In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  And, anyway, Miranda found she rather liked Dion. After screaming at her that she should at least recognise who he was and treat him like a human being, he had asked nothing further of her. He made no demands on her and certainly wasn’t trying to possess her. She remembered now, way back beside that pool, how he had held up against the beating Donnell had given him. She had been impressed by that, even then.

  *

  It took a few weeks for the children to come trickling back and, in the times between, Dion walked Miranda Whitlam through the Waste, now so prematurely warm that if there had been any trees left, they would have been coming out in blossom. He took her new-found accessibility carefully, talking to her at first about neutral matters such as Our Lady of Luck and the matrix of social cohesion she provided in the midst of extreme poverty. He told her about the subsistence economy handed out from World City, and the criminal brotherhoods that ducked and dived through the dark fabric that was all that was not World City. The attention she gave him held through all this, so he risked moving onto something that might matter more. He had recognised the purpose of her project in a way that was entirely intuitive and he wanted to firm up on that now. He wanted to know how it was done.

  “So what was really in the injections?” he asked.

  “Three designer viruses. Each acts as a vector for a different aspect of the therapy. One vector carries an enzyme system that minimises free radical damage; one produces factors that augment the activity of the DNA repair mechanisms; one improves on the ability of the immune system to recognise degenerate cell types. Each vector has its own independent control system but they all slot into the same place, into the uncommitted stem cells of the haemopoietic system. All they really do is magnify the existing life extension mechanisms.”

  Dion saw her look at him curiously, almost hopefully. He looked back, mostly uncomprehending but still interested.

  “You see,” she went on, “there’s never been any selection pressure to refine the mechanisms to the extent that I have. Every organism that’s going to pass on its genetic legacy will have done so long before longevity refinements of the kind I’m inserting could make any difference.”

  To Dion, most of this was secret language and he wondered whether it was a language worth the struggle to master. He knew something of the secret language of electronics, but you only needed that if you were buying or selling. Miranda Whitlam wasn’t buying or selling, not to him anyway. So Dion let it pass. All the same, he was pleased to know she was willing to speak to him that way. He found it odd, though, to think of longer life as a technical issue.

  “Why don’t you tell people to pray if they want more life?” he asked, half-joking, and was surprised when she answered seriously.

  “The dynamics of prayer are too far removed from the level you need to work on. Degeneration leading to death takes place in the fabric of the human body. It’s that fabric that generates the act of prayer, and I know of no evidence it can work the other way. People’s capacity for prayer or thought or feeling, or anything like that, degenerates as the human body degenerates. That’s why I’m going for the structure rather than the function. The function of the structure is to generate the capacity for prayer. I want to sustain the structure that can perform that function.”

  Dion raised an eyebrow and took a deep breath of the mild air that was blowing through the Waste. There seemed to be a lot of structure in all this. Thinking about it, he recognised he was easy enough with structure as it applied to electronics but talking about the structure of life was unreal. Structures were made out of substance and substances were made of material and material was part of the world of appearances – things to be seen and observed. That wasn’t what life was. Life was lived and felt, not seen and observed. He could still remember enough of his grandmother’s teachings to know that appearances were no more than clothing for the qualities they expressed. So Miranda Whitlam, for example, was for him some kind of light, dressed in appearances to make bearable her dazzling immediacy of being. He wondered if she was tempting him – trying to have him believe she was something other than the beautiful, otherworld creature that, now his guard was back down, she so evidently was.

  Another time, after a session, with only the two of them left in Dion’s Place, he said, “Viruses cause diseases. Why are you using things that cause disease?”

  “Viruses are molecular machines. They’re not even living. They’re a set of instructions and a vehicle for ensuring the instructions find their way to somewhere they can be acted on. They’re instructions for making instructions. They don’t sustain their own energy, so they’re not alive.”

  For Dion, this stress on her chosen tool not being alive connected with her earlier emphasis on life as structure. She really did seem to be trying to establish a mechanical procedure for prolonging life. This puzzled him. Mechanical procedures were applied to the dead, yet here was this more than living being proposing to extend life by applying herself as if to the dead. In the sepulchral space they occupied, lifted to the sky by two hundred feet of rotting concrete apartments, Dion felt uncertainty.

  Miranda saw this, but saw in the cast that came over him an implicit criticism of her procedures. She added, “Viruses that cause disease are usually newly evolved. They’ve not been through the selections necessary to ensure they don’t kill the organism they infect. Disease is a maladaptation on the part of the virus – although many viruses get away with it because they manage to infect another host before their current one dies. So they’ve not been forced to invest too much in keeping alive the body that supports them. But they’re just like any other DNA, yours and mine included. Our DNA has to invest a bit more than the viruses. DNA has to do that in order to ensure the body that carries it keeps going long enough for it to be passed on to the next generation. But it’s the same process really. The viruses I use are designed to be self-limiting in their spread through the body and they don’t compromise the body’s survival.”

