In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  “We’re selling a philosophy rather than a product,” was her final summing up. “Get them to buy the philosophy and they’ll buy the product simply as an expression of their own most deeply-held values.”

  Once the simulations had run successfully, the package of strategies they had developed was sold to the front-runner in the race to establish bioenergy as a viable market. Miranda Whitlam, on the strength of a pre-established bonus scheme, became one of the ten youngest ‘millions’ the school had fostered and, having paid all fees likely to accrue during her time there, was thus free to pursue her more personal interests.

  It was a kind of early retirement.

  Handelmann’s Hotel...

  Dion walks towards the slit of light where the window screens have a few more millimetres to close and reaches to one side for the draw button. The steady trickle of runners sounds and a dull light suffuses the room. When the gap has widened to a metre, he leans on the sill and looks out. Rain is just beginning in the late afternoon. Below him at the foot of the hotel wall there is a strip of grass. The meagre foliage looks tired and ready for winter. A Doberman, attention caught by the movement above, glances up at him then turns away. Beyond the grass are two fences, the first elegant, architect-designed, the second a maze of high-tension wire. On the far side of the fences is a deserted street.

  Dion knows the world on both sides of the wire. He stares out from behind the armoured glass and empty, broken windows opposite stare back at him. He sees the corroding metalwork of street signs hanging on the decaying concrete, like leaves about to drop. He thinks of lying down under some old tree and letting the leaves and months fall where they will, covering him with what is decayed and discarded, then frost and snow, freeze and thaw, his body dissolving into the winter ground. With his mind’s eye, he watches dispassionately the disintegration of all that he appears to be.

  Whatever she is sending is out there beyond that line of derelict buildings confronting the hotel – Miranda Whitlam when he had last known her. He can just recall her raving mad in a squalid apartment piled high with discarded electronics. It was somewhere on the edges of World City. Three of the young men she had interfered with were standing by like guardian angels.

  13

  Dion spent a month trying to persuade his gang boys it would be worth making the crossing into what called itself the Waste. The boys said things like, ‘There’s nothing there,’ or, ‘They don’t even have shops out that way,’ or, ‘I heard they kill strangers – sacrifice them some say. They’re weird out that way.’

  Dion insisted that this was all crap. “That’s all just stories the grown-ups tell you. There isn’t anywhere where people get sacrificed. It’s just poor out there. It’s where the poor people live. I’ve been in places like that. It was like that where I came from.”

  Since seeing the scrawled words, ‘Welcome to the Waste,’ Dion had been reconstructing his past. In the dissociated, isolating world his father had brought him to, his earlier years were acquiring the quality of myth. There was a glory about them and when he felt this glory he felt he could bear anything. And now he had a word for that world of myth – the Waste. The Waste was what he called the memories he returned to each evening as he shut his bedroom door and lay back on his bed, staring at his poster. The Waste was the warm, green island he imagined himself on, surrounded by animals and plants and ordinary people who could spend a day doing nothing and come out feeling the richer for it. The Waste was the perfect opposite of the World City his grandmother had warned him of, the World City his father so valued, and from which he retreated behind his bedroom door each evening. He remembered the little room his grandmother had occupied in their house on the island, the house he had called home and his father said would have been pulled down by now. He was becoming his grandmother in the eyes of his parents – he recognised that now. They treated him with the same grudging tolerance, the same distance, the same carelessness. He withdrew all the more, away from World City, seeking the warmth of his memories, refashioning them with every contrast he could think of.

  Accordingly, still trying to persuade the gang he had determinedly fashioned around himself, he said of the Waste, “It was like that where I came from. People were poor but they knew things these people don’t know nothin’ of,” – said with a dismissive toss of his head that took in the entirety of Northern Europe. “It’s going to be the same in the Waste. Maybe they won’t have much, but I bet they know things we don’t. I bet they do things differently there. Your parents only say you’ll get killed because the cops don’t reach out that far. You’ll only get killed if you set yourself up for it. Come on, let’s go. I want to see what’s really there.”

  Dion told them that if they were going to stick together as a gang, they needed to do things together, face challenges together, have adventures together. They had to go and they had to go soon. Then, in the face of their continuing resistance, he made it clear he was going whether they came with him or not. He’d find himself another gang, with boys in it that weren’t so shit scared and didn’t think they could just go home each evening, whatever they got themselves into.

  For all his talk, he was disappointed when only two would join him.

  *

  At the border, it seemed important to Dion that they show no hesitation in making the crossing. So they walked straight through the band of dereliction, under the flyovers and out the other side, a small phalanx of ants crossing a rubble-strewn path. Dion was reassured to see the crude, angry letters still shouting out their welcome to the Waste. He gave them a nod of acknowledgement as he and his two companions scuttled into the sheltering gloom of a narrow street. The decaying buildings enclosed them like a forest. After the steady roar of the traffic pouring across the interchange behind, it was very quiet.

