In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  He said to her, “So, you want to make people live forever, eh? – Forever and ever, amen. Well, let’s not think about that yet. Let’s think about one hundred years more. What about that? But even that is no straightforward problem, Miranda. The difficulty is that we are programmed to die and we are programmed to die because the great god, evolution, requires it of us. If DNA had not learned how to kill us, there would have been no evolution. If death had not been learned, the most there might be crawling around on this planet would be little primal blobs. But those little primal blobs learned how to die. And everything followed, including you and me. No, Miranda, death is the oldest wisdom we carry inside ourselves, and if you want to make changes to that, well...”

  “We do work on longevity here, don’t we?” Miranda challenged. She was uneasy with the limits the Professor seemed to be accepting.

  Prof Joe held up placating hands. “Yes, yes, indeed we do. We do longevity research and we are now one of the few places that could truly be said to do so. You will, of course, be aware by now that we work with animals.”

  Miranda nodded. She had been faintly shocked at first; animal experimentation was something barbaric, consigned to a bygone era, like children working in the mines.

  “Yes, indeed. After all, how can one not work to lengthen life without having lives to lengthen? Most other places use theoretical or laboratory-based systems. But I need to know that I am actually achieving something. Of course, the animals are why the drug companies keep us at arm’s length, even though it was from the drug companies that the animals came in the first place. But it is not what they want for their public image now. Molecular modelling and isolated cell systems are what they like. Nobody has heard a cell scream, you see, and they are not soft and furry. But yes, we do use animals, and quite a nice life they have too – twice as long as if they were in the wild and were lucky enough to die of old age. I still don’t much like it, but there it is.”

  “But if you can get animals to live twice as long, why can’t you apply that knowledge to humans?”

  “Think a moment, Miranda. Think about what I told you. I said that death is the oldest wisdom we have, so where can that wisdom be locked up? In our DNA, of course. We have to work on DNA to make the gains we do. And it is to do such work that you have come and joined us. But you see the problem? We have to work on DNA, so, ultimately, we have to work on the germ cells, the source cells from which each organism grows. Now, who is going to allow us to do that to people?”

  “So, why bother to work on animals, if you’re never going to be able to apply what you find to humans?” Miranda countered, “Rats don’t care about living to a hundred.”

  Prof Joe’s gaze seemed to slide past her and the light in the room dwindle.

  “They care about not dying and so do I. That is the devil’s bargain that DNA has struck for us. We must die, yet death must be made terrible so we struggle to avoid it at all costs. Every way you lose. But, no, you are right, Miranda, the rats do not care about living to a hundred. They only care about living to the next moment. But, you see, there is a possibility that, by working on their DNA, and on the effects that it has, we will find something that can be made to work in humans without risking any interference with the sacred germ line. That is why the drug companies continue to hold onto us, even if it is at arm’s length.”

  *

  Prof Joe lived another fourteen years and Miranda Whitlam had a post at the institute all that time. Towards the end, an increasingly bitter wind seemed to blow through his words. He would make pronouncements to people he passed in corridors like some Greek seer or Old Testament prophet, awesome but only just tolerated. He said, ‘Mankind is condemned to be free – free to examine its own puppet strings.’ And, ‘All that we are is determined, yet we are entirely unknowable.’ Sometimes he would become enraged. ‘Who are these damn fool evolutionists that they think they know everything? What good is their theory when there is no argument against it? What good is argument when you want to know the truth?’ And then, ‘Of course evolution happens. You only have to look at the cluttered old attic of the human genome to see that it happens. What else but evolution could make such a mess?’

  Miranda took less and less notice of all this. She was more interested in the research and her compelling need to develop a programme of work she could call her own. Prof Joe’s more bitter utterances were, in fact, peculiarly reassuring to her. They confirmed that the DNA she had gone in pursuit of was every bit as central as she had believed. Here indeed was something she could reach out to and change, and so change the entire world she was enmeshed in.

  Miranda was also interested in William Burger, who soon became director in all but name. He was the main organising force in the institute and he was okay to have dinner with. He took Prof Joe’s line that animal experimentation would provide the key to the life extension they were seeking. In this and in the words she recalled her father saying about scientists and doctors – words she was only now beginning to understand – Miranda recognised the opening for her own line of work. She studied for a medical degree and concentrated on developing a programme for applying the institute’s discoveries to humans. To the institute, however, she was careful to present this as being merely complementary to the main thrust of the work begun by Prof Joe.

  And in such time as she allowed herself, she got to know the city, with its drug-company towers and the old town where Erasmus had worked high above the great curve of the Rhine. She liked to take the tram out to the castle ruins at Dornach, especially on winter afternoons when the clouds were low on the Jura and the morning’s frost was still on the ground. Occasionally she visited her father when she could be sure he would be alone. He clearly found her a puzzle, but had developed a growing respect for her. He saw her as someone clearly capable of handling the world he was so much in control of himself, yet interested in something entirely different. She also provided a thread of continuity in his rather chaotic personal life.