  Dion thought about this. She was talking about a dead tool that clothed itself with life for no better reason than to make more of its own kind. She seemed to be saying there was a hard core of death in the centre of the life she was trying to bestow. She was spreading death to further life. It was as if she was proposing to make of longer life a simulacrum, a dark twin, something that would have all the appearances of extended life whilst all the while it was simply confirming the death that lay at the core of everything. He could feel her viruses spreading their mechanical inevitabilities and sensed settling over him a strange dissociation between the wonder he felt towards her and the language that she spoke.

  Dion’s next question was, “How will you know it’s working?”

  “It’ll show up in the samples I’m taking; the subdermal matrix. That’s the cells that support the surface skin. They’re about the most sensitive indicator of ageing there is. There are microdegenerative changes that can be detected very early. If I see a higher level of preservation developing in the matrix from the children’s samples, I’ll know it’s working.”

  Whilst on a trip into World City, Dion looked in on a mall that specialised in health foods. He looked at shelves that offered a bewildering variety of life extension and anti-ageing mixtures. What was she trying to do that was different from all this? Later, he asked, “Haven’t other people offered ways of prolonging life? What are you doing that’s different?”

  “There’s only a limited gain to be made from overdosing on vitamins and antioxidants and people mostly start taking them after too much damage has already been done. There’s also the work on calorie restriction but that’s only any good if you like being puritanical. Others have identified genes that limit protein oxidation and cross-linking and I’ve incorporated some of that work into what I’m doing. There are some substitution or replacement systems as well. But these are all hit-and-run tactics. There’s no other coordinated system that anyone’s worked out, apart from the one I’m testing.”

&nb
sp; Dion heard the phrase ‘hit-and-run tactic’ and conceived an image of the death she was trying to postpone as one of the retail outlets he set his company men to work on. He decided she had Death down as a purveyor of material goods. That was why she attacked Death in the way she did, with tools and mechanisms and material. She knew Death had to be attacked on His own terms. She must know Death well to be so sure of the weapons she was using. But how sure could she be?

  “You said you tested the system out on animals. What happened to them? How sure can you be their death will come the same way as the death the children have waiting for them?”

  “The animals I worked on lived, on average, 4.3 times longer than untreated animals. I don’t know if it’ll work the same way in humans. If I could be sure it would, I wouldn’t be coming here each month.”

  She thought she was being deliberately mild in her response. One of her few claims to ethical credibility in the work she was doing was that it focused exclusively on humans and the need for preliminary animal testing undermined that credibility. Had she but known, Dion was entirely unconcerned. Hadn’t his grandmother employed animal sacrifice with considerably less passion?

  “We and the other animals I work on share much the same longevity mechanisms,” Miranda added. “Evolution must have established them very early in the history of sexual reproduction. It’s true the rats don’t live as long as we do but that’s solely down to body size. Body size represents a kind of built-in inertia; it keeps you going according to the amount of substance that’s there.”

  There it was again: substance – material and its evolution. Wasn’t evolution about how the substance got rearranged? – How appearances changed?

  “You talk as if evolution is in charge of all this, in charge of birth and death. Why does evolution allow death so much power?”

  “We personify evolution because we like to talk that way. But we’re wrong to. Evolution is no more than a convenient word that describes the workings of an inevitability. Death is part of that inevitability. If there was no death, there would be no evolution. Death lets the old bodies fall away and so makes way for the new bodies that random variation has come up with to be tested. The old bodies have done their job. Death is, therefore, a part of evolutionary inevitability because once the genes have been passed on there’s nothing working to favour further survival.”

  This talk of old bodies falling away struck Dion personally. He was feeling tired in a way he had not experienced before. With the sudden influx of funds from Miranda, his business was expanding fast and he had put his fatigue down to the increasing demands on him. But maybe he was feeling the effects of becoming an old body. He mentioned this to Miranda.

  “Dion, you’re far too young to feel what I’m talking about. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  He tried to shrug it off but Miranda thought of several kinds of life Dion might have led before the project started and none of them was particularly healthy. “I’ll take some samples from you, too,” she insisted cheerfully, as much like a doctor as he had known her.

  Dion felt uneasy but didn’t resist. Had it been some years earlier, he might have protested more strongly, thinking of hair or nail clippings, substances upon which magic could be worked. But that kind of consciousness was beginning to fade and he felt no more than the mild distaste anyone might experience on having some blood and skin taken by their doctor. The lab tests Miranda ordered all came back normal; Dion was tired, that was all, and he felt a certain weight lift with the news. But out of the kind of ingrained habit that develops in anyone engaged in research, she kept back a portion of his samples for long-term storage. She kept them back in a low-temperature freezer she had in her own apartment, where a full back-up set of each of the monthly samplings from the children was accumulating. She put Dion’s samples in a plastic container, which she located in one corner of the deep freeze, away from all the others.