  “Look like you belong here,” Dion whispered, “Don’t catch anybody’s eye.”

  They walked past boarded shop fronts, picked their way along broken pavements, ducked under toppled lamp posts and looked straight ahead when a figure hurried by on the opposite side. As they penetrated deeper into the chaos and decay, Dion felt his spirits rising. He began looking around more confidently and noticed a feeling of familiarity with the scene around him. He looked at the fallen lamp posts and thought of broken trees; the fragmented pavement reminded him of churning jungle soil; and the boarded shop fronts were the wall of vegetation his grandmother had led him noiselessly into in the course of their walks together. He half-expected to see her appear round a corner, eyes open to everything around her, moving like an animal, entirely a part of it all. He imagined himself as her, entering into a new corner of the island for the first time, entering into somewhere with a life of its own; mysterious, unpredictable but worth getting to know.

  After a while, the occasional isolated figures they had seen began to give way to small groups, mainly of three or four people, drifting through the streets, apparently lost in loose, many-stranded conversations. Dion heard comments and allusions being thrown between the figures, giving each group an air of independent life. On street corners, people were talking more animatedly, warming themselves over fires that burned in upturned metal drums. Dion listened as he passed each gathering. There seemed to be some kind of loose-limbed, tentacle-like discussion pervading the Waste.

  Dion tried to catch familiar phrases – he could usually pick up the subject of an overheard conversation from a few sentences – but there was nothing he heard that he could find a fit with. He was aware, however, that these people were peculiarly non-threatening. Back on the outer edges of World City where they had crossed from, there was a dangerous hunger that came from people who had very little, people looking for something that would make themselves feel more substantial, anything that might alleviate the nothing their poverty made of them. But here it was as if the population had cut loose from the appetites Dion was familiar with and had simply drifted away. Perhaps this curious discourse he was hearing might be like new jungle growth; b
ut, if so, it clearly had nothing to do with the material circumstances of the place, which were simply dissolving.

  They walked the streets of the Waste in widening arcs, Dion always ensuring they returned to a fixed reference point. He counted it dumb to get lost – that was for kids. As the afternoon light began to fade, they came, in an area more derelict than most, to an expanse of cleared ground, marked out around its perimeter by the broken teeth of foundations sticking up from the earth. In the centre of the area was an open fire and assembled around the fire was a group larger than they had yet seen. Dion detected a more familiar kind of feel to the gathering. Rather than an even mix of both sexes, they were almost all men. And there was that hunger about them he had recognised on the edges of World City. They looked well-enough fed but their eyes were searching, looking for any chance that might present itself. To Dion, these were the most recognisable people he had yet seen in the Waste. He edged closer, his friends trailing behind at a distance. By now he was desperate to make some contact, however violent.

  Two of the outer figures in the group were eyeing the boys speculatively. One turned back and threw a comment in towards the centre of the gathering. Dion saw several heads turn to a figure standing behind the fire. The figure shimmered in the heat and was veiled by sparks and smoke: a tall figure in a broad hat, seemingly watching them through the flames, not responding to the comments that were now coming from several of the men in the group. Then Dion saw the broad hat move abruptly to one side of the fire and the figure of a man resolve itself, pushing through and detaching himself from the throng. The man paused briefly to survey the boys then strolled towards them. He came within a few metres, stopped and looked them over. Dion looked back. He saw a dark, stained cape that reached from around the man’s neck almost to the ground. A hat with a broad, floppy brim shaded the forehead. Between hat and cape was revealed a gaunt face, yellow-grey hair, grizzled stubble and glacial-blue eyes.

  “You boys look clean,” the man said, “Too clean to be loose in a place like this. Better get yourselves back to World City.”

  Dion felt electricity in his limbs. He had only ever heard his grandmother use that phrase.

  “What’s World City?” one of Dion’s friends asked.

  Before the man had time to answer, Dion cut in, “World City’s where we come from. This is the Waste. The Waste is all that is not World City.”

  The man laughed, the glacial-blue eyes glittering with amusement. “You sound like you know a thing or two,” he said. “Where d’you learn all that?”

  “I was born in the Waste,” said Dion.

  He was absolutely confident of this now: ‘that squalid little street on that squalid little island’ was now entirely identified with the Waste. And the world his grandmother had shown him, that was assuredly the Waste. How could it be anything other than the Waste when it was so clearly all that was not World City?

  “I want to go back there,” Dion added.

  “Want to go back there, do you?” Glacial-blue eyes, level as an ice shelf, looked out at him. “You sound sure enough. Got a record, have you?”

  “Record?”

  “Criminal. Juvenile detention.”

  “No, but I might get one.”

  “Started already then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think you can find your way back here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Bring me something worthwhile and I’ll take you on. If I’m not around, ask for Leo.”

  Dion returned home to find his father waiting for him. The police had been round asking questions. Dion had not been in school.

  “If they find anything against you, I’ll throw you out of the house.”