  William Burger’s attentions became gradually more pressing and she consented to an affair, even though he was by now married. When he became too serious, she ended it. Prof Joe died, and there were rumours he had taken his own life. But nobody pursued the possibility; he had been ninety-eight years old.

  Shortly before he died, Prof Joe said to Miranda, “I have kept my promise not to mention who you are, Miranda, but I am now far too old to keep promises. And in any case, you are a well-established member of our team and your history and background before you joined us are of no consequence. I have had a long time to think about it and I still think that I chose to be a threat to your father for purely ethical reasons rather than out of any concern for the advancement of my own plans. Financially, your father was always very close to the edge. I did not want to see the institute put at risk. That was why I tried to wrest it from his grasp. I felt he was a danger to his own creation. I say to myself that perhaps I am just making up excuses for a selfish takeover, but I always end up thinking that I did right. Anyway, after he had won his battle, he seemed to lose interest and left me to do much as I would have done if he had failed. So I think I acted for the best and it all worked out well. Take it or leave it.”

  Miranda took it. Working with Prof Joe, she had trusted less and less the story of cynical plotting her father had believed was behind the upheavals of her childhood. Neither had she ever allowed herself the slightest resentment of Prof Joe for having evicted her from her childhood home. When she thought about it at all, she simply saw those events as things that happened – part of her growing up.

  After Prof Joe died, the head of the pharmaceutical companies’ funding committee said, “Living to ninety-eight, old Joe was the best advertisement this place had for the work done here. But we don’t see it going anywhere, we can’t afford it anymore and the ethical issues make it a no-go area anyway. Sorry.”

  Faced with the possibility of having to lay off two-thirds of the staff, William Burger went to the Ageing
Initiative and asked for additional funding. They were reluctant. Some of the pension funds were going through a bad patch and, like the pharmaceutical companies, they wanted to keep the animal work at a distance. The Ageing Initiative dragged its feet and skilled staff began to leave. Miranda Whitlam went to her father and put a plan to him. Accordingly, he arranged to divert further income from some of his assets into an obscure charity foundation he had long cultivated. The foundation provided a package to sustain the work of the institute and Miranda Whitlam was appointed director. She was twenty-nine.

  15

  Dion brought Leo electronics, so Leo told him to specialise in electronics. “You’re still a kid so you work with kids’ stuff. You can move on to something more serious when you’re good and ready. You will be.”

  At first, Leo had him working mark-down shops on the outer edges of World City. Music centres, hand computers, organisers, even food processors all came across the dereliction via Dion. They were sold back to other mark-down shops, which paid a percentage for the privilege of being able to buy from Leo and, in return, were left unmolested. Dion was found a corner on top of a stained, overcrowded apartment block close up to the border between the Waste and World City. The corner might have been set aside to contain machinery – an air-conditioning unit perhaps that had long been sold to scrap. There was only a dribble of water came down the walls when it rained hard, and in winter the heat from the lower floors kept the little space tolerably warm. Dion taped up his picture of the jungle-clad island on the driest of the walls. Otherwise, there was just a bedroll and a pile of old electronics magazines that he could call his own. Dion was starting at the bottom but he knew Leo’s executives could live well enough. He was attracted to the position of executive and to the good-living executive status merited.

  Dion was looked after, to some extent and for a small consideration, by an old Asian lady who lived down the stairs that led up to his little cubicle. From her, he learned something of the sociology of the Waste. She said, “I will not ask you where your money comes from, young man. Nobody asks questions like that around here. But I get mine properly, in the same way that my parents got theirs, and their parents before them. It is enough, and enough is all that I need. Ten percent I save, twenty percent I give to the building cooperative, sixty percent buys me my food and the last ten percent I give to Our Lady of Luck. You did not know that, young man? Well, you have much to learn. That is how respectable people live in these parts and most of us are respectable. There are some who are not, however,” she added, looking accusingly at Dion.

  She took his money, nevertheless, and he would sit watching her cook their meal when he had nothing else to do. He became aware, as she arranged her cooking pots, her chopping board, her knives and spices, that the way she moved was familiar. It was some time before he began to make the connection.

  “Why do you do it that way?” he asked, as his suspicions gathered. She gave an impatient click of her tongue, which he took as a demand for silence. After she had completed her cutting, she turned and looked at him. He repeated, “Why do you do it that way? You always cut the onions and things with seven cuts. You always place the pot on the left and the cutting board on the right, so you have to move from right to left even though you’re right-handed. There’s a whole lot else you do that I can’t make out, but it’s not like you’re just getting the job done. There’s other stuff you’re doing as well.”

  She regarded him, secure in a superior knowledge. “You, young man, are ignorant. And you will stay ignorant in the company you keep. Those men – they feed off the people with money. They feed like fleas off a dog. Dog’s blood is all they bring back here. Dog dies, fleas die. But the respectable people here are different. We know the luck that rules the world.”

  Dion learned that the poor spent their money on offerings to Our Lady of Luck, which took the form of lottery-ticket purchases and comprised the Waste’s principal activity. Not bread, but attempts to manipulate probability were the staff of life. On his first expedition into the Waste, Dion had noticed the peculiar organic energy this imparted to the groups of people who, he now knew, were interminably discussing new ways of influencing the Waste’s patron saint.

