the talk afterwards. She was told it was her bedtime. She went up dutifully then crept down to listen. She fell asleep propped against the wall again and Donnell had to carry her back up to her room again. Before she drifted off she heard her father say, “Anton, your funds are in the business of creating an image of eternal life. You know you’re going to have to sustain that hope and to do that you’re going to need breakthroughs, new developments, progress. That’s how you get your edge over those that remain outside of your trust and try to go it alone. So you have no choice but to deliver. That’s why I want this arrangement. I want a portion of whatever comes out of the institute. That’s due to me. The institute wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for me. So when Prof Joe and you, Burger, finally deliver I need to be there.”

  In the morning, after breakfast, as the visitors were about to depart, Mr Staels said to her father, within Miranda’s hearing, “You have a very bright daughter there, Whitlam. You should think seriously about her education. I put my children through Spielman’s. You should do the same. After all, you can afford the risk.”

  Handelmann’s Hotel...

  Dion listens to the muffled steps of the porter, moving further away down the corridor. He hears the door click shut behind him. Slowly his eyes grow accustomed to the weak illumination from the scattered constellations of indicator lights and the dim square of the drawn blinds. He takes a pen-sized detector from his inside pocket and begins to move around the room, shifting aside the bland, decorative pictures, pausing to look at one of a jungle-clad atoll, a jewel of green and white set against a background of deepest blue. As he moves, he sweeps the black tube of the detector around these mundane objects. He feels his actions have all the necessity of a ritual – a fragment remaining lodged in his awareness from his time in the Waste. Only a fragment, though, for out in the Waste such invocatory protocol circumscribes not only arrivals in strange or unexplored places but every action anyone might conceivably undertake.

  Dion completes the sweep. There are no signs of surveillance. The place is secure as only rooms in the best hotels can be: nothing extra, nothing unexpected, nothing missing, only the familiar neutrality of a perfectly appointed hotel room.

  He thinks of other such hotel rooms he has occupied: thinks of a long time ago when Miranda Whitlam would wake beside him, hair messed across the pillow, mistress of all she surveyed, and himself arbiter of her future; lying beside each other in the middle of everywhere and nowhere, World City, where all is so connected that location no longer exists.

  Time is a location though and he looks back on the scene still wondering who they were, those two lying in that bed, each in a waking dream that each had made the other principal player in.

  7

  They arrived in Europe by air: Dion, his mother, his father.

  The aircraft exit opened onto a tube: steely, silver and filled with people. Dion followed his parents up. He found himself flinching as men and women hurried past. Their movements were brittle and aggressive and seemed to extend beyond the confines of their bodies. Some reached into coat pockets to pull out phones into which they shouted short, demanding messages. Others simply pushed ahead as fast as the constrained space would allow.

  In no time, they were disgorged into a long, glass-walled corridor, where they joined a greater flow of hurrying travellers. Dion’s father stepped confidently into the stream, looking like a man who has arrived exactly where he wants to be. Dion and his mother followed slightly behind.

  A lowering afternoon sun poured in through the transparent walls, the slight tint of the glass giving the scene an underwater quality. Dion felt a dream-like unreality come over him. He tried to keep the feeling in check by stepping only in the pools of light between the black bars of shadow cast by the supports of the great glass walls. It helped a little to have something he could work on in this vast depersonalising space. But then he was on a moving walkway taking no steps at all, the bars of shadow passing across him and over his feet. He tried a few half-hearted moves to avoid having his feet on the ground when the bars passed over but the ritual’s power had already faded. He was entirely in the hands of others.

  The corridor ended in a hall, where his father led them to a short line of people, at the head of which was a uniformed official seated behind a desk. While they waited, Dion saw that most of the volume of travellers had been diverted into a broader channel off to one side. This main stream passed between two pillars and, as it did so, each hurrying figure held something up. It was as if the stream was breaking over a rock in mid-channel, its flow disrupted but its pace undiminished.

  The queue Dion and his parents were waiting in gradually shortened until it was their turn at the desk. His fat
her handed over some papers and exchanged a few words with the uniformed official who, after a few questions, spoke into a phone and asked them to stand to one side so he could deal with the next group. Another man in uniform appeared and beckoned them to follow. They were conducted to a room where a woman, seated behind a lightly-constructed steel desk, greeted them politely. More papers were handed over for inspection. A computer screen was consulted. The woman looked up, smiled, rose, and ushered them out of a door opposite the one they had entered by.

  Outside, they rejoined the main stream, its volume augmented still further by joining tributaries of passengers. The flow carried them into a broad, brightly-lit hall where people thronged around automatic baggage-handling gear. Dion watched patiently, observing when the people around him succeeded in identifying their own uniquely personal combination of dents, scratches and designer label. Eventually, his father pulled out the little luggage they had checked in and loaded the cases onto a trolley. Mother and son followed father and trolley into a chamber even more brightly lit than the baggage collection hall. A few uniformed men and women stood behind broad metal tables. On one, somebody’s case was open and all the contents were spread out around it. Dion was interested in this. It looked messy, accidental and dangerous. But they were through the chamber before he had time to examine the event.