  Dion didn’t wait to be thrown. He packed a few things, broke into his school, lifted an assortment of recently purchased electronics and went back to find Leo.

  14

  With her marketing package sold and the game of ensuring her financial future at the school played out, Miranda Whitlam became actively uninterested in any company roles she might assume. Whether DNA-based energy liberation failed or succeeded was no longer any concern of hers. She asked the biotech consultant what was currently the single biggest problem that could be tackled by manipulating DNA.

  “Longevity,” he answered promptly. “There are billions waiting for anyone who can make something happen there.”

  “Longevity,” Miranda repeated, memories beginning to flicker and spark.

  “Yes,” the biotech consultant continued, watching her closely, again intrigued by the interest he had awakened. “It’s the one area that’s wide open to breakthroughs. There’s been plenty done in worms and rats, but that’s been mainly by breeding rather than direct genetic manipulation, and that kind of work’s becoming rather unfashionable anyway – fails to translate as often as not. So there’s still nothing to offer humans, despite fortunes in venture capital having been put into the field. Anyone who could guarantee even another twenty years would be made.”

  Miranda said, seemingly unaware of any absurdity, “I’d be thinking of forever.”

  “But it’s blue-skies research,” the biotech consultant continued hurriedly, “And the ethical issues would make your energy project look like a picnic.”

  He hesitated; she had handled them like a picnic.

  “Still, there’s plenty of work going on,” he continued. “Even the pension funds have a finger in it. There’s something called the Ageing Initiative that’s run by the Lifeline Services Reserve – that’s the pension funds’ longstop they all pay a percentage into. The Ageing Initiative is allowed to spend on research the small change the Reserve would otherwise just throw on the floor.”

  Longevity – that was what that institute of her father had been working on, and the Ageing Initiative was managing it for him. What Miranda had been looking for was already to hand. She tried to remember her way back to that time on the island, trying for some memory of the name of the institute. But, like so much else that had happened there, she had worked to forget rather than remember and the name simply would not come.

  “Where is the most important work in longevity research happening?” she asked.

  “It’s all over the place: universities, institutes, corporate laboratories. It tends to be work that’s attached to other projects though. It’s difficult to justify in its own right because of the lack of return. But there is one place I know that’s solely devoted to it. I was looking into it a while back because of some work I was doing on the Ageing Initiative. The Hollenbeck Institute it’s called, run by a man called Joseph Mancewicz.”

  The Hollenbeck Institute. Joseph Mancewicz. Prof Joe. Those were the names she had almost obliterated from her memory.

  “I want to go and work there,” Miranda said.

  From the detached way the biotech consultant was talking, it was clear that, even if he had been looking into the Ageing Initiative, he had not looked deeply enough to find her father in there. And she wasn’t going to give anything away. She wanted to know how she was placed, entirely independent of the fact that she could have her father buy her a way in at any time.

  The biotech consultant raised an eyebrow. Surely Miranda Whitlam must know that going to work in a place like that at age fifteen could only mean years as a technician and nothing else. Research was not like the corporate executive ladder. The corporate ladder was a thing apart right from the beginning, picking for its climbers a way up through a succession of conference rooms and plush hotels. Research, on the other hand, meant practical work and tying herself to a prescribed task was the last thing that one of the school’s pupils should be doing, never mind one of its most able. She needed to be learning to manage people who ran research groups, not working analysers or pipetting stations.

  The biotech consultant put this to her and put it to her again on several subsequent occasions, but she remained unmoved. Uncharacteristically unsure of himself, the biotech consultant went to see the principal. She listene
d carefully and asked some questions. To her credit she concluded, “It looks to me as if we have an original on our hands, someone who wants to understand the world, not just work it. See if you can get a studentship organised for her, something linked with the university.”

  *

  Miranda told her father what she intended to do and that on no account was he ever to talk about her to anyone from the institute. She was going into this as a complete outsider, free to succeed or fail. On being introduced again to William Burger, now assistant director, she said, “Thanks for the Christmas cards,” then made it clear, both to Burger and Prof Joe, that there was to be no further mention of any connection she might have with the institute, other than in her role as a research student.

  As the biotech consultant had predicted, Miranda was set to work in a strictly technical capacity, which role she assumed with the same detached, practical attention she had brought to her initiation of a new phase of global energy production. But the depth of her questioning and evident ability set her far apart from her peers. In her own right, she soon merited the individual attention of the director.

  Professor Joseph Mancewicz was a fabulously old German-Swiss whose research publication list began some decades before anyone else in the institute had been born. Miranda was interested to observe the skill with which he buoyed up the work of the institute on a regular supply of credit from each of the giant pharmaceutical combines centred in the city, whilst at the same time using Ageing Initiative funds to maintain complete independence from them. At her first full talk with him, which took place in his office overlooking the Rhine, Miranda watched the sunlight from the open window cast shadows in the mobile lines on his ancient face.