  *

  “Why do we want to live forever if we can’t?” Dion asked.

  “We’re programmed to survive at all costs. That’s the one absolute given. Without that compulsion there’d be no life. I suppose it would suit us for the compulsion to atrophy once our children have been born and brought up and their children born, but there’s not much selection pressure working for that to happen. Once the genes have been passed on, it doesn’t matter much one way or another whether we want to live or not. The compulsion to live has to be so strong that I suppose it simply persists even when it’s going to make no difference whatsoever to whether or not the genes get passed on.”

  Dion was beginning to understand the strange, ritualistic inevitability of the scheme she was working within. Her manipulations in matter were part of an operation that ensured absolute certainty, absolute inevitability and absolute security. Nothing unexpected could happen in the world she was working with, not like in the world that depended on your relationship with the other party, the world of bluff and negotiation. Dion wondered at the elegance of it all. His penultimate question was a confirmation of the mastery he had, through repeated exposure, finally achieved in this unfamiliar language. “Why don’t you take the genetic material from the oldest people and pass that on to the next generation. Then take genetic material from the oldest in that next generation and pass that on – and just keep doing that over and over. Wouldn’t that lead to people living longer and longer? Why not do that?”

  Miranda looked at Dion with sudden regard. He was beginning to make himself known to her, and he was doing so by understanding her thoughts as well as her language. “It’s been done in insects and it worked,” she replied enthusiastically. “But to do it in humans would require a commitment lasting a millennium. It’s possible, but the world I’m working in only allows you to keep on exploring if you can produce results. So we must come up with something quick. If it works, then maybe we can move on to an age-based selection experiment. But it would need a complete change in people’s attitudes. The whole idea of us actively selecting genetic material for transfer to future generations is still barely acceptable. We need the data that our project is going to generate.”

  Dion had one final question. “How come we’re born perfect?”

  Miranda was slightly shocked. This sounded like a relapse into his earlier thinking. “We’re not,” she replied briskly. “We’ve all kinds of time bombs at work in us that we’ve inherited from our parents. These things just don’t show through until they’ve been passed on to the next generation. If we were born perfect, we’d live forever.”

  Dion shook his head; he remembered now the babies his grandmother had blessed. “No, we’re born perfect, Miranda. Go and look at a baby sometime.”

  Miranda looked at Dion, puzzled. That wasn’t what she was talking about. She was talking about how living things really were; she was talking about the structure that underlay mere appearances. Living things were structures of matter and lived by the energy exchanges those structures mediated. All she could hear in what Dion was talking about was mere subjective experience: appearances. He seemed peculiarly sure of himself, though.

  20

  The children were three years older, the youngest still not much use for anything, but the older ones increasingly wanted to get serious about becoming company men. Dion could feel the pressure building in the boys. They hung around his professionals more and more, pestering them for odd jobs, anything that might get them involved in the real work.

  The three eldest were Nial, Biv, and Jetter. Nial had a way of making it clear to Dion he was going to become a company man come what may. He talked as if it was already understood he was just about ready. He’d say things like, ‘Dion, there’s a line of shops just closed on RieterStrasse. Looks like they’re going to redevelop. There’ll be some cut-price outlets opening up there before work starts; high turnover, low security. Might be worth looking into.’

  Biv went about it a different way. ‘Dion, I’m old enough to go out on a job, aren’t I? I’d only need to stand by
and watch. I wouldn’t need to do anything.’ And Dion would say no, and Biv would come back a week later with exactly the same line. Biv had a worried look, like he was getting uneasy without a role to play. He had a rash around his mouth that Miranda hadn’t been able to shift and Dion noticed it was getting worse.

  Jetter was the most demanding of the three. He simply marched up to Dion whenever he felt himself beginning to boil over and said in a voice that was barely short of a shout, “Dion, I must do some work, man. I’m going crazy kicking around with the kids. I’ve got to get going. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m just hanging around waiting. I went off with Face and Georgio and did a sweet-counter yesterday. Yeah, just like you said we shouldn’t. We ended up with all these fuckin’ cough sweets. Tasted like shit. But we got to do something.”

  Dion told Jetter to go and learn to read properly – it was a basic qualification for getting anywhere in the business. But Dion knew he was only temporising. As they got bigger, the kids would just go off and do their own thing. He had to start channelling their energies, somehow. And there lay his dilemma: the two-year commitment with Miranda Whitlam was a ten-year commitment now and the boys had to stay in one piece all that time. But starting out in the business was dangerous. There was a high drop-out rate and Dion, thinking of what the boys meant to Miranda, couldn’t risk losing a single one.

  There had to come a point, though, when the dangers of not getting them started began to outweigh the dangers of getting them started. Dion knew it had been reached when Juan, one of the younger ones, and still years off any reasonable expectation of becoming a company man, came to him and said, “Dion, are we kids really going to get to be company men or are we just going to carry on hanging out and having Miranda come and take stuff from us each month?”