  Apart from Leo’s company men and the few others like them, all inhabitants of the Waste lived to explore new invocatory protocols. It had been one such exploration Dion had seen in the old lady’s cooking, and she had reminded him of his grandmother. But, for all his distance from his grandmother, he could still recognise the protocols of the Waste as no more than simulations. His grandmother’s passes and incantations had been the expression of something alive and unseen and there had been a power in them he had been able to feel. By contrast, the rituals the dwellers in the Waste contrived for themselves felt empty.

  The old Asian lady spoke often about how she got her money properly, but she never told Dion how this was. It was only by talking to a sour-faced man who lived three floors down and never seemed to go out that Dion learned the Waste was supported by the federal government. The man growled at Dion, “It’s cheap. Ghettoise the poor, withdraw basic services, law and order, all that – and pay some of the credit you save directly back to the people to give them a subsistence living they can spend on government lotteries. This is the Waste – like in ‘waste bin’ – only most of the fools around here don’t see it like that. They think they’re special. Pray to Our Lady of Luck – Our Lady of Fuck. No, I don’t have the stomach for crime. Wish I had. The authorities don’t mind it carrying on at a reasonable level. It gives them an excuse for tying up World City even tighter – more electric fences and closed-circuit televisions. One hundred video eyes on every corner – always one of them awake.”

  *

  Dion progressed in the company. He was able to take the casual brutality because, rightly, he guessed that if he kept on the job, the brutality would give way to tolerance. It might even progress to respect, but he could wait for that.

  What he couldn’t take though was the calculated, deliberate, unremitting brutality that continued to be handed out to him by one man, long after all the others had taken to tolerating him. The man was called Maskel and he talked to Dion like Miranda Whitlam’s man had talked to him. When the other company men told Maskel to go more easy on the boy, Maskel simply went at him the harder, only he hid it more. He talked about Dion as black filth when others couldn’t hear instead of when they could. He hit Dion when others weren’t looking instead of when they were. Dion used all his skill to try and avoid Maskel. Maskel was one of Leo’s top executives, so Dion wasn’t going to hit back in a hurry, but he felt the strain begin to tell.

  One time, when he was safely immersed in the group of men around the fire, Dion heard Maskel say to Leo, “Leo, this is chicken shit we’re working with here. We need to get an operation going in World City, something with a bit more return on it.”

  Maskel went on for some time like that, but all Leo would say in reply was that the time wasn’t right. Dion heard the edge in Leo’s voice and thought that maybe Leo might not like Maskel so much after all. Dion got Leo out of hearing of the others and said, “I can’t stand that Maskel. He’s making my life hell. Can’t you get him to lay off me, Leo?”

  Leo looked at him and smiled with all the warmth of a winter sun shining through ice. He said, “You work with Maskel from now on.”

  When they first went out on a job together, Maskel said, “What I like about Leo is his sense of humour.”

  Maskel hit Dion less but abused him more. “You lickshit little nigger boy, you love it don’t you. Makes you feel like the slave you are. That’s why you don’t open your mouth at me. You just love it.”

  Dion looked meek and thought about ways of killing Maskel. He studied the man, examined the way he had to push every encounter with anyone just to see what gave, and he took in the way Maskel went unchallenged and took in his overconfidence. It was this overconfidence that had Maskel looking the other way when Dion, under the guise of
needing a piss after a particularly tight job, reached into the hole where he had hidden the gun and, holding it in both hands with the muzzle a foot from the base of Maskel’s skull, pulled the trigger. The sound was enormous and Dion had a vague memory of bits of head flying around. He ran without looking back. After he had dropped the gun down a hole where no one would ever find it, he was convulsively sick.

  Dion had just wanted Maskel non-existent, so he did what was necessary to achieve that. There was no drama, no confrontation, no change of heart, not even a twist of fate that disposed of Maskel without Dion having to get blood on his hands, like so often happened to heroes in the videos. Dion told Leo they had been tracked by some would-be competition and Maskel had been shot. Leo’s only reaction was a raised eyebrow so Dion assumed such things must happen from time to time.

  *

  Soon Dion had his own band of boys doing the kids’ stuff, while he learned about corporate operations. The key to it was that every World City enterprise had somebody sufficiently disaffected to open the doors for Leo’s men. All the traitor would need was enough credit to get clean away as soon as the police got too close. And every corporation was more than happy to buy whatever their principal competitor’s traitor succeeded in ‘liberating’.

  Remembering what Maskel had once said, Dion said to Leo, after he had removed the business suit that had just got him unnoticed into a smart hotel lobby and through to the latest corporate traitor, “This is working at a high level. Why don’t we move into World City?”

  “Too many eyes in there,” Leo said, gazing into the fire from out of the glacial-blue wastes of his interior. “You have to start killing if you want to make headway in World City. We’re left alone out here. Some even see our operation as necessary. I’m not into killing anyway. It generates too much feeling.”